The professor was a mere sketch of a man, random, rakish, with head aslant and shifty eyes forever dropping away from a questioner's face. He abounded in inhuman angles and impossible lines. It seemed that he must have been rather dashingly done in the first place, then half obliterated and badly mended with fumbling, indecisive touches. His restless hands unceasingly wrung each other as if he had that moment made his own acquaintance and was trying to infuse a false geniality into the meeting.
When he spoke he had a trick of opening his mouth for a word and holding it so, a not over-clean forefinger poised above an outheld palm. It seemed to the listener that the word when it came would mean much. His white moustache alone had a well-finished look, curving jauntily upward.
"Sit there!" An authoritative finger pointed Bean to the chair he had lately occupied.
He sat nervously, suffering that peculiar apprehension which physicians and dentists had always inspired.
"Most amazing! Most astounding!" muttered the professor as if to his own ear alone. He sat in a chair facing Bean and regarded him long and intently. At brief intervals his face twitched, his body stiffened, he seemed to writhe in some malign grasp.
Bean gripped the arms of his chair. His tingling nerves were accurately defining his spine. He waited, breathless.
"I see it all," breathed the professor in low, solemn tones, his eyes fixed above Bean's head. "First the pomp and glitter of a throne. You wrench it from a people whose weakness you play upon with a devilish cunning, you ascend to it over the bodies of countless men slain in battle. Power through blood! You are cruel, insatiable, a predatory monster. But retribution comes. You are hurled from your throne. Again you ascend it, but only for a brief time. You fight your last battle; you lose! You are captured and taken to a lonely island somewhere far to the south, there to be imprisoned until your death. Afterward I see your body returned to the city that was once your capital. It now lies in a heavy stone coffin. It is in a European city. I can almost hear the name, but not plainly. I cannot get the name under which you ruled. I look into the abyss and the cries of your victims drown it. Horror piles upon horror!"
Bean was leaning forward, tense with excitement, his mouth open. "Yes, that's just the way I felt about it," he murmured.
"But this was only a few paltry years ago, perhaps a hundred. It passes from my view. I am led back, away from it—far back—the cries of those you slaughtered echo but faintly—the scene changes—"
The professor paused. Bean had cowered in his chair, wincing under each blow. He wiped his face and crumpled the moist handkerchief tightly in one hand.
"Perhaps the name may come to me now," continued the professor. "But your superior personality overwhelmed me at first; you are so self-willed, so dominant, so ruthless. The name, the name!" He cried the last words commandingly and snapped his fingers at the delinquent control. "There! I seem to hear—"
"Never mind that name," broke in Bean hastily. "Let it go! I—I don't want to know it. Go on back farther!"
Again the professor's look became trancelike.
"Ah! What a relief to be free from that blood-lust!" He breathed deeply and his eyes rolled far up under their lids.
"What is this? A statesman, still crafty, still the lines of cunning cruelty about the mouth. The city is Venice in the fourteenth century. He is dressed in a richly bejewelled robe and toys with an inlaid dagger. He is plotting the assassination of a Doge—"
"Please get still farther back, can't you?" pleaded Bean.
The seer struggled once more with his control.
"I next see you at the head of a Roman legion, going forth to battle. You are a tyrant, ruling by fear alone, and with your own sword I see you cut off the heads of—"
"Farther back," beseeched the sitter. "I—I've had enough of all that battle and killing. I—I don't like it. Go on back to the very first."
Patiently the adept redirected his forces.
"I see a poet. He sings his deathless lay by a roadside in ancient Greece. He is an old man, feeble, blind—"
"Something else," broke in the persistent sitter, resolving not to pay twenty dollars for having been a blind poet.
The professor glanced sharply at him. Perhaps his control did not relish these interruptions. He seemed to suppress words of impatience and began anew.
"Ah! Now I see your very first appearance on this planet. You were born from another as yet unknown to our astronomers. You are now"—he lowered his eyes to the sitter's face—"an Egyptian king."
Detecting no sign of displeasure at this, he continued with refreshed enthusiasm.
"It is thousands of years ago. You are the last king of the pre-dynastic era—"
"What kind of a king—one of those fighters?"
"You are a wise and good king. I see a peaceful realm peopled by contented subjects."
"That's what I want to know. Go on; tell me more. Married?"
