Bunker Bean

Bean had once attended a magician's entertainment and there suffered vicariously the agony endured by one of his volunteer assistants. Suavely the entertainer begged the help of "some kind gentleman from the audience." He was insistent, exerting upon the reluctant ones the pressure of his best platform manner.

When the pause had grown embarrassing, a shamed looking man slouched forward from an aisle seat amid hearty cheers. He ascended the carpeted runway from aisle to stage, stumbled over footlights and dropped his hat. Then the magician harried him to the malicious glee of the audience. He removed playing-cards, white rabbits and articles of feminine apparel from beneath the coat of his victim. He seated him in a chair that collapsed. He gave him a box to hold and shocked him electrically. He missed his watch and discovered it in the abused man's pocket. And when the ordeal was over the recovered hat was found to contain guinea-pigs. The kind gentleman from the audience had been shown to be transcendently awkward, brainless, and to have a mania for petty thievery. With burning face and falling glance, he had stumbled back to his seat, where a lady who had before exhibited the public manner of wife to husband toward him, now pretended that he was an utter and offensive stranger.

Bean, I say, had once suffered vicariously with this altruistic dolt. His suffering now was not vicarious. For three days he endured on the raw of his own soul tortures even more ingeniously harrowing.

To be shut up for three hours a day with Breede was bad enough, but custom had a little dulled his sensitiveness to this. And he could look Breede over and write down in beautiful shorthand what he thought of him.

But the other Breedes!

Mrs. Breede, a member of one of the very oldest families in Omaha, he learned, terrified him exceedingly. She was an advanced dresser—he had to admit that—but she was no longer beautiful. She was a plucked rose that had been too long kept; the petals were rusting, crumpling at the edges. He wondered if Breede had ever wished to be wrecked on a desert island with her. She surveyed Bean through a glass-and-gold weapon with a long handle, and on the two subsequent occasions when she addressed him called him Mr. Brown. Once meeting him in the hall, she seemed to believe that he had been sent to fix the telephone.

And the flapper's taller sister of the languishing glance—how quickly had she awakened him from that golden dream of the low-lying atoll and the wrecked ship in a far sea. She did flirt with "any one," no doubt about that. She adroitly revealed to Bean an unshakable conviction that he was desperately enamoured of her, and that it served him right for a presumptuous nobody. She talked to him, preened herself in his gaze, and maddened him with a manner of deadly roguishness. Then she flew to exert the same charm upon any one of the resplendent young men who were constantly riding over or tooting over in big black motor-cars. They were young men who apparently had nothing to do but "go in" for things—riding, tennis, polo, golf. To all of them she was the self-confident charmer; just the kind of a girl to make a fool of you and tell about it.

Twenty-four hours after her first assault upon him he was still wrecking the ship at the entrance to that lagoon, but now he watched the big sister go down for the third time while he placidly rescued a stoker to share his romantic isolation.

The flapper and Grandma, the Demon, were even more objectionable, and, what was worse, they alarmed him. Puzzled as to their purpose, he knew not what defence to make. He was swept on some secret and sinister current to an end he could not divine.

The flapper lay in wait for him at all hours when he might appear. Did he open a door, she lurked in the corridor; did he seek refuge in the gloom of the library, she arose to confront him from its dimmest nook; did he plan a masterly escape by a rear stairway, she burst upon him from the ambush of some exotic shrub to demand which way he had thought of going. He had never thought of a way that did not prove to have been her own. The creature was a leech! If she had only talked, he believed that he could have thrown her off. But she would not talk. She merely walked beside him insatiably. Sometimes he thought he could detect a faint anxiety in the look she kept upon him, but, mostly, it was the look of something calm, secure, ruthless. Something! It unnerved him.

It was usually probable that Grandma, the Demon, would join them, the silver cigarette case dangling at her girdle. Then was he sorely beset. They would perhaps talk about him over his head, discuss his points as if he were some new beast from the stables.

"I tell you, he's over an inch taller than I am," announced the flapper.

