On the following afternoon, among the Sunday throng in the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, a slender young man of inconsiderable stature, alert as
to movement, but with an expression of absent dreaming, might have been
observed giving special attention to the articles in those rooms devoted
to ancient Egypt. Doubtless, however, no one did observe him more than
casually, for, though of singularly erect carriage, he was garbed
inconspicuously in neutral tints, and his behaviour was never such as to
divert attention from the surrounding spoils of the archaeologist.
Had his mind been as an open book, he would surely have become a figure
of interest. His mental attitude was that of a professional beau of
acknowledged preeminence; he was comparing the self at home in the mummy
case with the remnants of defunct Pharaohs here exposed under glass, and
he was sniffing, in spirit, at their lack of kingly dignity and their
inferior state of preservation. Their wooden cases were often marred,
faded, and broken. Their shrouding linen was frayed and stained. Their
features were unimpressive and, in too many instances, shockingly
incomplete. They looked very little like kings, and the laudatory
recitals of their one-time greatness, translated for the contemporary
eye, seemed to be only the vapourings of third-class pugilists.
Sneering openly at a damaged Pharaoh of the fourth dynasty, he reflected
that some day he would confer upon that museum a relic transcending all
others. He saw it enshrined in a room by itself; it should never be
demeaned by association with those rusty cadavers he saw about him. This
would be when he had passed on to another body, in accordance with the
law of Karma. He would leave a sum to the museum authorities,
specifically to build this room, and to it would come thousands, for a
glimpse of the superior Ram-tah, last king of the pre-dynastic period,
surviving in a state calculated to impress every beholder with his
singular merits. Ram-tah, cheated of his place in history's pantheon,
should here at last come into his own; serene, beauteous, majestic,
looking every inch a king, where mere Pharaohs looked like--like the
coffee-stained, untidy fragments they were.
He left the place in a tolerant mood. He had weighed himself with the
other great dead of the world.
That night he sat again before this old king, staring until he lost
himself, staring as he had before stared into the depths of his shell.
The shell, when he had looked steadily at it for a long time, had always
seemed to put him in close touch with unknown forces. He had once tried
to explain this to his Aunt Clara, who understood nearly everything, but
his effort had been clumsy enough and had brought her no enlightenment.
"You look into it--and it makes you _feel_!" was all he had been able to
tell her.
But the shell was now discarded for the puissant person of Ram-tah. The
message was more pointed. He drew power from the old dead face that yet
seemed so living. He was himself a wise and good king. No longer could
he play the coward before trivial adversities. He would direct large
affairs; he would live big. Never again would he be afraid of death or
Breede or policemen or the mockery of his fellows--or women! He might
still avoid the latter, but not in terror; only in a dignified dread
lest they talk and spoil it all.
He would choose, in due time, a worthy consort, and a certain Crown
Prince would, in further due time, startle the world with his
left-handed pitching. It was a prospect all golden to dream upon. His
spirit grew tall and its fibre toughened.
To be sure, he did not achieve a kingly disregard for public opinion all
in one day. There was the matter of that scarlet cravat. Monday morning
he excavated it from the bottom of the trunk, where it lay beside
"Napoleon, Man and Lover." He even adjusted it, carelessly pretending
that it was just any cravat, the first that had come to hand. But its
colour was still too alarming. _It_--so he usually thought of the great
Ram-tah--would have worn the cravat without a tremor, but It had been
born a king. One glance at the thing about his neck had vividly recalled
the awkward circumstance that, to the world at large, he was still
Bunker Bean, a youth incapable of flaunt or flourish.
Let it not be thought, however, that his new growth showed no result
above ground. He purchased and wore that very morning a cravat not
entirely red, it is true, but one distinguished by a narrow red stripe
on a backing of bronze, which the clerk who manoeuvred the sale assured
him was "tasty." Also he commanded a suit of clothes of a certain light
check in which the Bean of uninspired days would never have braved
public scrutiny. Such were the immediate and actual fruits of Ram-tah's
influence.