"Your wife is a princess of rare beauty from—from Mesopotamia. You have three lovely children, two boys and a girl, and your palace on the banks of the Nile is one of the most beautiful and grand palaces ever erected by the hand of man. You are ministered to by slaves, and your councillors of state come to you with their reports. You are tall, handsome and of a most kingly presence. Your personal bravery is unquestioned, you are an adept in all manly sports, but you will not go to war as you very properly detest all violence. For this reason there is little to relate of your reign. It was uneventful and distinguished only by your wise and humane statesmanship—"
"What name?" asked Bean, in low, reverent tones.
"The name—er—the name is—oh, yes, I get it—the name is Ram-tah."
"Can I find him in the histories?"
"You cannot," answered the seer emphatically. "I am probably the only living man that can tell you very much about him."
"When did he—pass on?"
"At the age of eighty-two years. He was deeply mourned by all his people. He had been a king of great strength of character, stern at moments, but ever just. His remains received the treatment customary in those times, and the mummy was interred in the royal sepulchre which is now covered by the sands of the centuries. Anything else?"
Bean was leaning forward in his chair, his eyes lost in that far, glorious past.
"Nothing else, now, I think. If I could see you again some time, I'd like to ask—"
"My mission is to serve," answered the other, caressing the moustache with a deft hand. "Anything I can do for you, any time, command me."
The Countess appeared from between the curtains.
"Was the conditions right?" she asked.
"They have been, at least so far," replied the professor crisply, with a side-glance at Bean who seemed on the point of leaving.
"Say, friend, I guess you're forgetting something, ain't you?" demanded the Countess archly.
And Bean perceived that he had indeed forgotten something. He rectified the oversight with blushing apologies, while the professor inspected the mantel ornaments with an absent air. What was twenty dollars to a king and a sire of kings? He bowed himself from the room.
They listened until the hall door closed.
"There's yours, Ed. You earned it all right, I'll say that. My! don't I wish I was up on that dope."
"You were the wise lady to send for me, Lizzie. You'd have killed him off right here. As it is, he'll come back. He's a clerk somewhere, drawing twenty-five a week or so. He ought to give up at least five of it every week; cigarette money, anyway. Anything loose in the house?"
"They's a couple bottles beer in the icebox. Gee! ain't he good, though! If he only had the roll some has!"
In his little room far up under the hunched shoulders of the house, Bunker Bean sat reviewing his Karmic past. Over parts of it he shuddered. That crafty Venetian plotting to kill, trifling wickedly with the inlaid dagger; the brutal Roman, ruling by fear, cutting off heads! And the blind poet! He would rather be Napoleon than a blind poet, if you came down to that. But the king, wise, humane, handsome, masterly, with a princess of rare beauty from Mesopotamia to be the mother of his three lovely children. That was a dazzling vision to behold, a life sane and proper, abounding in majesty both moral and material.
He sought to live over his long and peaceful but brilliant reign. Then he dwelt on his death and burial. They had made a mummy of him, of course. Somewhere that very night, at that very instant, his lifeless form reposed beneath the desert sands. Perhaps the face had changed but little during the centuries. He, Bunker Bean, lay there in royal robes, hands folded upon his breast, as lamenting subjects had left him.
And what did it mean to him now? He thought he saw. As King Ram-tah he had been too peaceful. For all his stern and kingly bearing might he not have been a little timid—afraid of people now and then? And the Karmic law had swept him on and on into lives that demanded violence, the Roman warrior, the Venetian plotter, the Corsican usurper!
He saw that he must have completed one of those vast Karmic cycles. What he had supposed to be timidity was a natural reaction from Napoleonic bravado. Now he had finished the circle and was ready to become again his kingly self, his Ram-tah self—able, reliant, fearless.
He expanded his chest, erected his shoulders and studied himself in the glass: there was undoubted majesty in the glance. He vibrated with some fresh, strange power.
Yes; but what about to-morrow—out in the world? in daylight, passing the policeman on the corner, down at the office? Would he remain a king in the presence of Breede, even in the lesser presence of Bulger, or of old Metzeger from whom he purposed to borrow seventeen dollars and seventy-nine cents? All right about being a king, but how were other people to know it? Well, he would have to make them feel it. He must know it himself, first; then impress it upon them.