"U-u-mm!" replied Grandma, measuring Bean's stature with narrowed eye. "U-u-mm!"

"You show her!" commanded flapper, in a louder voice, as if she believed him deaf. She grasped his arm and whirled him about to stand with his back to hers.

"There!" said the flapper tensely, her eyes staring ahead. "There!"

"You're scrooching!" accused the Demon.

"Not a bit!—and see how square his shoulders are!" She turned to point out this grace of the animal.

"Ever take any drugs? Ever get any habits like that?" queried the Demon. Plainly Bean's confession to an unusual virtue had aroused her suspicion. He might be a drug fiend!

He faltered wretchedly, wishing Breede would send for him.

"I—well, I used to be made to take sulphur and molasses every spring ... but I never kept it up after I left home."

"Hum!" said the old lady, looking as if he could tell a lot more if he chose.

She gripped one of his biceps. He was not ashamed of these. The night and morning drill with that home exerciser had told, even though he was not yet so impressive as the machine's inventor, who, in magazine advertisements, looked down so fondly upon his own flexed arm.

"For goodness' sake!" exclaimed the Demon respectfully.

Bean thrilled at this, feeling like a primitive brute of the cave times, accustomed to subduing women by force.

After that they seemed tacitly to agree that they would pretend to show him over the "grounds." Bean hated the grounds, which were worried to the last square inch into a chilling formality, and the big glass conservatory was stifling, like an overcrowded, overheated auditorium. And he knew they were "drawing him out." They looked meaningly at each other whenever he spoke.

They questioned him about his early life, but learned only that his father had been "engaged in the express business." He was ably reticent.

Did he believe that women ought to be classed legally with drunkards, imbeciles and criminals? He did not, if you came down to that. Let them vote if they wanted to. He had other things to think about, more important. He didn't care much, either way. Voting didn't do any good.

He had taken the ideal attitude to enrage the woman suffragist. She will respect opposition. Careless indifference she cannot brook. Grandma opened upon him and battered him to a pulpy mass. Within the half hour he was supinely promising to remind her to give him a badge before he left; and there was further talk of his marching at the next parade as a member of the Men's League for Woman's Suffrage, or, at the very least, in the column of Men Sympathizers.

He wondered, wondered! Were they trying to assure themselves that he was a fit man to be in the employ of old Breede? He could imagine it of them; as soon as they thought about voting they began to interfere in a man's business. Yet this suspicion slept when he was with the flapper alone. Sometimes he was conscious of liking very much to be with her. He decided that this was because she didn't talk.

The evening of his last day came. Breede, in a burst of garrulity, had said: "Had enough this; go town to-morrow!" The flapper, and even the Demon, had seemed to be stirred by the announcement. He resolved to be more than ever on his guard. But they caught him fairly in the open.

"How do you like his hair parted that way in the middle?" demanded the flapper, with the calculating eye of one who ponders changes in a dwelling-house.

"U-u-mm!" considered the Demon gravely. "Not bad. Still, perhaps—!"

"Exactly what I was thinking!" said the flapper cordially. Then, to Bean, her tone slightly raised:

"Which way?"

"Got to get off a bunch of telegrams," lied Bean.

"Oh, all right! We'll wait for you," said the flapper. "Right there," she added, pointing to the most expensive pergola on the place.

In the dusk of an hour later he slunk stealthily down a rear stairway and made a cautious detour into the grounds. He earnestly meant to keep far from that pergola. Wait for him, would they? Well, he'd show them! Always spying on a man; hounding him! What business was it of theirs whether he had habits or not ... any kind of habits?

But he was to find himself under a spell such as is said to bring the weak-willed bird to the serpent's maw. His traitorous feet dragged him toward the trap. The odour of a cigarette drew his revolted nostrils. He could hear the murmurous duet.

Talking about him! Of course! He would like to break in on them and for a little while be a certain Corsican upstart in one of his most objectionable moods. That would take them down a bit. But, instead, he became something entirely different. With the stealth of the red Indian he effaced himself against a background of well-groomed shrubbery and crept toward the murmur. At last he could hear words above the beating of his heart.