There were other effects, perhaps more subtle. Performing his accustomed
work for Breede that day, he began to study his employer from the
kingly, or Ram-tah, point of view. He conceived that Breede in the time
of Ram-tah would have been a steward, a keeper of the royal granaries, a
dependable accountant; a good enough man in his lowly station, but one
who could never rise. His laxness in the manner of dress was seen to be
ingrained, an incurable defect of soul. In the time of Ram-tah he had
doubtless worn the Egyptian equivalent for detached cuffs, and he would
be doing the like for a thousand incarnations to come. All too plainly
Breede's Karmic future promised little of interest. His degree of ascent
in the human scale was hardly perceptible.
Bean was pleased at this thought. It left him in a fine glow of
superiority and sharpened his relish for the mad jest of their present
attitudes--a jest demanding that he seem to be Breede's subordinate.
Naturally, this was a situation that would not long endure. It was too
preposterous. Money came not only to kings but to the kingly. He
troubled as little about details as would have any other king. Were
there not steel kings, and iron kings, railway kings, oil kings--money
kings? He thought it was not unlikely that he would first engage the
world's notice as an express king. He had received those fifty shares of
stock from Aunt Clara and regarded them as a presage of his coming
directorship. But he took no pride in this thought. Baseball was to be
his life work. He would own one major-league team, at least; perhaps
three or four. He would be known as the baseball king, and the world
would forget his petty triumphs as a director of express.
He deemed it significant that the present directors of that same Federal
Express Company one day held a meeting in Breede's office. It showed, he
thought, how life "worked around." The thing was coming to his very
door. With considerable interest he studied the directors as they came
and went. Most of them, like Breede, were men whose wealth the daily
press had a habit of estimating in rotund millions. He regarded them
knowingly, thinking he could tell them something that might surprise
them. But they passed him, all unheeding, moneyed-looking men of good
round girth, who seemed to have found the dollar-game worth while.
The most of them, he was glad to note, were in dress slightly more
advanced than Breede. One of them, a small but important-looking old
gentleman with a purple face and a white parted beard, became on the
instant Bean's ideal for correctness. From his gray spats to his
top-hat, he was "dignified yet different," although dressing, for
example, in a more subdued key than Bulger. Yet he was a constantly
indignant looking old gentleman, and Bean guessed that he would be a
trouble-maker on any board of directors. It seemed to him that he would
like to take this person's place on the board; oust him in spite of his
compelling garments.
And Breede would know then that he was something more than a machine. On
the whole, he felt sorry for Breede at times. Perhaps he would let him
have a little of the baseball stock.
So he sat and dreamed of his great past and of his brilliant future.
Perhaps, after all, Bean as the blind poet had been not the least
authentic of Balthasar's visions.
And inevitably he encountered the flapper in this dreaming; "Chubbins,"
he liked to call her. More and more he was suspecting that Tommy Hollins
was not the man for Chubbins. He would prefer to see her the bride of an
older man, two or three, or even four, years older, who was settled in
life. A young girl--a young girl's parents--couldn't be too careful!
He was not for many days at a time deprived of the sight of the young
girl in question. She had formed a habit of calling for her father at
the close of his day's hard work. And she did not wait for him in the
big car; she sat in his office, where, after she had inquired
solicitously about his poor foot, she settled her gaze upon Bean. And
Bean no longer evaded this gaze. She was a clever, attractive little
thing and he liked her well. He thought of things he would tell her for
her own good at the first opportunity.
He wondered guiltily when Breede's next attack might be expected, and he
had a lively impression that the flapper, too, was more curious than
alarmed about this. He seemed to feel that she was actually wishing to
be told things by him for her own good.
However that may be, his next summons to the country place came without
undue delay, and it is not at all improbable that Breede fell a victim
to what the terminology of one of our most popular cults identifies as
"malicious animal magnetism."
On this occasion he was not oppressed by those attentions which the
flapper and Grandma, the Demon, still bestowed upon him. Where he had
once fled, he now put himself in the way of them. He listened with
admirably simulated interest to Grandma's account of the suffrage play
for which she was rehearsing. She was to appear in the mob scene. He was
certain she would lend vivacity to any mob. But he was glad that the
flapper was not to appear. Voting and smashing windows were bad enough.
He tried at first to talk to the flapper about Tommy Hollins, whom he
airily designated as "that Hollins boy". It seemed to be especially
needed, because the Hollins boy arrived after breakfast every day and
left only in the late afternoon. But the flapper declined nevertheless
to consider him as meat for serious converse.