But a sense of unreality was creeping back. It was almost better to remember the Napoleon past. There were books about that. He pictured again the dead Ram-tah in trappings of royalty. If he could only see himself, and be sure. But that was out of the question. It was no good wishing. After all, he was Bunker Bean, a poor thing who had to fly when Breede growled "Wantcha." He sat at his table, staring moodily into vacancy. He idly speculated about Breede's ragged moustache; he thought it had been blasted and killed by the words Breede spoke. A moment later he was conscious that he stared at an unopened letter on the table before him.
He took it up without interest, perceiving that it came from his Aunt Clara in Chicago. She would ask if he had yet joined the Y.M.C.A., and warn him to be careful about changing his flannels.
"Dear Bunker" [it began], "my own dear husband passed to his final rest last Thursday at 5 p.m. He was cheerful to the last and did not seem to suffer much. The funeral was on Saturday and was very beautiful and impressive. I did not notify you at the time as I was afraid the shock would affect you injuriously and that you might be tempted to make the long trip here to be with me. Now that you know it is all over, you can take it peacefully, as I am already doing. The life-insurance people were very nice about it and paid the claim promptly. I enclose the money which wipes out all but—"
He opened the double sheet. There were many more of the closely written lines, but he read no farther, for a check was folded there. His trembling fingers pulled the ends apart and his astounded eyes rested on its ornate face.
It was for ten thousand dollars.
At six minutes after eight the following evening the Countess Casanova, moved from her professional calm, hurriedly closed the sliding doors between the two rooms of her apartment and sprang to the telephone where she frantically demanded a number. The delay seemed interminable to her, but at last she began to speak.
"That you, Ed? F'r God's sake, beat it over here quick. That boob las' night is back here an' he's got it. I dunno—but something big, I tell you. He's actin' like a crazy man. Listen here! He wants t' know can you locate it—see it lyin' there underground. Why, the mummy; yes. M-u-m-m-i-e. Yes, sure! He's afraid mebbe they already dug him up an' got him in a musée somewheres, but if it's still there he wants it. Yes, sure thing, dontchu un'stand? Wants it! How in—how can I tell? That's up to you. Git here! Sure—fifty-fifty!"
Bean glanced up feverishly as the Countess reappeared. She was smoothing her hair and readjusting the set of the scarlet wrapper. Her own excitement was apparent.
"It's all right. I think he'll come, but it was a close call. He was jes' packin' his grip f'r Wash'n'ton. Got a telegraph from the Pres'dent to-day t' come at once. Of course he'll miss a big fee. The Pres'dent don't care f'r money when it's a question of gittin' th' right advice—"
"Oh, money!" murmured Bean, and waved a contemptuous hand.
His manner was not lost upon his hearer.
"Lots of money made in a hurry, these days," she suggested, "or got hold of some way—gits left to parties—thousand dollars, mebbe—two, three, four thousand?"
Again he performed the pushing gesture, as if he were discommoded by money. He scarcely heard her voice.
The Countess did not venture another effort to appraise his wealth.
She fell silent, watching him. Bean gazed at a clean square on the wall-paper where a picture had once hung. Then the authoritative tread was again heard on the stairway, and again the Countess Casanova welcomed Professor Balthasar to her apartment. She expressed a polite regret for having annoyed him.
Professor Balthasar bestowed his shiny hat upon her, enveloped his equally shiny skull with the silken cap and assured her that his mission was to serve. Bean had not risen. He still stared at the wall.
"I'll jes' leave you alone with our friend here," said the Countess charmingly. The professor questioned her with a glance and she shook her head in response, yet her gesture as she vanished through the curtains was one of large encouragement.
The professor faced Bean and coughed slightly. Bean diverted his stare to the professor and seemed about to speak, but the other silenced him with a commanding forefinger.
"Not a word! I see it all. You impose your tremendous will upon me."
He took the chair facing Bean and began swiftly:
"I see the path over the desert. I stop beside a temple. Sand is all about. Beneath that temple is a stone sarcophagus. Within it lies the body of King Tam-rah—"
"Ram-tah!" corrected Bean gently.
