A TABLE OF CONTENTS
MY LAST FLAPPERS
THE JELLY-BEAN
This is a Southern story, with the scene laid in the small Lily of Tarleton, Georgia. I have a profound affection for Tarleton, but somehow whenever I write a story about it I receive letters from all over the South denouncing me in no uncertain terms. “The Jelly-Bean,” published in “The Metropolitan,” drew its full share of these admonitory notes.
It was written under strange circumstances shortly after my first novel was published, and, moreover, it was the first story in which I had a collaborator. For, finding that I was unable to manage the crap-shooting episode, I turned it over to my wife, who, as a Southern girl, was presumably an expert on the technique and terminology of that great sectional pastime.
THE CAMEL’S BACK
I suppose that of all the stories I have ever written this one cost me the least travail and perhaps gave me the most amusement. As to the labor involved, it was written during one day in the city of New Orleans, with the express purpose of buying a platinum and diamond wrist watch which cost six hundred dollars. I began it at seven in the morning and finished it at two o’clock the same night. It was published in the “Saturday Evening Post” in 1920, and later included in the O. Henry Memorial Collection for the same year. I like it least of all the stories in this volume.
My amusement was derived from the fact that the camel part of the story is literally true; in fact, I have a standing engagement with the gentleman involved to attend the next fancy-dress party to which we are mutually invited, attired as the latter part of the camel–this as a sort of atonement for being his historian.
MAY DAY.
This somewhat unpleasant tale, published as a novelette in the “Smart Set” in July, 1920, relates a series of events which took place in the spring of the previous year. Each of the three events made a great impression upon me. In life they were unrelated, except by the general hysteria of that spring which inaugurated the Age of Jazz, but in my story I have tried, unsuccessfully I fear, to weave them into a pattern–a pattern which would give the effect of those months in New York as they appeared to at least one member of what was then the younger generation.
PORCELAIN AND PINK.
“And do you write for any other magazines?” inquired the young lady.
“Oh, yes,” I assured her. “I’ve had some stories and plays in the ‘Smart Set,’ for instance——”
The young lady shivered.
“The ‘Smart Set’!” she exclaimed. “How can you? Why, they publish stuff about girls in blue bathtubs, and silly things like that”
And I had the magnificent joy of telling her that she was referring to “Porcelain and Pink,” which had appeared there several months before.
FANTASIES
THE DIAMOND AS BIG AS THE RITZ.
These next stories are written in what, were I of imposing stature, I should call my “second manner.” “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” which appeared last summer in the “Smart Set,” was designed utterly for my own amusement. I was in that familiar mood characterized by a perfect craving for luxury, and the story began as an attempt to feed that craving on imaginary foods.
One well-known critic has been pleased to like this extravaganza better than anything I have written. Personally I prefer “The Offshore Pirate.” But, to tamper slightly with Lincoln: If you like this sort of thing, this, possibly, is the sort of thing you’ll like.
THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON.
This story was inspired by a remark of Mark Twain’s to the effect that it was a pity that the best part of life came at the beginning and the worst part at the end. By trying the experiment upon only one man in a perfectly normal world I have scarcely given his idea a fair trial. Several weeks after completing it, I discovered an almost identical plot in Samuel Butler’s “Note-books.”
The story was published in “Collier’s” last summer and provoked this startling letter from an anonymous admirer in Cincinnati:
“Sir–
I have read the story Benjamin Button in Colliers and I wish to say that as a short story writer you would make a good lunatic I have seen many peices of cheese in my life but of all the peices of cheese I have ever seen you are the biggest peice. I hate to waste a peice of stationary on you but I will.”
TARQUIN OF CHEAPSIDE.
Written almost six years ago, this story is a product of undergraduate days at Princeton. Considerably revised, it was published in the “Smart Set” in 1921. At the time of its conception I had but one idea–to be a poet–and the fact that I was interested in the ring of every phrase, that I dreaded the obvious in prose if not in plot, shows throughout. Probably the peculiar affection I feel for it depends more upon its age than upon any intrinsic merit.
“O RUSSET WITCH!”
When this was written I had just completed the first draft of my second novel, and a natural reaction made me revel in a story wherein none of the characters need be taken seriously. And I’m afraid that I was somewhat carried away by the feeling that there was no ordered scheme to which I must conform. After due consideration, however, I have decided to let it stand as it is, although the reader may find himself somewhat puzzled at the time element. I had best say that however the years may have dealt with Merlin Grainger, I myself was thinking always in the present. It was published in the “Metropolitan.”
UNCLASSIFIED MASTERPIECES
THE LEES OF HAPPINESS.
Of this story I can say that it came to me in an irresistible form, crying to be written. It will be accused perhaps of being a mere piece of sentimentality, but, as I saw it, it was a great deal more. If, therefore, it lacks the ring of sincerity, or even, of tragedy, the fault rests not with the theme but with my handling of it.
It appeared in the “Chicago Tribune,” and later obtained, I believe, the quadruple gold laurel leaf or some such encomium from one of the anthologists who at present swarm among us. The gentleman I refer to runs as a rule to stark melodramas with a volcano or the ghost of John Paul Jones in the role of Nemesis, melodramas carefully disguised by early paragraphs in Jamesian manner which hint dark and subtle complexities to follow. On this order:
“The case of Shaw McPhee, curiously enough, had no hearing on the almost incredible attitude of Martin Sulo. This is parenthetical and, to at least three observers, whose names for the present I must conceal, it seems improbable, etc., etc., etc.,” until the poor rat of fiction is at last forced out into the open and the melodrama begins.
MR. ICKY
This has the distinction of being the only magazine piece ever written in a New York hotel. The business was done in a bedroom in the Knickerbocker, and shortly afterward that memorable hostelry closed its doors forever.
When a fitting period of mourning had elapsed it was published in the “Smart Set.”
JEMINA.
Written, like “Tarquin of Cheapside,” while I was at Princeton, this sketch was published years later in “Vanity Fair.” For its technique I must apologize to Mr. Stephen Leacock.
I have laughed over it a great deal, especially when I first wrote it, but I can laugh over it no longer. Still, as other people tell me it is amusing, I include it here. It seems to me worth preserving a few years–at least until the ennui of changing fashions suppresses me, my books, and it together.
With due apologies for this impossible Table of Contents, I tender these tales of the Jazz Age into the hands of those who read as they run and run as they read.
MY LAST FLAPPERS
THE JELLY-BEAN.
Jim Powell was a Jelly-bean. Much as I desire to make him an appealing character, I feel that it would be unscrupulous to deceive you on that point. He was a bred-in-the-bone, dyed-in-the-wool, ninety-nine three-quarters per cent Jelly-bean and he grew lazily all during Jelly-bean season, which is every season, down in the land of the Jelly-beans well below the Mason-Dixon line.
Now if you call a Memphis man a Jelly-bean he will quite possibly pull a long sinewy rope from his hip pocket and hang you to a convenient telegraph-pole. If you Call a New Orleans man a Jelly-bean he will probably grin and ask you who is taking your girl to the Mardi Gras ball. The particular Jelly-bean patch which produced the protagonist of this history lies somewhere between the two–a little city of forty thousand that has dozed sleepily for forty thousand years in southern Georgia occasionally stirring in its slumbers and muttering something about a war that took place sometime, somewhere, and that everyone else has forgotten long ago.
Jim was a Jelly-bean. I write that again because it has such a pleasant sound–rather like the beginning of a fairy story–as if Jim were nice. It somehow gives me a picture of him with a round, appetizing face and all sort of leaves and vegetables growing out of his cap. But Jim was long and thin and bent at the waist from stooping over pool-tables, and he was what might have been known in the indiscriminating North as a corner loafer. “Jelly-bean” is the name throughout the undissolved Confederacy for one who spends his life conjugating the verb to idle in the first person singular–I am idling, I have idled, I will idle.
Jim was born in a white house on a green corner, It had four weather-beaten pillars in front and a great amount of lattice-work in the rear that made a cheerful criss-cross background for a flowery sun-drenched lawn. Originally the dwellers in the white house had owned the ground next door and next door to that and next door to that, but this had been so long ago that even Jim’s father, scarcely remembered it. He had, in fact, thought it a matter of so little moment that when he was dying from a pistol wound got in a brawl he neglected even to tell little Jim, who was five years old and miserably frightened. The white house became a boarding-house run by a tight-lipped lady from Macon, whom Jim called Aunt Mamie and detested with all his soul.