"How can you know?" the Demon was saying. "A child of your age?"

The flapper's tone was calm and confident as one who relates a phenomenon that has become a commonplace.

"I knew it the very first second I ever saw him—something went over me just like that—I can't tell how, but I knew."

"Well, how can you know about him?"

"Oh, him!" The words implied that the flapper had waved a deprecating hand. "Why, I know about him in just the same way; you can't tell how. It comes over you!"

The Demon: (A long-drawn) "U-u-mm!"

The flapper: "And he makes me perfectly furious sometimes, too!"

There was a stir as if they were leaving. Bean retreated a dozen feet before he breathed again. So that was their game, was it? He'd see about that!

He waited for them to emerge, but they had apparently settled to more of this high-handed talk. Then, like an icy wave to engulf him, came a name—"Tommy Hollins." It came in the Demon's voice, indistinguishable words preceding it. And in the flapper's voice came "Tommy Hollins!" gently, caressingly, it seemed. In truth, the flapper had sniffed before uttering it, and the sniff had meant good-natured contempt but Bean had lost the sniff.

Now he had it! Tommy Hollins! He identified the youth, a yellow-headed, pink-faced lout in flannels who was always riding over, and who seemed to "go in" for nearly everything. He had detected a romping intimacy between the two. So it was Tommy Hollins. At once he felt a great relief; he need worry no longer over the singular attentions of this young woman. Let Tommy Hollins worry! He could admit, now, how grave had been his alarm. And there was nothing in it. He could meet her without being afraid. He was almost ready to approach them genially and pass an hour in light conversation. He advanced a few steps with this intention, but again came the voice of the flapper replying, apparently, to some unheard admonition. It came, cold and terrible.

"I don't care. I've got the right to choose the father of my own children!"

He blushed for this language, a blush he could feel mantling his very toes. He fled from there. He saw that the moment was not for light conversation. And even as he fled he caught the Demon's prolonged "U-u-mmm!"

Yet when he left in the morning the flapper lurked for him as ever, materializing from an apparently vacant corridor. He greeted her for the first time without ulterior questioning. He thought he liked her pretty well now. And she was undeniably good to look at in the white of her tennis costume; the hair, like Nap's spots in its golden brown, was filleted with a scarlet ribbon, and her eyes shone from her freshened face with an unwonted sparkle—decision, certitude—what was it? He deemed that he knew.

"Tommy Hollins coming to play," she vouchsafed in explanation of the racquet she carried. "Are you glad to go?"

"Glad to see my dog again." He smiled as a man of the world. He was on the verge of coquetry, now that he knew it to be safe.

"We'll bring him along too, next time."

"Oh, the next time!" He put it carelessly aside.

"You'll be out again, soon enough. I simply know Pops is going to have another bad spell—in a week or so."

He could have sworn that the eyes of Breede's daughter gleamed with cold anticipatory malice. He shuddered for Breede. And he wished Tommy Hollins well of his bargain. Flirt, indeed! All alike!

"Chubbins!" called the unconscious father from afar.

"Yes, Pops!" She gripped his hand with a well-muscled fervour. "Oh, he'll have another in a little while, don't you worry!" And she was off, with this evil in her heart, to a father but now convalescent.

Marvelling, he walked on to the Demon's ambuscade. She pounced upon him from behind a half-opened door.

"I want to say one word, young man. Oh, you needn't think I don't see the way things are going. I'm not blind if I am seventy-six! If you're the tender and innocent thing you say you are, you look out for yourself. I know you all! If you don't break out one time you do another. I'd a good deal rather you'd had it over before now and put it all behind you—don't interrupt—but you're sound and clean as far as I can see, and you've got a good situation. I don't say it couldn't be worse. But if you are—well, you see that you stay that way. Don't try to tell me. I've seen enough of men in my time—"

He broke away from her at Breede's call. The flapper jerked her head twice at him, very neatly, as the car passed the tennis court. She was beginning a practise volley with Tommy Hollins, who was disporting himself like a young colt.