"Did I not say Ram-tah?" pursued the seer. "There it has lain sealed for centuries, while all about it the tombs of other kings have been despoiled by curiosity hunters looking for objects of interest to place in their cabinets. But Ram-tah, last king of the pre-dynastic period, though others will tell you differently, but that's because he never got into history much, by reason of his uniformly gentlemanly conduct. He rests there to-day precisely as he was put. I see it all; I penetrate the heaped sands. At this moment the moon shines upon the spot, and a night bird is calling to its mate in the mulberry tree near the northeast corner of the temple. I see it all. I am there! What is this? What is this I get from you, my young friend?"
The professor seemed to cock a psychic ear toward Bean.
"You want—ah, yes, I see what you want, but that, of course, humanly, would be impossible. Oh, quite impossible, quite, quite!"
"Why, if you're sure it's there?"
"My dear sir, you descend to the material world. I will talk to you now as one practical man to another. Simply because it would take more money than you can afford. The thing is practicable but too expensive."
"How do you know?"
"It is true, I do not know. My control warned me when I came here that your circumstances had been suddenly bettered. I withdraw the words. I do not know, but—you will pardon the bluntness—can you afford it?"
"What'd it cost? That's what I want to know."
"Hum!" said the professor. He was unable to achieve more for a little time. He hum'd again.
"There's the labour and the risk," he ventured at last. "Of course my agents at Cairo—I have secret agents in every city on the globe—could proceed to the spot from my carefully worded directions. They could do the work of excavating. So far, so good! But they would have to work quietly and would be punished if discovered. Of course here and there they could bribe. Naturally, they would have to bribe, and that, as you are doubtless aware, requires money. Again, entering this port the custom-house officials would have to be bribed, and they've gone up in price the last few years. My control tells me that this mummy is one they've been looking hard for. It's about the only one they haven't found. The loss will be discovered and my men might be traced. It requires an enormous sum. Now, for instance, a thousand dollars"—he regarded Bean closely and was reassured—"a thousand dollars wouldn't any more than start the work. Two thousand"—his eyes were steadily upon Bean now—"would further it some. Three thousand might see it pretty well advanced. Four thousand, of course, would help still farther and five thousand"—he had seen the shadow of dismay creep over the face of his sitter—"five thousand, I think, might put the thing through."
Bean drew a long breath. The professor had correctly read the change in his face at "five thousand," but it had been a sudden fear that his whole ten thousand was not going to suffice for this prodigious operation.
"I can afford that," said Bean shortly. He hardly dared trust himself to say more. His emotion threatened to overcome him.
The professor suffered from the same danger. He, too, dared trust himself to say no more than the few necessary words.
"There must be a payment down," he said with forced coldness.
"How much?"
"A thousand wouldn't be any too much."
"Enough?"
"Well, perhaps not enough," the professor nerved himself to admit.
"I'll give you two, now. Give you the rest when you get—when you get It here."
"You move me, I confess," conceded the professor. "I will undertake it."
"How long will it be, do you think?"
"I shall give orders by cable. A month, possibly, if all goes well."
"I'll give you check." He gulped at that. It was the first time he had ever used the words.
The Countess parted the curtains. Curiously enough she carried a pen and ink, though no one remarked upon the circumstance.
Bean had that morning left a carefully written signature at the bank where his draft had been deposited. He later wondered how the scrawl he achieved now could ever be identified as by the same hand.
And he was conscious, even as he wrote, that the Countess Casanova and Professor Balthasar were labouring under an excitement equal to his own. It was a big feat to attempt.
As before, they waited until he had closed the lower door.
"Oh, Ed!" breathed the Countess emotionally.
"Anything loose in the house?" asked the professor.
"They's a couple bottles beer in the icebox, but Oh, Ed!"
VI
Again we chant pregnant phrases from the Bard of Dress: "It is cut to give the wearer the appearance of perfect physical development. And the effect produced so improves his form that he unconsciously strives to attain the appearance which the garment gives him; he expands his chest, draws in his waist, and stands erect."
A psychologist, that Bard! acutely divining a basic law of this absurd human nature. In a beggar's rags few men could be more than beggars. In kingly robes, most men could be kings; could achieve the finished and fearless behaviour that is said to distinguish royalty.