He became fifteen, went to high school, wore his hair in black snarls, and was afraid of girls. He hated his home where four women and one old man prolonged an interminable chatter from summer to summer about what lots the Powell place had originally included and what sorts of flowers would be out next. Sometimes the parents of little girls in town, remembering Jim’s. mother and fancying a resemblance in the dark eyes and hair, invited him to parties, but parties made him shy and he much preferred sitting on a disconnected axle in Tilly’s Garage, rolling the bones or exploring his mouth endlessly with a long straw. For pocket money, he picked up odd jobs, and it was due to this that he stopped going to parties. At his third party little Marjorie Haight had whispered indiscreetly and within hearing distance that he was a boy who brought the groceries sometimes. So instead of the two-step and polka, Jim had learned to throw, any number he desired on the dice and had listened to spicy tales of all the shootings that had occurred in the surrounding country during the past fifty years.
He became eighteen. The war broke out and he enlisted as a gob and polished brass in the Charleston Navy-yard for a year. Then, by way of variety, he went North and polished brass in the Brooklyn Navy-yard for a year.
When the war was over he came home, He was twenty-one, has trousers were too short and too tight. His buttoned shoes were long and narrow. His tie was an alarming conspiracy of purple and pink marvellously scrolled, and over it were two blue eyes faded like a piece of very good old cloth, long exposed to the sun.
In the twilight of one April evening when a soft gray had drifted down along the cottonfields and over the sultry town, he was a vague figure leaning against a board fence, whistling and gazing at the moon’s rim above the lights of Jackson Street. His mind was working persistently on a problem that had held his attention for an. The Jelly-bean had been invited to a party.
Back in the days when all the boys had detested all the girls, Clark Darrow and Jim had sat side by side in school. But, while Jim’s social aspirations had died in the oily air of the garage, Clark had alternately fallen in and out of love, gone to college, taken to drink, given it up, and, in short, become one of the best beaux of the town. Nevertheless Clark and Jim had retained a friendship that, though casual, was perfectly definite. That afternoon Clark’s ancient Ford had slowed up beside Jim, who was on the sidewalk and, out of a clear sky, Clark invited him to a party at the country club. The impulse that made him do this was no stranger than the impulse which made Jim accept. The latter was probably an unconscious ennui, a half-frightened sense of adventure. And now Jim was soberly thinking it over.
He began to sing, drumming his long foot idly on a stone block in the sidewalk till it wobbled up and down in time to the low throaty tune:
“One smile from Home in Jelly-bean town, Lives Jeanne, the Jelly-bean Queen.
She loves her dice and treats ’em nice; No dice would treat her mean.”
He broke off and agitated the sidewalk to a bumpy gallop.
“Daggone!” he muttered, half aloud. They would all be there–the old crowd, the crowd to which, by right of the white house, sold long since, and the portrait of the officer in gray over the mantel, Jim should have belonged. But that crowd had grown up together into a tight little set as gradually as the girls’ dresses had lengthened inch by inch, as definitely as the boys’ trousers had dropped suddenly to their ankles. And to that society of first names and dead puppy loves Jim was an outsider–a running mate of poor whites. Most of the men knew him, condescendingly; he tipped his hat to three or four girls. That was all.
When the dusk had thickened into a blue setting for the moon, he walked through the hot, pleasantly pungent town to Jackson Street. The stores were closing and the last shoppers were drifting homeward, as if borne on the dreamy revolution of a slow merry-go-round. A street-fair farther down a brilliant alley of varicolored booths and contributed a blend of music to the night–an oriental dance on a calliope, a melancholy bugle in front of a freak show, a cheerful rendition of “Back Home in Tennessee” on a hand-organ.
The Jelly-bean stopped in a store and bought a collar. Then he sauntered along toward Soda Sam’s, where he found the usual three or four cars of a summer evening parked in front and the little darkies running back and forth with sundaes and lemonades.
“Hello, Jim.”
It was a voice at his elbow–Joe Ewing sitting in an automobile with Marylyn Wade. Nancy Lamar and a strange man were in the back seat.
The Jelly-bean tipped his hat quickly.
“Hi Ben–” then, after an almost imperceptible pause–“How y’ all?”
Passing, he ambled on toward the garage where he had a room up-stairs. His “How y’all” had been said to Nancy Lamar, to whom he had not spoken in fifteen years.
Nancy had a mouth like a remembered kiss and shadowy eyes and blue-black hair inherited from her mother who had been born in Budapest. Jim passed her often on the street, walking small-boy fashion with her hands in her pockets and he knew that with her inseparable Sally Carrol Hopper she had left a trail of broken hearts from Atlanta to New Orleans.
For a few fleeting moments Jim wished he could dance. Then he laughed and as he reached his door began to sing softly to himself:
“Her Jelly Roll can twist your soul, Her eyes are big and brown,
She’s the Queen of the Queens of the Jelly-beans– My Jeanne of Jelly-bean Town.”
II
At nine-thirty, Jim and Clark met in front of Soda Sam’s and started for the Country Club in Clark’s Ford. “Jim,” asked Clark casually, as they rattled through the jasmine-scented night, “how do you keep alive?”
The Jelly-bean paused, considered.
“Well,” he said finally, “I got a room over Tilly’s garage. I help him some with the cars in the afternoon an’ he gives it to me free. Sometimes I drive one of his taxies and pick up a little thataway. I get fed up doin’ that regular though.”
“That all?”
“Well, when there’s a lot of work I help him by the day–Saturdays usually–and then there’s one main source of revenue I don’t generally mention. Maybe you don’t recollect I’m about the champion crap-shooter of this town. They make me shoot from a cup now because once I get the feel of a pair of dice they just roll for me.”
Clark grinned appreciatively,
“I never could learn to set ’em so’s they’d do what I wanted. Wish you’d shoot with Nancy Lamar some day and take all her money away from her. She will roll ’em with the boys and she loses more than her daddy can afford to give her. I happen to know she sold a good ring last month to pay a debt.”
The Jelly-bean was noncommittal.
“The white house on Elm Street still belong to you?”
Jim shook his head.
“Sold. Got a pretty good price, seein’ it wasn’t in a good part of town no more. Lawyer told me to put it into Liberty bonds. But Aunt Mamie got so she didn’t have no sense, so it takes all the interest to keep her up at Great Farms Sanitarium.
“Hm.”
“I got an old uncle up-state an’ I reckin I kin go up there if ever I get sure enough pore. Nice farm, but not enough niggers around to work it. He’s asked me to come up and help him, but I don’t guess I’d take much to it. Too doggone lonesome–” He broke off suddenly. “Clark, I want to tell you I’m much obliged to you for askin’ me out, but I’d be a lot happier if you’d just stop the car right here an’ let me walk back into town.”
“Shucks!” Clark grunted. “Do you good to step out. You don’t have to dance–just get out there on the floor and shake.”
“Hold on,” exclaimed. Jim uneasily, “Don’t you go leadin’ me up to any girls and leavin’ me there so I’ll have to dance with ’em.”
Clark laughed.
“‘Cause,” continued Jim desperately, “without you swear you won’t do that I’m agoin’ to get out right here an’ my good legs goin’ carry me back to Jackson street.”
They agreed after some argument that Jim, unmolested by females, was to view the spectacle from a secluded settee in the corner where Clark would join him whenever he wasn’t dancing.
So ten o’clock found the Jelly-bean with his legs crossed and his arms conservatively folded, trying to look casually at home and politely uninterested in the dancers. At heart he was torn between overwhelming self-consciousness and an intense curiosity as to all that went on around him. He saw the girls emerge one by one from the dressing-room, stretching and pluming themselves like bright birds, smiling over their powdered shoulders at the chaperones, casting a quick glance around to take in the room and, simultaneously, the room’s reaction to their entrance–and then, again like birds, alighting and nestling in the sober arms of their waiting escorts. Sally Carrol Hopper, blonde and lazy-eyed, appeared clad in her favorite pink and blinking like an awakened rose. Marjorie Haight, Marylyn Wade, Harriet Cary, all the girls he had seen loitering down Jackson Street by noon, now, curled and brilliantined and delicately tinted for the overhead lights, were miraculously strange Dresden figures of pink and blue and red and gold, fresh from the shop and not yet fully dried.
He had been there half an hour, totally uncheered by Clark’s jovial visits which were each one accompanied by a “Hello, old boy, how you making out?” and a slap at his knee. A dozen males had spoken to him or stopped for a moment beside him, but he knew that they were each one surprised at finding him there and fancied that one or two were even slightly resentful. But at half past ten his embarrassment suddenly left him and a pull of breathless interest took him completely out of himself–Nancy Lamar had come out of the dressing-room.