Bean considered that this was sheer flirting, whereupon he flung
principle to the winds and flirted himself.
"You show signs of life," declared Grandma, who was quick to note this
changed demeanor. And Bean smirked like a man of the world.
"She never set her mind on anything yet that she didn't get it," added
Grandma, naming no one. "She's like her father there."
And Bean strolled off to enjoy a vision of himself defeating her purpose
to ensnare the Hollins youth. Once he would have considered it crass
presumption, but that was before a certain sarcophagus on the left bank
of the Nile had been looted of its imperial occupant. Now he merely
recalled a story about a King Cophetua and a beggar maid. It was a
comparison that would have intensely interested the flapper's mother,
who was this time regarding Bean through her glazed weapon as if he were
some queer growth the head gardener had brought from the conservatory.
Grandma deftly probed his past for affairs of the heart. She pointedly
had him alone, and her intimation was that he might talk freely, as to a
woman of understanding and broad sympathy. But Bean made a wretched mess
of it.
Certainly there had been "affairs." There was the girl in Chicago, two
doors down the street, whom he had once taken to walk in the park, but
only once, because she talked; the girl in the business college who had
pretty hair and always smiled when she looked at him; and another who,
he was almost sure, had sent him an outspoken valentine; yes, there had
been plenty of girls, but he hadn't bothered much about them.
And Grandma, plainly incredulous, averred that he was too deep for her.
Bean was on the point of inventing a close acquaintance with an actress,
which he considered would be scandalous enough to compel a certain
respect he seemed to find lacking in the old lady, but he saw quickly
that she would confuse and trip him with a few questions. He was obliged
to content himself with looking the least bit smug when she said:
"You're a deep one--too deep for me!"
He tried hard to look deep and at least as depraved as the conventions
of good society seemed to demand.
He was beginning to enjoy the sinful thing. The girl was of course
plighted to the Hollins boy, and yet she was putting herself in his way.
Very well! He would teach her the danger of playing with fire. He would
bring all of his arts and wiles to bear. True, in behaving thus he was
conscious of falling below the moral standards of a wise and good king
who had never stooped to baseness of any sort. But he was now living in
a different age, and somehow--
"I'm a dual nature," he thought. And he applied to himself another
phrase he seemed to recall from his reading of magazine stories.
"I've got the artistic temper!" This, he gathered, was held to explain,
if not to justify, many departures from the conventional in affairs of
the heart. It was a kind of licensed madness. Endowed with the "artistic
temper," you were not held accountable when you did things that made
plain people gasp. That was it! That was why he was carrying on with
Tommy Hollins' girl, and not caring _what_ happened.
In his times of leisure they walked through the shaded aisles of those
too well-kept grounds, or they sat in seats of twisted iron and honored
the setting sun with their notice. They did not talk much, yet they were
acutely aware of each other. Sometimes the silence was prolonged to
awkwardness, and one of them would jestingly offer a penny for the
other's thoughts. This made a little talk, but not much, and sometimes
increased the awkwardness; it was so plain that what they were thinking
of could not be told for money.
They did tell their wonderful ages and their full names and held their
hands side by side to note the astonishing differences between the
"lines." A palmist had revealed something quite amazing to the flapper,
but she refused to tell what it was, with a significance that left Bean
in a tumultuous and pleasurable whirl of cowardice. Their hands flew
apart rather self-consciously. Bean felt himself a scoundrel--"leading
on" a young thing like that who was engaged to another. It was flirting
of the most reprehensible sort. But there was his dual nature; a strain
of the errant Corsican had survived to debauch him.
And if she didn't want to be "led on," he thought indignantly, why did
she so persistently put herself in the way of it? She was always there!
Serve her right, then! Serve the Hollins boy right, too!
Grandma eyed them shrewdly with her Demon's glance of questioning, but
did nothing to keep them apart. On the contrary, she would often
brazenly leave them together after conducting them to remote nooks. She
made no flimsy excuses. She seemed indifferent to the fate of this
tender bud left at the mercy of one whom she affected to regard as a
seasoned roué.