Bunker Bean, the divinely credulous, now daily arrayed himself in royal vestures, set a well-fashioned crown upon the brow of him and strode forth, sceptre in hand. Invisible were these trappings, to be sure; he was still no marked man in a city street. But at least they were there to his own truth-lit eyes, and he most truly did "expand his chest, draw in his waist, and stand erect." Yea, in the full gaze of inhumanly large policemen would he do these things.
This, indeed, was one of the first prerogatives his royalty claimed. He discovered that it was not necessary for any but criminals to fear policemen. It might still be true that an honest man of moderate physique and tender sensibilities could not pass one without slight tremors of self-consciousness; but by such they were—a most prodigious thought—to be regarded as one's paid employees; within the law one might even greet them pleasantly in passing, and be answered civilly. Bean was now equal to approaching one and saying, "Good evening, Officer!" He would sometimes cross a street merely to perform this apparently barren rite. It stiffened his spine. It helped him to realize that he had indeed been a king and the sire of kings; that kingly stuff was in him.
So marked an advance in his spirit was not made in a day, however. It came only after long dwelling in thought upon his splendid past. And, too, after he had envisioned the circumstance that he was now a man of means. The latter was not less difficult of realization than his kingship. He had thought little about money, save at destitute moments; had dreamed of riches as a vague, rather pleasant and not important possibility. But kings were rich; no sooner had his kingship been proclaimed than money was in his hand. And, of course, more money would come to him, as it had once come on the banks of the Nile. He did not question how nor whence. He only knew.
It was three days before he bethought himself to finish the reading of Aunt Clara's letter, suspended at sight of the astounding enclosure. He had begun that letter a harried and trivial unit of the toiling masses. He came to finish it a complacent and lordly figure!
"Affectionately,
"Aunt Clara.
P.S.—It has rained hard for two days."
There it was! Money came to you. Federal Express was only a name to him; he had written it sometimes at Breede's dictation. But his Aunt Clara was old enough to know about such things, and he would follow her advice, though being a director of an express company seemed as unexciting as it was doubtless respectable: what he had at times been wild enough to dream was that he should be the principal owner of a major-league baseball club, and travel with the club—see every game! If he should, temporarily, become the director of an express company, he would have it plainly understood that he might resign at any moment.
Night and morning he surveyed himself in the glass. Not in the way of ordinary human conceit; he was clear sighted enough as to the pulchritude of his present encasement; but with the eyes of the young who see visions. Raptly scrutinizing his meagre form he chanted a line of verse that seemed apposite:
He was already persuaded that his next incarnation would enrich the world with something far more stately than the mansion that he at present occupied; something on the Gordon Dane order, he suspected. And it was not too soon to begin laying those unseen foundations—to think the thought that must come before the thing. He was veritably a king, yet for a time must he masquerade as a wage-slave, a serf to Breede, and an inferior of Bulger's, considered as a mere spectacle.
He began to word long conversations with these two; noiseless conversations, be it understood, in which the snappy dialogue went unuttered. His sarcasm to Bulger in the matter of that ten-dollar loan was biting, ruthless, witty, invariably leaving the debtor in direst confusion with nothing to retort. Bean always had the last word, both with Bulger and Breede, turning from them with easy contempt.
He was less hard on Breede than on Bulger, because of the ball game. A man who could behave like that in the presence of baseball must have good in him. Nevertheless, in this silent way, he curtly apprised Breede of his intentions about working beyond stipulated hours, and when Breede was rash enough to adopt a tone of bluster, Bean silenced him with a magnificent "I can imagine nothing of less consequence!"
He carried this silent warfare into public conveyances and when stout aggressive men glared at him because he had a seat he quickly and wittily reduced them to such absurdity in the public eye that they had to flee in impotent rage. The once modest street row with a bully twice his size was enlarged in cast. There were now, as befitted a king, two bullies, who writhed in pain, each with a broken arm, while the slight but muscular youth with a knowledge of jiu-jitsu walked coolly off, flecking dust from one of his capable shoulders. Sometimes he paused long enough to explain the affair, in a few dignified words, to an admiring policeman who found it difficult to believe that this stripling had vanquished two such powerful brutes. Sometimes another act was staged in which he conferred his card upon the amazed policeman and later explained the finesse of his science to him, thereby winning his deathless gratitude. He became quite chummy with this officer and was never to be afraid of anything any more.