She was dressed in yellow organdie, a costume of a hundred cool corners, with three tiers of ruffles and a big bow in back until she shed black and yellow around her in a sort of phosphorescent lustre. The Jelly-bean’s eyes opened wide and a lump arose in his throat. For she stood beside the door until her partner hurried up. Jim recognized him as the stranger who had been with her in Joe Ewing’s car that afternoon. He saw her set her arms akimbo and say something in a low voice, and laugh. The man laughed too and Jim experienced the quick pang of a weird new kind of pain. Some ray had passed between the pair, a shaft of beauty from that sun that had warmed him a moment since. The Jelly-bean felt suddenly like a weed in a shadow.
A minute later Clark approached him, bright-eyed and glowing.
“Hi, old man” he cried with some lack of originality. “How you making out?”
Jim replied that he was making out as well as could be expected.
“You come along with me,” commanded Clark. “I’ve got something that’ll put an edge on the evening.”
Jim followed him awkwardly across the floor and up the stairs to the locker-room where Clark produced a flask of nameless yellow liquid.
“Good old corn.”
Ginger ale arrived on a tray. Such potent nectar as “good old corn” needed some disguise beyond seltzer.
“Say, boy,” exclaimed Clark breathlessly, “doesn’t Nancy Lamar look beautiful?”
Jim nodded.
“Mighty beautiful,” he agreed.
“She’s all dolled up to a fare-you-well to-night,” continued Clark. “Notice that fellow she’s with?”
“Big fella? White pants?”
“Yeah. Well, that’s Ogden Merritt from Savannah. Old man Merritt makes the Merritt safety razors. This fella’s crazy about her. Been chasing, after her all year.
“She’s a wild baby,” continued Clark, “but I like her. So does everybody. But she sure does do crazy stunts. She usually gets out alive, but she’s got scars all over her reputation from one thing or another she’s done.”
“That so?” Jim passed over his glass. “That’s good corn.”
“Not so bad. Oh, she’s a wild one. Shoot craps, say, boy! And she do like her high-balls. Promised I’d give her one later on.”
“She in love with this–Merritt?”
“Damned if I know. Seems like all the best girls around here marry fellas and go off somewhere.”
He poured himself one more drink and carefully corked the bottle.
“Listen, Jim, I got to go dance and I’d be much obliged if you just stick this corn right on your hip as long as you’re not dancing. If a man notices I’ve had a drink he’ll come up and ask me and before I know it it’s all gone and somebody else is having my good time.”
So Nancy Lamar was going to marry. This toast of a town was to become the private property of an individual in white trousers–and all because white trousers’ father had made a better razor than his neighbor. As they descended the stairs Jim found the idea inexplicably depressing. For the first time in his life he felt a vague and romantic yearning. A picture of her began to form in his imagination–Nancy walking boylike and debonnaire along the street, taking an orange as tithe from a worshipful fruit-dealer, charging a dope on a mythical account, at Soda Sam’s, assembling a convoy of beaux and then driving off in triumphal state for an afternoon of splashing and singing.
The Jelly-bean walked out on the porch to a deserted corner, dark between the moon on the lawn and the single lighted door of the ballroom. There he found a chair and, lighting a cigarette, drifted into the thoughtless reverie that was his usual mood. Yet now it was a reverie made sensuous by the night and by the hot smell of damp powder puffs, tucked in the fronts of low dresses and distilling a thousand rich scents, to float out through the open door. The music itself, blurred by a loud trombone, became hot and shadowy, a languorous overtone to the scraping of many shoes and slippers.
Suddenly the square of yellow light that fell through the door was obscured by a dark figure. A girl had come out of the dressing-room and was standing on the porch not more than ten feet away. Jim heard a low-breathed “doggone” and then she turned and saw him. It was Nancy Lamar.
Jim rose to his feet.
“Howdy?”
“Hello–” she paused, hesitated and then approached. “Oh, it’s–Jim Powell.”
He bowed slightly, tried to think of a casual remark.
“Do you suppose,” she began quickly, “I mean–do you know anything about gum?”
“What?” “I’ve got gum on my shoe. Some utter ass left his or her gum on the floor and of course I stepped in it.”
Jim blushed, inappropriately.
“Do you know how to get it off?” she demanded petulantly. “I’ve tried a knife. I’ve tried every damn thing in the dressing-room. I’ve tried soap and water–and even perfume and I’ve ruined my powder-puff trying to make it stick to that.”
Jim considered the question in some agitation.
“Why–I think maybe gasolene–”
The words had scarcely left his lips when she grasped his hand and pulled him at a run off the low veranda, over a flower bed and at a gallop toward a group of cars parked in the moonlight by the first hole of the golf course.
“Turn on the gasolene,” she commanded breathlessly.
“What?”
“For the gum of course. I’ve got to get it off. I can’t dance with gum on.”
Obediently Jim turned to the cars and began inspecting them with a view to obtaining the desired solvent. Had she demanded a cylinder he would have done his best to wrench one out.
“Here,” he said after a moment’s search. “‘Here’s one that’s easy. Got a handkerchief?”
“It’s up-stairs wet. I used it for the soap and water.”
Jim laboriously explored his pockets.
“Don’t believe I got one either.”
“Doggone it! Well, we can turn it on and let it run on the ground.”
He turned the spout; a dripping began.
“More!”
He turned it on fuller. The dripping became a flow and formed an oily pool that glistened brightly, reflecting a dozen tremulous moons on its quivering bosom.
“Ah,” she sighed contentedly, “let it all out. The only thing to do is to wade in it.”
In desperation he turned on the tap full and the pool suddenly widened sending tiny rivers and trickles in all directions.
“That’s fine. That’s something like.”
Raising her skirts she stepped gracefully in.
“I know this’ll take it off,” she murmured.
Jim smiled.
“There’s lots more cars.”
She stepped daintily out of the gasolene and began scraping her slippers, side and bottom, on the running-board of the automobile. The jelly-bean contained himself no longer. He bent double with explosive laughter and after a second she joined in.
“You’re here with Clark Darrow, aren’t you?” she asked as they walked back toward the veranda.
“Yes.”
“You know where he is now?”
“Out dancin’, I reckin.”
“The deuce. He promised me a highball.”
“Well,” said Jim, “I guess that’ll be all right. I got his bottle right here in my pocket.”
She smiled at him radiantly.
“I guess maybe you’ll need ginger ale though,” he added.
“Not me. Just the bottle.”
“Sure enough?”
She laughed scornfully.
“Try me. I can drink anything any man can. Let’s sit down.”
She perched herself on the side of a table and he dropped into one of the wicker chairs beside her. Taking out the cork she held the flask to her lips and took a long drink. He watched her fascinated.
“Like it?”
She shook her head breathlessly.
“No, but I like the way it makes me feel. I think most people are that way.”
Jim agreed.
“My daddy liked it too well. It got him.”
“American men,” said Nancy gravely, “don’t know how to drink.”
“What?” Jim was startled.
“In fact,” she went on carelessly, “they don’t know how to do anything very well. The one thing I regret in my life is that I wasn’t born in England.”
“In England?”
“Yes. It’s the one regret of my life that I wasn’t.”
“Do you like it over there?” “Yes. Immensely. I’ve never been there in person, but I’ve met a lot of Englishmen who were over here in the army, Oxford and Cambridge men–you know, that’s like Sewanee and University of Georgia are here–and of course I’ve read a lot of English novels.”
Jim was interested, amazed.
“D’ you ever hear of Lady Diana Manner?” she asked earnestly.
No, Jim had not.
“Well, she’s what I’d like to be. Dark, you know, like me, and wild as sin. She’s the girl who rode her horse up the steps of some cathedral or church or something and all the novelists made their heroines do it afterwards.”
Jim nodded politely. He was out of his depths.
“Pass the bottle,” suggested Nancy. “I’m going to take another little one. A little drink wouldn’t hurt a baby.
“You see,” she continued, again breathless after a draught. “People over there have style, Nobody has style here. I mean the boys here aren’t really worth dressing up for or doing sensational things for. Don’t you know?”
“I suppose so–I mean I suppose not,” murmured Jim.
“And I’d like to do ’em an’ all. I’m really the only girl in town that has style.”
She stretched, out her arms and yawned pleasantly.
“Pretty evening.”
“Sure is,” agreed Jim.
“Like to have boat” she suggested dreamily. “Like to sail out on a silver lake, say the Thames, for instance. Have champagne and caviare sandwiches along. Have about eight people. And one of the men would jump overboard to amuse the party, and get drowned like a man did with Lady Diana Manners once.”
“Did he do it to please her?” “Didn’t mean drown himself to please her. He just meant to jump overboard and make everybody laugh,”
“I reckin they just died laughin’ when he drowned.”
“Oh, I suppose they laughed a little,” she admitted. “I imagine she did, anyway. She’s pretty hard, I guess–like I am.”
“You hard?”
“Like nails.” She yawned again and added, “Give me a little more from that bottle.”