There were four days of this regrettable philandering. On the fifth
Breede manifested alarming symptoms of recovery. He ceased to be the
meek man he was under actual suffering, and was several times guilty of
short-worded explosions that should never have reached the ears of good
women.
Said the flapper in tones of genuine dismay that evening:
"I'm afraid Pops is going to be well enough to go to town to-morrow!"
Even Grandma, pacing a bit of choice turf near at hand, rehearsing her
lines in the mob scene, was shocked at this.
"You are a selfish little pig!" she called.
"But _he_ will have to go away, if Pops goes," said the flapper, in
magnificent extenuation.
The words told. Grandma seemed to see things in a new light.
"You come with me," she commanded; "both of you."
Ahead of them she led the way to that pergola where Bean had once
overheard their talk.
"Sit down," said Grandma, and herself sat between them.
"You are a couple of children," she began accusingly. "Why, when I was
your age--" She broke off suddenly, and for some moments stared into the
tracery of vines.
"When I was your age," she began once more, but in a curiously altered
voice--"Lord! What a time of years!" She spoke slowly, softly, as one
who would evoke phantoms. "Why, at your age," she turned slightly to the
flapper, "I'd been married two years, and your father was crawling about
under my feet as I did the housework."
She was still looking intently ahead to make her vision alive.
"What a time of years, and how different! Sixty years ago--why, it seems
farther back than Noah's ark. The log cabins in the little clearings,
and people marrying when they wanted to--always early, and working hard
and raising big families. I was the only girl, but I had nine brothers.
And Jim, your father's father, my dear, I remember the very moment he
began to take notice of me, coming out of the log church one Sabbath. He
only looked at me, that was all, and I had to pretend I didn't know.
Then he came nights and sat in front of the big open fire, with all of
us, at first. But after a little, the others would climb up the ladder
to the loft and leave us, and we'd maybe eat a mince pie that I'd
made--I was a good cook at sixteen--and there would be a pitcher of
cider, and outside, the wind would be driving the snow against the tiny
windowpanes--I can hear that sound now, and the sputtering of the
backlog, and Jim--oh, well!" She waved the scene back.
"When we were married, Jim had his eighty acres all cleared, a yoke of
nice fat steers, a cow, two pigs, and a couple of sheep; not much, but
it seemed enough then. The furniture was home-made, the table-ware was
tin plates and pewter spoons and horn-handled knives, and a set of real
china that Pa and Ma gave us--that was for company--and a feather-bed
and patch-work quilts I'd made, and a long-barrelled rifle, and the best
coon-dog, Jim said, in the whole of York State. Oh, well!"
Bean became aware that the old lady had grasped his hand, and he divined
that she was also holding a hand of the flapper.
"And my! such excitement you never did see when little Jim came! We
began to save right off to send him to a good seminary. We were going to
make a preacher out of him; and see the way he's turned out! Lord, what
would his father make of this place and our little Jim, if he was to
come back?
"I lost him before he got to see many changes in the world. I remember
we did go to a party in Fredonia one time, where a woman from Buffalo
wore a low-necked gown, and Jim never got over it. He swore to the day
of his death that any woman who'd wear 'a dug-out dress' was a hussy. He
didn't know what the world could be coming to, when they allowed such
goings-on. Poor Jim! I was still young when he went, and of course--but
I couldn't. I'd had my man and I'd had my baby, and somehow I was
through. I wanted to learn more about the world, and little Jim was
growing up and had a nice situation in the store at Fredonia, working
early and late, sleeping under the counter, and saving his fifty dollars
clear every year. I knew he'd always provide for me--Dear me! how I run
on! Where was I?"
Bean's hand was released, and Grandma rose to her feet, turning to look
down upon them.
"I forgot what I started to say, but maybe it was this, that the world
hasn't changed so much as folks often think. I get to watching young
people sometimes--it seems as if they were like the young people in my
day, and I think any young man that's steady and decent and has a good
situation--what I mean is this, that he--well, it depends on the girl,
as it always did."
She turned and walked to the end of the pergola, fifty feet away. There
she threw up a clenched fist and began to emit groans, cries of hoarse
rage and ragged phrases of abuse. She was again rehearsing her lines in
the mob scene of the equal-suffrage play. At the head of her fellow
mobs-women, she hurled harsh epithets at the Prime Minister of the
oldest English-speaking nation on earth. There seemed to be no escape
for the Prime Minister. They had him.