He glowed from this new exercise. He became more witty, more masterful, while the repartee of his adversaries sank to wretched piffle. He met disaster only once. That was when his conscience began to hurt him after a particularly bitter assault on Bulger in which the latter had been more than usually contemptible in the matter of the overdue debt. He felt that he had really been too hard on the fellow. And Bulger, who must have been psychically gifted himself, came over from his typewriter at that moment and borrowed an additional five without difficulty. In later justification, Bean reflected that he would almost certainly have refused this second loan had it not been for his softened mood of the moment. Still he was glad that, with his instinctive secrecy he had kept from Bulger any knowledge of his new fortune. With Bulger aware that he had thousands of dollars in the bank, something told him that distressing complications would have ensued.
He debated several days about this money. He resolved, at length, that a thousand dollars should be devoted to the worthy purpose of living up to his new condition. A thousand dollars would, for the present, give him an adequate sensation of wealth. Three thousand more must be paid to Professor Balthasar when his secret agents brought It from Its long-hidden resting-place. Suppose the professor pleaded unexpected outlays, officials not too easily bribed or something, and demanded a further sum? At once, in a crowded street, he brought about a heated interview with the professor, in which the seer was told that a bargain was a bargain, and that if he had thought Bean was a man to stand nonsense of any sort he was indeed wildly mistaken. Bean was going to hold him to the exact sum, and his parting sting was that the professor had better get a new lot of controls if his old ones hadn't been able to tell him this. After he had cooled a little he reflected that if there were really any small sums the professor would be out of pocket, he would of course not be mean.
This left him four thousand dollars with which to buy his way into the directorate of that express company, as suggested by Aunt Clara. He had learned a great deal about buying stocks. He knew there was a method called "buying on a margin" which was greatly superior to buying the shares outright: you received a great many more shares for a given sum. Therefore he would buy thus, and the sooner be a director. He liked to think of that position in his moments of lesser exaltation. He recalled his child-self sitting beside his father on the seat of an express wagon. It was queer how life turned out—sometimes you couldn't get away from a thing. Maybe he would always be a director; still he could go into baseball, too.
He did his business with the broker without a twinge of his old timidity. Indeed, he was rather bored by the affair. The broker took his money and later in the day he learned that he controlled a very large number of the shares of the Federal Express Company. He forgot how many, but he knew it was a number befitting his new dignity. Having done this much he thought the directorship could wait. Let them come to him if they wanted him. He had other affairs on.
There was the new dog.
It was not the least of many great days in Bean's life, that golden afternoon when he sped to the bird-and-animal store and paid the last installment of Napoleon's ransom. The creature greeted him joyously as of yore through the wall of glass, frantically essaying to lick the hand that was so close and yet so unaccountably withheld.
The money passed, and one dream, at least, had been made to come true. For the first time he was in actual contact with the wonderful animal.
"He knows me," said Bean, as the dog hurled itself delightedly upon him. "We've been friends a long time. I think he got so he expected me every afternoon."
Napoleon barked emphatically in confirmation of this. He seemed to be saying: "Hurry! Let's get out of here before he puts me back in that window!"
The old man confessed that he would miss the little fellow. He advised Bean to call him "Nap." "Napoleon" was no right name for a dog of any character.
"You know what that fellow been if he been here now," he volunteered at parting. "I dell you, you bed your life! He been a gompanion unt partner in full with that great American train-robber, Chessie Chames. Sure he would. My grantmutter she seen him like she could maybe reach out a finger unt touch him!"
"I'll call him Nap," promised Bean. He had ceased to feel blamable for the shortcomings of Napoleon I, but it was just as well not to have the name used too freely.
When he issued to the street, the excited dog on a leash, he was prouder than most kings have ever had occasion to be.
Now, he went to inspect flats. He would at last have "apartments," and in a neighbourhood suitable for a growing dog. He bestowed little attention on the premises submitted to his view, occupying himself chiefly with observing the effect of his dog on the various janitors. Some were frankly hostile; some covertly so. Some didn't mind dogs—but there was rules. And some defeated themselves by a display of over-enthusiasm that manifestly veiled indifference, or perhaps downright dislike.