Jim hesitated but she held out her hand defiantly, “Don’t treat me like a girl;” she warned him. “I’m not like any girl _you_ ever saw,” She considered. “Still, perhaps you’re right. You got–you got old head on young shoulders.”
She jumped to her feet and moved toward the door. The Jelly-bean rose also.
“Good-bye,” she said politely, “good-bye. Thanks, Jelly-bean.”
Then she stepped inside and left him wide-eyed upon the porch.
III
At twelve o’clock a procession of cloaks issued single file from the women’s dressing-room and, each one pairing with a coated beau like dancers meeting in a cotillion figure, drifted through the door with sleepy happy laughter–through the door into the dark where autos backed and snorted and parties called to one another and gathered around the water-cooler.
Jim, sitting in his corner, rose to look for Clark. They had met at eleven; then Clark had gone in to dance. So, seeking him, Jim wandered into the soft-drink stand that had once been a bar. The room was deserted except for a sleepy negro dozing behind the counter and two boys lazily fingering a pair of dice at one of the tables. Jim was about to leave when he saw Clark coming in. At the same moment Clark looked up.
“Hi, Jim” he commanded. “C’mon over and help us with this bottle. I guess there’s not much left, but there’s one all around.”
Nancy, the man from Savannah, Marylyn Wade, and Joe Ewing were lolling and laughing in the doorway. Nancy caught Jim’s eye and winked at him humorously.
They drifted over to a table and arranging themselves around it waited for the waiter to bring ginger ale. Jim, faintly ill at ease, turned his eyes on Nancy, who had drifted into a nickel crap game with the two boys at the next table.
“Bring them over here,” suggested Clark.
Joe looked around.
“We don’t want to draw a crowd. It’s against club rules.
“Nobody’s around,” insisted Clark, “except Mr. Taylor. He’s walking up and down, like a wild-man trying find out who let all the gasolene out of his car.”
There was a general laugh.
“I bet a million Nancy got something on her shoe again. You can’t park when she’s around.”
“O Nancy, Mr. Taylor’s looking for you!”
Nancy’s cheeks were glowing with excitement over the game. “I haven’t seen his silly little flivver in two weeks.”
Jim felt a sudden silence. He turned and saw an individual of uncertain age standing in the doorway.
Clark’s voice punctuated the embarrassment.
“Won’t you join us Mr. Taylor?”
“Thanks.”
Mr. Taylor spread his unwelcome presence over a chair. “Have to, I guess. I’m waiting till they dig me up some gasolene. Somebody got funny with my car.”
His eyes narrowed and he looked quickly from one to the other. Jim wondered what he had heard from the doorway–tried to remember what had been said.
“I’m right to-night,” Nancy sang out, “and my four bits is in the ring.”
“Faded!” snapped Taylor suddenly.
“Why, Mr. Taylor, I didn’t know you shot craps!” Nancy was overjoyed to find that he had seated himself and instantly covered her bet. They had openly disliked each other since the night she had definitely discouraged a series of rather pointed advances.
“All right, babies, do it for your mamma. Just one little seven.” Nancy was _cooing_ to the dice. She rattled them with a brave underhand flourish, and rolled them out on the table.
“Ah-h! I suspected it. And now again with the dollar up.”
Five passes to her credit found Taylor a bad loser. She was making it personal, and after each success Jim watched triumph flutter across her face. She was doubling with each throw–such luck could scarcely last. “Better go easy,” he cautioned her timidly.
“Ah, but watch this one,” she whispered. It was eight on the dice and she called her number.
“Little Ada, this time we’re going South.”
Ada from Decatur rolled over the table. Nancy was flushed and half-hysterical, but her luck was holding.
She drove the pot up and up, refusing to drag. Taylor was drumming with his fingers on the table but he was in to stay.
Then Nancy tried for a ten and lost the dice. Taylor seized them avidly. He shot in silence, and in the hush of excitement the clatter of one pass after another on the table was the only sound.
Now Nancy had the dice again, but her luck had broken. An hour passed. Back and forth it went. Taylor had been at it again–and again and again. They were even at last–Nancy lost her ultimate five dollars.
“Will you take my check,” she said quickly, “for fifty, and we’ll shoot it all?” Her voice was a little unsteady and her hand shook as she reached to the money.
Clark exchanged an uncertain but alarmed glance with Joe Ewing. Taylor shot again. He had Nancy’s check.
“How ’bout another?” she said wildly. “Jes’ any bank’ll do–money everywhere as a matter of fact.”
Jim understood—the “good old corn” he had given her–the “good old corn” she had taken since. He wished he dared interfere–a girl of that age and position would hardly have two bank accounts. When the clock struck two he contained himself no longer.
“May I–can’t you let me roll ’em for you?” he suggested, his low, lazy voice a little strained.
Suddenly sleepy and listless, Nancy flung the dice down before him.
“All right–old boy! As Lady Diana Manners says, ‘Shoot ’em, Jelly-bean’–My luck’s gone.”
“Mr. Taylor,” said Jim, carelessly, “we’ll shoot for one of those there checks against the cash.”
Half an hour later Nancy swayed forward and clapped him on the back.
“Stole my luck, you did.” She was nodding her head sagely.
Jim swept up the last check and putting it with the others tore them into confetti and scattered them on the floor. Someone started singing and Nancy kicking her chair backward rose to her feet.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” she announced, “Ladies–that’s you Marylyn. I want to tell the world that Mr. Jim Powell, who is a well-known Jelly-bean of this city, is an exception to the great rule–‘lucky in dice–unlucky in love.’ He’s lucky in dice, and as matter of fact I–I _love_ him. Ladies and gentlemen, Nancy Lamar, famous dark-haired beauty often featured in the _Herald_ as one the most popular members of younger set as other girls are often featured in this particular case; Wish to announce–wish to announce, anyway, Gentlemen–” She tipped suddenly. Clark caught her and restored her balance.
“My error,” she laughed, “she–stoops to–stoops to–anyways–We’ll drink to Jelly-bean … Mr. Jim Powell, King of the Jelly-beans.”
And a few minutes later as Jim waited hat in hand for Clark in the darkness of that same corner of the porch where she had come searching for gasolene, she appeared suddenly beside him.
“Jelly-bean,” she said, “are you here, Jelly-bean? I think–” and her slight unsteadiness seemed part of an enchanted dream–“I think you deserve one of my sweetest kisses for that, Jelly-bean.”
For an instant her arms were around his neck–her lips were pressed to his.
“I’m a wild part of the world, Jelly-bean, but you did me a good turn.”
Then she was gone, down the porch, over the cricket-loud lawn. Jim saw Merritt come out the front door and say something to her angrily–saw her laugh and, turning away, walk with averted eyes to his car. Marylyn and Joe followed, singing a drowsy song about a Jazz baby.
Clark came out and joined Jim on the steps. “All pretty lit, I guess,” he yawned. “Merritt’s in a mean mood. He’s certainly off Nancy.”
Over east along the golf course a faint rug of gray spread itself across the feet of the night. The party in the car began to chant a chorus as the engine warmed up.
“Good-night everybody,” called Clark.
“Good-night, Clark.”
“Good-night.”
There was a pause, and then a soft, happy voice added,
“Good-night, Jelly-bean.”
The car drove off to a burst of singing. A rooster on a farm across the way took up a solitary mournful crow, and behind them, a last negro waiter turned out the porch light, Jim and Clark strolled over toward the Ford, their, shoes crunching raucously on the gravel drive.
“Oh boy!” sighed Clark softly, “how you can set those dice!”
It was still too dark for him to see the flush on Jim’s thin cheeks–or to know that it was a flush of unfamiliar shame.
IV
Over Tilly’s garage a bleak room echoed all day to the rumble and snorting down-stairs and the singing of the negro washers as they turned the hose on the cars outside. It was a cheerless square of a room, punctuated with a bed and a battered table on which lay half a dozen books–Joe Miller’s “Slow Train thru Arkansas,” “Lucille,” in an old edition very much annotated in an old-fashioned hand; “The Eyes of the World,” by Harold Bell Wright, and an ancient prayer-book of the Church of England with the name Alice Powell and the date 1831 written on the fly-leaf.
The East, gray when Jelly-bean entered the garage, became a rich and vivid blue as he turned on his solitary electric light. He snapped it out again, and going to the window rested his elbows on the sill and stared into the deepening morning. With the awakening of his emotions, his first perception was a sense of futility, a dull ache at the utter grayness of his life. A wall had sprung up suddenly around him hedging him in, a wall as definite and tangible as the white wall of his bare room. And with his perception of this wall all that had been the romance of his existence, the casualness, the light-hearted improvidence, the miraculous open-handedness of life faded out. The Jelly-bean strolling up Jackson Street humming a lazy song, known at every shop and street stand, cropful of easy greeting and local wit, sad sometimes for only the sake of sadness and the flight of time–that Jelly-bean was suddenly vanished. The very name was a reproach, a triviality. With a flood of insight he knew that Merritt must despise him, that even Nancy’s kiss in the dawn would have awakened not jealousy but only a contempt for Nancy’s so lowering herself. And on his part the Jelly-bean had used for her a dingy subterfuge learned from the garage. He had been her moral laundry; the stains were his.