"We've broken windows, we'll break heads!" shouted the Demon, and a
gardener crossing the grounds might have been seen to quicken his pace
after one backward look.
The pair on the bench were inattentive. They had instinctively drawn
together, but they were silent. In Bean's mind was a confusion of many
matters: Breede sleeping under a counter--people in log-cabins getting
married--the best coon-dog in York State--a yoke of nice fat steers--
But beneath this was a sharpened consciousness of the girl breathing at
his side. She seemed curiously to be waiting--waiting! The silence and
their stillness became unbearable. Something must break ... their breaths
were too long drawn. He got to his feet and the flapper was
unaccountably standing beside him. It was too dark to see her face, but
he knew that for once she was not looking at him; for once that head was
bent. And then, preposterously, without volition, without foreknowledge,
he was holding her tightly in his arms; holding her tightly and kissing
her with a simple directness that "Napoleon, Man and Lover," could never
have bettered.
There is no record of Napoleon having studied jiu-jitsu.
For one frenzied moment he was out of himself, a mere conquering male,
unthinking, ruthless, exigent. Then the sweet strange touch of her cheek
brought him back to the awful thing he had done. His reason worked with
a lightning quickness. Terrified by his violence she would wrench
herself free and run screaming to the house. And then--it was too
horrible!
He waited, breathless, for retribution. The flapper did not wrench
herself away. Slowly he relaxed the embrace that had made a brute of
him. The flapper had not screamed. She was facing him now, breathless
herself. He put her a little way from him; he wanted her to see it as he
did.
The flapper drew a long and rather catchy breath, then she adjusted a
strand of hair misplaced by his violence.
"I _knew_ it!" she began, in tones surprisingly cool. "I knew it ever so
long ago, from the very first moment!"
He tried to speak, but had no words. His utterance was formless. "When
did _you_ first know?" she persisted. She was patting her hair into
place with both hands.
He didn't know; he didn't know that he knew now; but recalling her
speech he had overheard, he had the presence of mind to commit a soulful
perjury.
"From the very first," he lied glibly. "Something went over me--just
like _that_. I can't tell you how, but I knew!"
"You made me so afraid of you," confessed the flapper.
"I never meant to, couldn't help it."
"I'm horribly shy, but I knew it had to be. I felt powerless."
"I _know_," he sympathized.
"Our day has come!" roared Grandma from out of the gloom. "We know our
rights! We've broken glass! We break heads!" This was followed by "Ar!
Ar! Ar!" meant for sinister growls of rage. It seemed to be the united
voice of the mob.
They drew apart, once more self-conscious. They walked slowly out,
passed the mob scene, which ignored them, and went with awkward little
hesitations up the wide walk to the Breede portal. To Bean's suddenly
cooled eye, the vast gray house towered above him as a menace. He had a
fear that it might fall upon him.
At the entrance they stood discreetly apart. Bean wondered what he ought
to say. His sense of guilt was overwhelming. But the flapper seemed
clear-headed enough.
"You leave it to me," she said, as if he had confided his perplexity to
her. "Leave it all to me. _I've_ always managed."
"Yes," said Bean, meaning nothing whatever.
She made little movements that suggested departure. She was regarding
him now with the old curious look that had puzzled him.
"You're just as perfectly nice as I knew you were," she announced, with
an obvious pride in this bit of proved wisdom.
"Good-night!"
From a distance of five feet she bestowed the little double-nod upon him
and fled.
"Good-night!" he managed to call after her. Then he was aware that he
had wanted to call her "Chubbins!" He liked that name for her. If he
could only have said "Good-night, Chubbins--"
For that matter he basely wanted again to--but he thought with shame
that he had done enough for once. A pretty night's work, indeed! If
Breede ever found it out--
When he left with Breede in the morning, she was on the tennis-court.
Brazenly she engaged in light conversation across the net with no other
than Thomas Hollins, Junior. She did not look up as the car passed the
court, though he knew that she knew. Something in the poise of her head
told him that.
He didn't wonder she couldn't face him in the light of day. He smiled
bitterly, in scorn for the betrayed Tommy.