But a janitor was finally encountered who met the test. In ten seconds Bean knew that Cassidy would be a friend to any dog. He did not fawn upon the animal nor explode with praise. He merely bestowed a glance or two upon the distinguished head, and later rubbed the head expertly just back of the erect ears; this, while he exposed to Bean the circumstances under which one steam-heated apartment, suitable for light housekeeping, chanced to be vacant. The parties, it appeared, was givin' a Dutch lunch to a gang of their friends at 5 A.M. of a morning, and that was bad enough in a place that was well kep' up; but in the sicin' place they got scrappin', which had swiftly resulted in an ambulance call for the host and lessee, and the patrol wagon for his friends that were not in much better shape thimselves, praise Gawd. But the place was all cleaned up again and would be a jool f'r anny young man that could take a drink, or maybe two, and then stop.
Bean knew Cassidy by that time, and his inspection of the apartment was perfunctory. Cassidy would be a buckler and shield to the dog, in his absence. Cassidy would love him. The dog, on his spread forefeet, touched his chest to the ground and with ears erect, eyes agleam, and inciting soprano gurgles invited the world to a mad, mad, game.
Cassidy only said, "Aw, g'wan! Would you, now!" But each word was a caress. And Cassidy became Bean's janitor.
He moved the next day, bringing his effects in a cab. The cabman professed never to have seen a dog as "classy" as Nap, and voiced the cheerful prophecy that in any bench show he would make them all look like mutts. He received a gratuity of fifty cents in addition to the outrageous fee he demanded for coming so far north, although he had the appearance of one who uses liquor to excess, and could probably not have qualified as a judge of dogs.
Bean's installation, under the guidance of Cassidy, was effected without delay. The apartment proved to be entirely suitable for a king in abeyance. There was a bedroom, a parlour, an alcove off the latter that Cassidy said was the libr'y an' a good place f'r a dawg t' sleep, and beyond this was a feminine diminutive of a kitchen, prettily called a "kitchenette."
Bean felt like an insect in such a labyrinth of a place. He forgot where he put things, and then, overcome by the vastness and number of rooms, forgot what he was looking for, losing himself in an abstracted and fruitless survey of the walls. He must buy things to hang on the walls, especially over certain stains on the wall of the parlour, or throne-room, to which in the heat of battle, doubtless, certain items of the late Dutch lunch had been misdirected.
But he knew what to buy. Etchings. In the magazine stories he read, aside from the very rich characters who had galleries of old masters, there were two classes: one without taste that littered its rooms with expensive but ill-advised bric-a-brac; and one that wisely contented itself with "a few good etchings." He bought a few good etchings at a department store for $1.97 each, and felt irreproachable. And when he had arranged his books—about Napoleon I and ancient Egypt—he was ready to play the game of living. Mrs. Cassidy "did" his rooms, and Cassidy already showed the devotion of an old and tried retainer. The Cassidys made him feel feudal.
At night, while Nap fought a never-decided battle with a sofa-pillow, or curled asleep on the couch with a half-inch of silly pink tongue projecting from between his teeth, he read of Egypt, the black land, where had been the first great people of the ancient world. He devoured the fruit of the lotus, the tamarisk, the pomegranate, and held cats to be sacred. (Funny, that feeling he had always had about cats—afraid of them even in childhood—it had survived in his being!) There he had lived and reigned in that flat valley of the Nile, between borders of low mountains, until his name had been put down in the book of the dead, and he had gone for a time to the hall of Osiris.
Or, perhaps, he read reports of psychical societies, signed by men with any number of capital letters after their names: cool-headed scientists, university professors, psychologists, grave students all, who were constantly finding new and wonderful mediums, and achieving communication with the disembodied. He could tell them a few things; only, of course, he wouldn't make a fool of himself. He could show them something, too, when the secret agents of Professor Balthasar came bringing It.
Or he looked into the opal depths of his shell, and saw visions of his greatness to come, while Nap, unregarded, wrenched away one of his slippers and pretended to find it something alive and formidable, to be growled at and shaken and savagely macerated.
There came, on a certain fair morning, a summons from Breede, who was detained at his country place by the same malady that Bulger had once so crudely diagnosed. Bean was to bring out the mail and do his work there. The car waited below.
At another time the expedition might have attracted him. He had studied pictures of that country place in the Sunday papers. Now it meant a separation from his dog, who was already betraying for the Cassidys a greater fondness than the circumstances justified; and it meant an absence from town at the very time when the secret agents might happen along with It. Of course he could refuse to go, but that would cost him his job, and he was not yet even the director of an express company. Dejectedly he prepared for the journey.