As the gray became blue, brightened and filled the room, he crossed to his bed and threw himself down on it, gripping the edges fiercely.
“I love her,” he cried aloud, “God!”
As he said this something gave way within him like a lump melting in his throat. The air cleared and became radiant with dawn, and turning over on his face he began to sob dully into the pillow.
In the sunshine of three o’clock Clark Darrow chugging painfully along Jackson Street was hailed by the Jelly-bean, who stood on the curb with his fingers in his vest pockets.
“Hi!” called Clark, bringing his Ford to an astonishing stop alongside. “Just get up?”
The Jelly-bean shook his head.
“Never did go to bed. Felt sorta restless, so I took a long walk this morning out in the country. Just got into town this minute.”
“Should think you _would_ feel restless. I been feeling thataway all day–”
“I’m thinkin’ of leavin’ town” continued the Jelly-bean, absorbed by his own thoughts. “Been thinkin’ of goin’ up on the farm, and takin’ a little that work off Uncle Dun. Reckin I been bummin’ too long.”
Clark was silent and the Jelly-bean continued:
“I reckin maybe after Aunt Mamie dies I could sink that money of mine in the farm and make somethin’ out of it. All my people originally came from that part up there. Had a big place.”
Clark looked at him curiously.
“That’s funny,” he said. “This–this sort of affected me the same way.”
The Jelly-bean hesitated.
“I don’t know,” he began slowly, “somethin’ about–about that girl last night talkin’ about a lady named Diana Manners–an English lady, sorta got me thinkin’!” He drew himself up and looked oddly at Clark, “I had a family once,” he said defiantly.
Clark nodded.
“I know.”
“And I’m the last of ’em,” continued the Jelly-bean his voice rising slightly, “and I ain’t worth shucks. Name they call me by means jelly–weak and wobbly like. People who weren’t nothin’ when my folks was a lot turn up their noses when they pass me on the street.”
Again Clark was silent.
“So I’m through, I’m goin’ to-day. And when I come back to this town it’s going to be like a gentleman.”
Clark took out his handkerchief and wiped his damp brow.
“Reckon you’re not the only one it shook up,” he admitted gloomily. “All this thing of girls going round like they do is going to stop right quick. Too bad, too, but everybody’ll have to see it thataway.”
“Do you mean,” demanded Jim in surprise, “that all that’s leaked out?”
“Leaked out? How on earth could they keep it secret. It’ll be announced in the papers to-night. Doctor Lamar’s got to save his name somehow.”
Jim put his hands on the sides of the car and tightened his long fingers on the metal.
“Do you mean Taylor investigated those checks?”
It was Clark’s turn to be surprised.
“Haven’t you heard what happened?”
Jim’s startled eyes were answer enough.
“Why,” announced Clark dramatically, “those four got another bottle of corn, got tight and decided to shock the town–so Nancy and that fella Merritt were married in Rockville at seven o’clock this morning.”
A tiny indentation appeared in the metal under the Jelly-bean’s fingers.
“Married?”
“Sure enough. Nancy sobered up and rushed back into town, crying and frightened to death–claimed it’d all been a mistake. First Doctor Lamar went wild and was going to kill Merritt, but finally they got it patched up some way, and Nancy and Merritt went to Savannah on the two-thirty train.”
Jim closed his eyes and with an effort overcame a sudden sickness.
“It’s too bad,” said Clark philosophically. “I don’t mean the wedding–reckon that’s all right, though I don’t guess Nancy cared a darn about him. But it’s a crime for a nice girl like that to hurt her family that way.”
The Jelly-bean let go the car and turned away. Again something was going on inside him, some inexplicable but almost chemical change.
“Where you going?” asked Clark.
The Jelly-bean turned and looked dully back over his shoulder.
“Got to go,” he muttered. “Been up too long; feelin’ right sick.”
“Oh.”
* * * * *
The street was hot at three and hotter still at four, the April dust seeming to enmesh the sun and give it forth again as a world-old joke forever played on an eternity of afternoons. But at half past four a first layer of quiet fell and the shades lengthened under the awnings and heavy foliaged trees. In this heat nothing mattered. All life was weather, a waiting through the hot where events had no significance for the cool that was soft and caressing like a woman’s hand on a tired forehead. Down in Georgia there is a feeling–perhaps inarticulate–that this is the greatest wisdom of the South–so after a while the Jelly-bean turned into a poolhall on Jackson Street where he was sure to find a congenial crowd who would make all the old jokes–the ones he knew.
THE CAMEL’S BACK
The glazed eye of the tired reader resting for a second on the above title will presume it to be merely metaphorical. Stories about the cup and the lip and the bad penny and the new broom rarely have anything, to do with cups or lips or pennies or brooms. This story Is the exception. It has to do with a material, visible and large-as-life camel’s back.
Starting from the neck we shall work toward the tail. I want you to meet Mr. Perry Parkhurst, twenty-eight, lawyer, native of Toledo. Perry has nice teeth, a Harvard diploma, parts his hair in the middle. You have met him before–in Cleveland, Portland, St. Paul, Indianapolis, Kansas City, and so forth. Baker Brothers, New York, pause on their semi-annual trip through the West to clothe him; Montmorency & Co. dispatch a young man post-haste every three months to see that he has the correct number of little punctures on his shoes. He has a domestic roadster now, will have a French roadster if he lives long enough, and doubtless a Chinese tank if it comes into fashion. He looks like the advertisement of the young man rubbing his sunset-colored chest with liniment and goes East every other year to his class reunion.
I want you to meet his Love. Her name is Betty Medill, and she would take well in the movies. Her father gives her three hundred a month to dress on, and she has tawny eyes and hair and feather fans of five colors. I shall also introduce her father, Cyrus Medill. Though he is to all appearances flesh and blood, he is, strange to say, commonly known in Toledo as the Aluminum Man. But when he sits in his club window with two or three Iron Men, and the White Pine Man, and the Brass Man, they look very much as you and I do, only more so, if you know what I mean.
Now during the Christmas holidays of 1919 there took place in Toledo, counting only the people with the italicized _the_, forty-one dinner parties, sixteen dances, six luncheons, male and female, twelve teas, four stag dinners, two weddings, and thirteen bridge parties. It was the cumulative effect of all this that moved Perry Parkhurst on the twenty-ninth day of December to a decision.
This Medill girl would marry him and she wouldn’t marry him. She was having such a good time that she hated to take such a definite step. Meanwhile, their secret engagement had got so long that it seemed as if any day it might break off of its own weight. A little man named Warburton, who knew it all, persuaded Perry to superman her, to get a marriage license and go up to the Medill house and tell her she’d have to marry him at once or call it off forever. So he presented himself, his heart, his license, and his ultimatum, and within five minutes they were in the midst of a violent quarrel, a burst of sporadic open fighting such as occurs near the end of all long wars and engagements. It brought about one of those ghastly lapses in which two people who are in love pull up sharp, look at each other coolly and think it’s all been a mistake. Afterward they usually kiss wholesomely and assure the other person it was all their fault. Say it all was my fault! Say it was! I want to hear you say it!
But while reconciliation was trembling in the air, while each was, in a measure, stalling it off, so that they might the more voluptuously and sentimentally enjoy it when it came, they were permanently interrupted by a twenty-minute phone call for Betty from a garrulous aunt. At the end of eighteen minutes Perry Parkhurst, urged on by pride and suspicion and injured dignity, put on his long fur coat, picked up his light brown soft hat, and stalked out the door,
“It’s all over,” he muttered brokenly as he tried to jam his car into first. “It’s all over–if I have to choke you for an hour, damn you!”. The last to the car, which had been standing some time and was quite cold.
He drove downtown–that is, he got into a snow rut that led him downtown. He sat slouched down very low in his seat, much too dispirited to care where he went.
In front of the Clarendon Hotel he was hailed from the sidewalk by a bad man named Baily, who had big teeth and lived at the hotel and had never been in love.
“Perry,” said the bad man softly when the roadster drew up beside him at the, curb, “I’ve got six quarts of the doggonedest still champagne you ever tasted. A third of it’s yours, Perry, if you’ll come up-stairs and help Martin Macy and me drink it.”