"Better take some things along," suggested Tully, who had conveyed the order to him. "He may keep you three or four days."
Bulger followed him to the hall.
"Look out for Grandma, the Demon!" warned Bulger. "'F I was the old man I'd slip something in her tea."
"Who—who is she?" demanded Bean.
"Just his dear, sweet old mother, that's all! Talk you to death—suffergette! Oh! say!"
Reaching the street, his gloom was not at all lightened by the discovery of the flapper in the waiting car. She gave him the little double-nod and regarded him with that peculiar steely kindness he so well remembered. It was undoubtedly kind, that look, yet there was an implacable something in its quality that dismayed him. He wondered what she exactly meant by it.
"Get in," commanded the flapper, and Bean got in.
"Tell him where to go for your things."
Bean told him.
"I'm glad it's on our way. Pops is in an awful state. He swore right out at his own mother this morning, and he wants you there in a hurry. Maybe we'll be arrested for speeding."
Bean earnestly hoped they would. Pops in health was ordeal enough. But he remained silent, trusting to the vigilance of an excellent constabulary. The car reached the steam-heated apartment without adventure, however, and he quickly secured his suit-case and consigned the dog for an uncertain period to a Cassidy, who was brazenly taking more than a friendly interest in him. Cassidy talked bluntly of how "we" ought to feed him, as if he were already a part owner of the animal.
The car flew on, increasing a speed that had been unlawful almost from the start. He wondered what the police were about. He might write a sharp letter to the newspapers, signed, "Indignant Pedestrian," only it would be too late. He was being volleyed at the rate of thirty-five miles an hour into the presence of a man who had that morning sworn at his mother. He wished he could, say for one day, have Breede back there on the banks of the Nile—set him to work building a pyramid, or weeding the lotus patch, foot or no foot! He'd show him!
He switched this resentment to the young female at his side. He wanted her to quit looking at him that way. It made him nervous. But a muffled glance or two at her disarmed this feeling. She was all right to look at, he thought, had pretty hands and "all that"—she had stripped off her gloves when they reached the open country—and she didn't talk, which was what he most feared in her sex. He recalled that she had said hardly a word since the start. He might have supposed himself forgotten had it not been for that look of veiled determination which he encountered as often as he dared.
A young dog dashed from a gateway ahead of them and threatened the car furiously. They both applied imaginary brakes to the car with feet and hands and taut nerves. The puppy escaping death by an inch, trotted back to his saved home with an air that comes from duty well performed. They looked from the dog to each other.
"I'd make them against the law," said Bean.
"How could you? The idea!"
"I mean motors, not dogs."
"Oh! Of course!"
They had been brought a little together.
"You go in for dogs?" asked the flapper.
He hesitated. "Going in" for dogs seemed to mean more. "I've got only one just now," he confessed.
Wooded hills flew by them, the white road flickered forward to their wheels.
"You interested in the movement?" demanded the flapper again.
"Yes," he said.
"Granny will be delighted to know that. So many young men aren't."
"What make is it?" he inquired, preparing to look enlightened when told the name of the vehicle in which they rode.
"Oh, I mean the Movement—the movement!"
"Oh, yes," he faltered. "Greatly interested!" He remembered the badge on her jacket, and Bulger's warning about Grandma, the Demon.
"Granny and I marched in the parade this year, clear down to Washington Square. If she wasn't so old we'd both run over to London and get arrested in the Strand for breaking windows."
Bean shuddered.
"We're making our flag now for the next parade—big blue cloth with a gold star for every state that has raised woman from her degradation by giving her a vote."
He shuddered again. Although of legal years for the franchise, he had never voted. If you tried to vote some ward-heeler would challenge you and you'd like as not be hauled off to the lock-up. And what was the good of it! The politicians got what they wanted. But this he kept to himself.
"Granny'll put a badge on you," promised the flapper. "We have to take advantage of every little means."
He was still puzzling over this when they turned through a gateway, imposing with its tangle of wrought iron and gilt, and at a decorously reduced speed crinkled up a wide drive to the vast pile of gray stone that housed the un-filial Breede.