“Baily,” said Perry tensely, “I’ll drink your champagne. I’ll drink every drop of it, I don’t care if it kills me.”
“Shut up, you nut!” said the bad man gently. “They don’t put wood alcohol in champagne. This is the stuff that proves the world is more than six thousand years old. It’s so ancient that the cork is petrified. You have to pull it with a stone drill.”
“Take me up-stairs,” said Perry moodily. “If that cork sees my heart it’ll fall out from pure mortification.”
The room up-stairs was full of those innocent hotel pictures of little girls eating apples and sitting in swings and talking to dogs. The other decorations were neckties and a pink man reading a pink paper devoted to ladies in pink tights.
“When you have to go into the highways and byways—-” said the pink man, looking reproachfully at Baily and Perry.
“Hello, Martin Macy,” said Perry shortly, “where’s this stone-age champagne?”
“What’s the rush? This isn’t an operation, understand. This is a party.”
Perry sat down dully and looked disapprovingly at all the neckties.
Baily leisurely opened the door of a wardrobe and brought out six handsome bottles.
“Take off that darn fur coat!” said Martin Macy to Perry. “Or maybe you’d like to have us open all the windows.”
“Give me champagne,” said Perry.
“Going to the Townsends’ circus ball to-night?”
“Am not!”
“‘Vited?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Why not go?”
“Oh, I’m sick of parties,” exclaimed Perry. “I’m sick of ’em. I’ve been to so many that I’m sick of ’em.”
“Maybe you’re going to the Howard Tates’ party?”
“No, I tell you; I’m sick of ’em.”
“Well,” said Macy consolingly, “the Tates’ is just for college kids anyways.”
“I tell you—-”
“I thought you’d be going to one of ’em anyways. I see by the papers you haven’t missed a one this Christmas.”
“Hm,” grunted Perry morosely.
He would never go to any more parties. Classical phrases played in his mind–that side of his life was closed, closed. Now when a man says “closed, closed” like that, you can be pretty sure that some woman has double-closed him, so to speak. Perry was also thinking that other classical thought, about how cowardly suicide is. A noble thought that one—warm and inspiring. Think of all the fine men we should lose if suicide were not so cowardly!
An hour later was six o’clock, and Perry had lost all resemblance to the young man in the liniment advertisement. He looked like a rough draft for a riotous cartoon. They were singing–an impromptu song of Baily’s improvisation:
_”One Lump Perry, the parlor snake, Famous through the city for the way he drinks his tea; Plays with it, toys with it
Makes no noise with it,
Balanced on a napkin on his well-trained knee–“_
“Trouble is,” said Perry, who had just banged his hair with Baily’s comb and was tying an orange tie round it to get the effect of Julius Caesar, “that you fellas can’t sing worth a damn. Soon’s I leave the air and start singing tenor you start singin’ tenor too,”
“‘M a natural tenor,” said Macy gravely. “Voice lacks cultivation, tha’s all. Gotta natural voice, m’aunt used say. Naturally good singer.”
“Singers, singers, all good singers,” remarked Baily, who was at the telephone. “No, not the cabaret; I want night egg. I mean some dog-gone clerk ‘at’s got food–food! I want—-”
“Julius Caesar,” announced Perry, turning round from the mirror. “Man of iron will and stern ‘termination”
“Shut up!” yelled Baily. “Say, iss Mr. Baily Sen’ up enormous supper. Use y’own judgment. Right away.”
He connected the receiver and the hook with some difficulty, and then with his lips closed and an expression of solemn intensity in his eyes went to the lower drawer of his dresser and pulled it open.
“Lookit!” he commanded. In his hands he held a truncated garment of pink gingham.
“Pants,” he exclaimed gravely. “Lookit!”
This was a pink blouse, a red tie, and a Buster Brown collar.
“Lookit!” he repeated. “Costume for the Townsends’ circus ball. I’m li’l’ boy carries water for the elephants.”
Perry was impressed in spite of himself.
“I’m going to be Julius Caesar,” he announced after a moment of concentration.
“Thought you weren’t going!” said Macy.
“Me? Sure I’m goin’, Never miss a party. Good for the nerves–like celery.”
“Caesar!” scoffed Baily. “Can’t be Caesar! He is not about a circus. Caesar’s Shakespeare. Go as a clown.”
Perry shook his head.
“Nope; Caesar,”
“Caesar?”
“Sure. Chariot.”
Light dawned on Baily.
“That’s right. Good idea.”
Perry looked round the room searchingly.
“You lend me a bathrobe and this tie,” he said finally. Baily considered.
“No good.”
“Sure, tha’s all I need. Caesar was a savage. They can’t kick if I come as Caesar, if he was a savage.”
“No,” said Baily, shaking his head slowly. “Get a costume over at a costumer’s. Over at Nolak’s.”
“Closed up.”
“Find out.”
After a puzzling five minutes at the phone a small, weary voice managed to convince Perry that it was Mr. Nolak speaking, and that they would remain open until eight because of the Townsends’ ball. Thus assured, Perry ate a great amount of filet mignon and drank his third of the last bottle of champagne. At eight-fifteen the man in the tall hat who stands in front of the Clarendon found him trying to start his roadster.
“Froze up,” said Perry wisely. “The cold froze it. The cold air.”
“Froze, eh?”
“Yes. Cold air froze it.”
“Can’t start it?”
“Nope. Let it stand here till summer. One those hot ole August days’ll thaw it out awright.”
“Goin’ let it stand?”
“Sure. Let ‘er stand. Take a hot thief to steal it. Gemme taxi.”
The man in the tall hat summoned a taxi.
“Where to, mister?”
“Go to Nolak’s–costume fella.”
II
Mrs. Nolak was short and ineffectual looking, and on the cessation of the world war had belonged for a while to one of the new nationalities. Owing to unsettled European conditions she had never since been quite sure what she was. The shop in which she and her husband performed their daily stint was dim and ghostly, and peopled with suits of armor and Chinese mandarins, and enormous papier-mâché birds suspended from the ceiling. In a vague background many rows of masks glared eyelessly at the visitor, and there were glass cases full of crowns and scepters, and jewels and enormous stomachers, and paints, and crape hair, and wigs of all colors.
When Perry ambled into the shop Mrs. Nolak was folding up the last troubles of a strenuous day, so she thought, in a drawer full of pink silk stockings.
“Something for you?” she queried pessimistically. “Want costume of Julius Hur, the charioteer.”
Mrs. Nolak was sorry, but every stitch of charioteer had been rented long ago. Was it for the Townsends’ circus ball?
It was.
“Sorry,” she said, “but I don’t think there’s anything left that’s really circus.”
This was an obstacle.
“Hm,” said Perry. An idea struck him suddenly. “If you’ve got a, piece of canvas I could go’s a tent.”
“Sorry, but we haven’t anything like that. A hardware store is where you’d have to go to. We have some very nice Confederate soldiers.”
“No. No soldiers.”
“And I have a very handsome king.”
He shook his head.
“Several of the gentlemen” she continued hopefully, “are wearing stovepipe hats and swallow-tail coats and going as ringmasters–but we’re all out of tall hats. I can let you have some crape hair for a mustache.”
“Want somep’n ‘stinctive.”
“Something–let’s see. Well, we have a lion’s head, and a goose, and a camel–”
“Camel?” The idea seized Perry’s imagination, gripped it fiercely.
“Yes, but It needs two people.”
“Camel, That’s the idea. Lemme see it.”
The camel was produced from his resting place on a top shelf. At first glance he appeared to consist entirely of a very gaunt, cadaverous head and a sizable hump, but on being spread out he was found to possess a dark brown, unwholesome-looking body made of thick, cottony cloth.
“You see it takes two people,” explained Mrs. Nolak, holding the camel in frank admiration. “If you have a friend he could be part of it. You see there’s sorta pants for two people. One pair is for the fella in front, and the other pair for the fella in back. The fella in front does the lookin’ out through these here eyes, an’ the fella in back he’s just gotta stoop over an’ folla the front fella round.”
“Put it on,” commanded Perry.
Obediently Mrs. Nolak put her tabby-cat face inside the camel’s head and turned it from side to side ferociously.
Perry was fascinated.
“What noise does a camel make?”
“What?” asked Mrs. Nolak as her face emerged, somewhat smudgy. “Oh, what noise? Why, he sorta brays.”
“Lemme see it in a mirror.”
Before a wide mirror Perry tried on the head and turned from side to side appraisingly. In the dim light the effect was distinctly pleasing. The camel’s face was a study in pessimism, decorated with numerous abrasions, and it must be admitted that his coat was in that state of general negligence peculiar to camels–in fact, he needed to be cleaned and pressed–but distinctive he certainly was. He was majestic. He would have attracted attention in any gathering, if only by his melancholy cast of feature and the look of hunger lurking round his shadowy eyes.
“You see you have to have two people,” said Mrs. Nolak again.
Perry tentatively gathered up the body and legs and wrapped them about him, tying the hind legs as a girdle round his waist. The effect on the whole was bad. It was even irreverent–like one of those mediaeval pictures of a monk changed into a beast by the ministrations of Satan. At the very best the ensemble resembled a humpbacked cow sitting on her haunches among blankets.
“Don’t look like anything at all,” objected Perry gloomily.
“No,” said Mrs. Nolak; “you see you got to have two people.”
A solution flashed upon Perry.
“You got a date to-night?”
“Oh, I couldn’t possibly—-”
“Oh, come on,” said Perry encouragingly. “Sure you can! Here! Be good sport, and climb into these hind legs.”
With difficulty he located them, and extended their yawning depths ingratiatingly. But Mrs. Nolak seemed loath. She backed perversely away.
“Oh, no—-”
“C’mon! You can be the front if you want to. Or we’ll flip a coin.”
“Make it worth your while.”
Mrs. Nolak set her lips firmly together.
“Now you just stop!” she said with no coyness implied. “None of the gentlemen ever acted up this way before. My husband—-”
“You got a husband?” demanded Perry. “Where is he?”
“He’s home.”
“Wha’s telephone number?”
After considerable parley he obtained the telephone number pertaining to the Nolak penates and got into communication with that small, weary voice he had heard once before that day. But Mr. Nolak, though taken off his guard and somewhat confused by Perry’s brilliant flow of logic, stuck staunchly to his point. He refused firmly, but with dignity, to help out Mr. Parkhurst in the capacity of back part of a camel.
Having rung off, or rather having been rung off on, Perry sat down on a three-legged stool to think it over. He named over to himself those friends on whom he might call, and then his mind paused as Betty Medill’s name hazily and sorrowfully occurred to him. He had a sentimental thought. He would ask her. Their love affair was over, but she could not refuse this last request. Surely it was not much to ask–to help him keep up his end of social obligation for one short night. And if she insisted, she could be the front part of the camel and he would go as the back. His magnanimity pleased him. His mind even turned to rosy-colored dreams of a tender reconciliation inside the camel–there hidden away from all the world….
“Now you’d better decide right off.”
The bourgeois voice of Mrs. Nolak broke in upon his mellow fancies and roused him to action. He went to the phone and called up the Medill house. Miss Betty was out; had gone out to dinner.
Then, when all seemed lost, the camel’s back wandered curiously into the store. He was a dilapidated individual with a cold in his head and a general trend about him of downwardness. His cap was pulled down low on his head, and his chin was pulled down low on his chest, his coat hung down to his shoes, he looked run-down, down at the heels, and–Salvation Army to the contrary–down and out. He said that he was the taxicab-driver that the gentleman had hired at the Clarendon Hotel. He had been instructed to wait outside, but he had waited some time, and a suspicion had grown upon him that the gentleman had gone out the back way with purpose to defraud him–gentlemen sometimes did–so he had come in. He sank down onto the three-legged stool.
“Wanta go to a party?” demanded Perry sternly.
“I gotta work,” answered the taxi-driver lugubriously. “I gotta keep my job.”
“It’s a very good party.”
“‘S a very good job.”
“Come on!” urged Perry. “Be a good fella. See–it’s pretty!” He held the camel up and the taxi-driver looked at it cynically.
“Huh!”
Perry searched feverishly among the folds of the cloth.
“See!” he cried enthusiastically, holding up a selection of folds. “This is your part. You don’t even have to talk. All you have to do is to walk–and sit down occasionally. You do all the sitting down. Think of it. I’m on my feet all the time and _you_ can sit down some of the time. The only time _I_ can sit down is when we’re lying down, and you can sit down when–oh, any time. See?”
“What’s ‘at thing?” demanded the individual dubiously. “A shroud?”
“Not at all,” said Perry indignantly. “It’s a camel.”
“Huh?”
Then Perry mentioned a sum of money, and the conversation left the land of grunts and assumed a practical tinge. Perry and the taxi-driver tried on the camel in front of the mirror.
“You can’t see it,” explained Perry, peering anxiously out through the eyeholes, “but honestly, ole man, you look sim’ly great! Honestly!”
A grunt from the hump acknowledged this somewhat dubious compliment.
“Honestly, you look great!” repeated Perry enthusiastically. “Move round a little.”
The hind legs moved forward, giving the effect of a huge cat-camel hunching his back preparatory to a spring.
“No; move sideways.”
The camel’s hips went neatly out of joint; a hula dancer would have writhed in envy.
“Good, isn’t it?” demanded Perry, turning to Mrs. Nolak for approval.
“It looks lovely,” agreed Mrs. Nolak.
“We’ll take it,” said Perry.
The bundle was stowed under Perry’s arm and they left the shop.
“Go to the party!” he commanded as he took his seat in the back.
“What party?”
“Fanzy-dress party.”
“Where’bouts is it?”
This presented a new problem. Perry tried to remember, but the names of all those who had given parties during the holidays danced confusedly before his eyes. He could ask Mrs. Nolak, but on looking out the window he saw that the shop was dark. Mrs. Nolak had already faded out, a little black smudge far down the snowy street.
“Drive uptown,” directed Perry with fine confidence. “If you see a party, stop. Otherwise I’ll tell you when we get there.”
He fell into a hazy daydream and his thoughts wandered again to Betty–he imagined vaguely that they had had a disagreement because she refused to go to the party as the back part of the camel. He was just slipping off into a chilly doze when he was wakened by the taxi-driver opening the door and shaking him by the arm.
“Here we are, maybe.”
Perry looked out sleepily. A striped awning led from the curb up to a spreading gray stone house, from which issued the low drummy whine of expensive jazz. He recognized the Howard Tate house.
“Sure,” he said emphatically; “‘at’s it! Tate’s party to-night. Sure, everybody’s goin’.”
“Say,” said the individual anxiously after another look at the awning, “you sure these people ain’t gonna romp on me for comin’ here?”
Perry drew himself up with dignity.
“‘F anybody says anything to you, just tell ’em you’re part of my costume.”
The visualization of himself as a thing rather than a person seemed to reassure the individual.
“All right,” he said reluctantly.
Perry stepped out under the shelter of the awning and began unrolling the camel.
“Let’s go,” he commanded.
Several minutes later a melancholy, hungry-looking camel, emitting clouds of smoke from his mouth and from the tip of his noble hump, might have been seen crossing the threshold of the Howard Tate residence, passing a startled footman without so much as a snort, and heading directly for the main stairs that led up to the ballroom. The beast walked with a peculiar gait which varied between an uncertain lockstep and a stampede–but can best be described by the word “halting.” The camel had a halting gait–and as he walked he alternately elongated and contracted like a gigantic concertina.
III
The Howard Tates are, as every one who lives in Toledo knows, the most formidable people in town. Mrs. Howard Tate was a Chicago Todd before she became a Toledo Tate, and the family generally affect that conscious simplicity which has begun to be the earmark of American aristocracy. The Tates have reached the stage where they talk about pigs and farms and look at you icy-eyed if you are not amused. They have begun to prefer retainers rather than friends as dinner guests, spend a lot of money in a quiet way, and, having lost all sense of competition, are in process of growing quite dull.
The dance this evening was for little Millicent Tate, and though all ages were represented, the dancers were mostly from school and college–the younger married crowd was at the Townsends’ circus ball up at the Tallyho Club. Mrs. Tate was standing just inside tie ballroom, following Millicent round with her eyes, and beaming whenever she caught her bye. Beside her were two middle-aged sycophants, who were saying what a perfectly exquisite child Millicent was. It was at this moment that Mrs. Tate was grasped firmly by the skirt and her youngest daughter, Emily, aged eleven, hurled herself with an “Oof!” into her mother’s arms.
“Why, Emily, what’s the trouble?”
“Mamma,” said Emily, wild-eyed but voluble, “there’s something out on the stairs.”
“What?”
“There’s a thing out on the stairs, mamma. I think it’s a big dog, mamma, but it doesn’t look like a dog.”
“What do you mean, Emily?”
The sycophants waved their heads sympathetically.
“Mamma, it looks like a–like a camel.”
Mrs. Tate laughed.
“You saw a mean old shadow, dear, that’s all.”
“No, I didn’t. No, it was some kind of thing, mamma–big. I was going down-stairs to see if there were any more people, and this dog or something, he was coming up-stairs. Kinda funny, mamma, like he was lame. And then he saw me and gave a sort of growl, and then he slipped at the top of the landing, and I ran.”
Mrs. Tate’s laugh faded.
“The child must have seen something,” she said.
The sycophants agreed that the child must have seen something–and suddenly all three women took an instinctive step away from the door as the sounds of muffled steps were audible just outside.
And then three startled gasps rang out as a dark brown form rounded the corner, and they saw what was apparently a huge beast looking down at them hungrily.
“Oof!” cried Mrs. Tate.
“O-o-oh!” cried the ladies in a chorus.
The camel suddenly humped his back, and the gasps turned to shrieks.
“Oh–look!”
“What is it?”
The dancing stopped, bat the dancers hurrying over got quite a different impression of the invader; in fact, the young people immediately suspected that it was a stunt, a hired entertainer come to amuse the party. The boys in long trousers looked at it rather disdainfully, and sauntered over with their hands in their pockets, feeling that their intelligence was being insulted. But the girls uttered little shouts of glee.
“It’s a camel!”
“Well, if he isn’t the funniest!”
The camel stood there uncertainly, swaying slightly from side to aide, and seeming to take in the room in a careful, appraising glance; then as if he had come to an abrupt decision, he turned and ambled swiftly out the door.
Mr. Howard Tate had just come out of the library on the lower floor, and was standing chatting with a young man in the hall. Suddenly they heard the noise of shouting up-stairs, and almost immediately a succession of bumping sounds, followed by the precipitous appearance at the foot of the stairway of a large brown beast that seemed to be going somewhere in a great hurry.
“Now what the devil!” said Mr. Tate, starting.
The beast picked itself up not without dignity and, affecting an air of extreme nonchalance, as if he had just remembered an important engagement, started at a mixed gait toward the front door. In fact, his front legs began casually to run.
“See here now,” said Mr. Tate sternly. “Here! Grab it, Butterfield! Grab it!”
The young man enveloped the rear of the camel in a pair of compelling arms, and, realizing that further locomotion was impossible, the front end submitted to capture and stood resignedly in a state of some agitation. By this time a flood of young people was pouring down-stairs, and Mr. Tate, suspecting everything from an ingenious burglar to an escaped lunatic, gave crisp directions to the young man:
“Hold him! Lead him in here; we’ll soon see.”
The camel consented to be led into the library, and Mr. Tate, after locking the door, took a revolver from a table drawer and instructed the young man to take the thing’s head off. Then he gasped and returned the revolver to its hiding-place.
“Well, Perry Parkhurst!” he exclaimed in amazement.
“Got the wrong party, Mr. Tate,” said Perry sheepishly. “Hope I didn’t scare you.”
“Well–you gave us a thrill, Perry.” Realization dawned on him. “You’re bound for the Townsends’ circus ball.”
“That’s the general idea.”
“Let me introduce Mr. Butterfield, Mr. Parkhurst.” Then turning to Perry; “Butterfield is staying with us for a few days.”
“I got a little mixed up,” mumbled Perry. “I’m very sorry.”
“Perfectly all right; most natural mistake in the world. I’ve got a clown rig and I’m going down there myself after a while.” He turned to Butterfield. “Better change your mind and come down with us.”
The young man demurred. He was going to bed.
“Have a drink, Perry?” suggested Mr. Tate.
“Thanks, I will.”
“And, say,” continued Tate quickly, “I’d forgotten all about your–friend here.” He indicated the rear part of the camel. “I didn’t mean to seem discourteous. Is it any one I know? Bring him out.”
“It’s not a friend,” explained Perry hurriedly. “I just rented him.”
“Does he drink?”
“Do you?” demanded Perry, twisting himself tortuously round.
There was a faint sound of assent.
“Sure he does!” said Mr. Tate heartily. “A really efficient camel ought to be able to drink enough so it’d last him three days.”
“Tell you,” said Perry anxiously, “he isn’t exactly dressed up enough to come out. If you give me the bottle I can hand it back to him and he can take his inside.”
From under the cloth was audible the enthusiastic smacking sound inspired by this suggestion. When a butler had appeared with bottles, glasses, and siphon one of the bottles was handed back; thereafter the silent partner could be heard imbibing long potations at frequent intervals.
Thus passed a benign hour. At ten o’clock Mr. Tate decided that they’d better be starting. He donned his clown’s costume; Perry replaced the camel’s head, arid side by side they traversed on foot the single block between the Tate house and the Tallyho Club.
The circus ball was in full swing. A great tent fly had been put up inside the ballroom and round the walls had been built rows of booths representing the various attractions of a circus side show, but these were now vacated and over the floor swarmed a shouting, laughing medley of youth and color–downs, bearded ladies, acrobats, bareback riders, ringmasters, tattooed men, and charioteers. The Townsends had determined to assure their party of success, so a great quantity of liquor had been surreptitiously brought over from their house and was now flowing freely. A green ribbon ran along the wall completely round the ballroom, with pointing arrows alongside and signs which instructed the uninitiated to “Follow the green line!” The green line led down to the bar, where waited pure punch and wicked punch and plain dark-green bottles.
On the wall above the bar was another arrow, red and very wavy, and under it the slogan: “Now follow this!”
But even amid the luxury of costume and high spirits represented, there, the entrance of the camel created something of a stir, and Perry was immediately surrounded by a curious, laughing crowd attempting to penetrate the identity of this beast that stood by the wide doorway eying the dancers with his hungry, melancholy gaze.
And then Perry saw Betty standing in front of a booth, talking to a comic policeman. She was dressed in the costume of an Egyptian snake-charmer: her tawny hair was braided and drawn through brass rings, the effect crowned with a glittering Oriental tiara. Her fair face was stained to a warm olive glow and on her arms and the half moon of her back writhed painted serpents with single eyes of venomous green. Her feet were in sandals and her skirt was slit to the knees, so that when she walked one caught a glimpse of other slim serpents painted just above her bare ankles. Wound about her neck was a glittering cobra. Altogether a charming costume–one that caused the more nervous among the older women to shrink away from her when she passed, and the more troublesome ones to make great talk about “shouldn’t be allowed” and “perfectly disgraceful.”
But Perry, peering through the uncertain eyes of the camel, saw only her face, radiant, animated, and glowing with excitement, and her arms and shoulders, whose mobile, expressive gestures made her always the outstanding figure in any group. He was fascinated and his fascination exercised a sobering effect on him. With a growing clarity the events of the day came back–rage rose within him, and with a half-formed intention of taking her away from the crowd he started toward her–or rather he elongated slightly, for he had neglected to issue the preparatory command necessary to locomotion.
But at this point fickle Kismet, who for a day had played with him bitterly and sardonically, decided to reward him in full for the amusement he had afforded her. Kismet turned the tawny eyes of the snake-charmer to the camel. Kismet led her to lean toward the man beside her and say, “Who’s that? That camel?”
“Darned if I know.”
But a little man named Warburton, who knew it all, found it necessary to hazard an opinion:
“It came in with Mr. Tate. I think part of it’s probably Warren Butterfield, the architect from New York, who’s visiting the Tates.”
Something stirred in Betty Medill–that age-old interest of the provincial girl in the visiting man.
“Oh,” she said casually after a slight pause.
At the end of the next dance Betty and her partner finished up within a few feet of the camel. With the informal audacity that was the key-note of the evening she reached out and gently rubbed the camel’s nose.
“Hello, old camel.”
The camel stirred uneasily.
“You ‘fraid of me?” said Betty, lifting her eyebrows in reproof. “Don’t be. You see I’m a snake-charmer, but I’m pretty good at camels too.”
The camel bowed very low and some one made the obvious remark about beauty and the beast.
Mrs. Townsend approached the group.
“Well, Mr. Butterfield,” she said helpfully, “I wouldn’t have recognised you.”
Perry bowed again and smiled gleefully behind his mask.
“And who is this with you?” she inquired.
“Oh,” said Perry, his voice muffled by the thick cloth and quite unrecognizable, “he isn’t a fellow, Mrs. Townsend. He’s just part of my costume.”
Mrs. Townsend laughed and moved away. Perry turned again to Betty,
“So,” he thought, “this is how much she cares! On the very day of our final rupture she starts a flirtation with another man–an absolute stranger.”
On an impulse he gave her a soft nudge with his shoulder and waved his head suggestively toward the hall, making it clear that he desired her to leave her partner and accompany him.
“By-by, Rus,” she called to her partner. “This old camel’s got me. Where we going, Prince of Beasts?”
The noble animal made no rejoinder, but stalked gravely along in the direction of a secluded nook on the side stairs.
There she seated herself, and the camel, after some seconds of confusion which included gruff orders and sounds of a heated dispute going on in his interior, placed himself beside her–his hind legs stretching out uncomfortably across two steps.
“Well, old egg,” said Betty cheerfully, “how do you like our happy party?”