"Chubbins!" he thought. Not a bad name for her, though it had come queerly from Breede. For the first time he was pricked with the needle of suspicion that Hollins might not be the right man for the flapper. Hearing her called "Chubbins" somehow made it seem different. Maybe Hollins, who seemed all of twenty, wouldn't "make her happy." He thought it was something that the family ought to consider very seriously. He was conscious of a willingness to consider it himself, as a friend of the family and a well-wisher of Chubbins.

He was back in the apartment and in the presence of a document that swept his mind of all Breedes. Never had he in fancy ceased to be king Ram-tah, cheated of historic mention because of his wisdom and goodness. He had looked commiseratingly upon Breede's country-house, thinking of his own palace on the banks of the slow-moving Nile. "—probably made this place look like a shack!" he had exultantly thought. And the benign monarch had ended his reign in peace, to be laid magnificently away, to repose undisturbed while the sands drifted over him—until—

The hour had come. "My men have succeeded, after incredible hardships," wrote Professor Balthasar. "The goods will be delivered to you Thursday night, the tenth. I trust the final payment will be ready, as, relying on your honour, I have advanced—"

The rest did not matter. His honour was surely to be relied upon. The money had been richly earned. An able man, this Balthasar! He had achieved the thing with admirable secrecy. Bean had feared the hounds of the daily press. They might discover who It was, to whom It was going; discover the true identity of Bunker Bean. The whole thing might come out in the papers! But Balthasar had known how. He approved the caution that had led him to speak of "the goods"; there was something almost witty about it.

He leaned far out a window, listening, straining his eyes up and down the lighted avenue. There was confusion in his mind as to how It could most fittingly be brought to him. The sable vision of a hearse drawn by four lordly black horses at first possessed his mind. But this was dismissed; there was no death! And the spectacle would excite comment. The idea of an ambulance, which he next considered, seemed equally impracticable. It would have to be done quietly; Balthasar would know. Trust Balthasar!

He heard the rhythmic clump-clump of a horse's hoofs on the asphalt pavement. This was presently accompanied by the sounds of wheels. An express wagon came under the street-lights. Balthasar rode beside the driver, his frock coat and glossy tall hat having been relinquished for the garb of an ordinary citizen. Back of them in the wagon he could distinguish the lines of an Object. It had come to him in a common express wagon, in a common crate, and the driver did not even wear a black mask. Balthasar had cunningly eluded detection by pretending there was nothing to conceal.

He drew back from the window and with fast beating heart went to open the door. They were already on the stairway. Balthasar was coming first. With sublime effrontery he had impressed Cassidy to help carry It, and Cassidy was warning the expressman to look out for that turn an' not tear inta th' plashter.

It was lowered to the floor in the throne-room. Cassidy and the expressman puffed freely and looked at the thing as if wondering how two men had ever been equal to it.

"'Twould be brickybac," said Cassidy genially.

"That there hall's choked with dust," said the expressman with seeming irrelevance.

"I noticed it meself," said Cassidy.

"Clogged me throat up fur fair," continued the expressman huskily.

"Pay the men liberally and let them be on their way," said Balthasar. Bean pressed money upon both and they departed.

"You couldn't get me to do it again for twice the money," said Balthasar; "the nervous strain I've been under. A custom-house detective was on our trail, but one of my men took care of him—at a dark corner."

Bean shuddered.

"They didn't—"

"Oh, nothing serious. He'll be as well as ever in a few days. Got a hatchet." He gestured significantly toward the crate.

But this was too precipitate for Bean. He could not disinter himself—it seemed like that—under the eyes of Balthasar.

"Not now! Not now! You've done your part—here!" He passed Balthasar the check he had written earlier in the evening.

"I'll leave you, then," said the professor. "But one thing, don't handle it much. It might disintegrate. I bid you farewell, my young friend."

Bean, at the door, listened to his descending steps. The professor was whistling. He recognized the air, "Call Me Up Some Rainy Afternoon." It was a lively air and the professor rendered it ably but quite softly.

The door locked, he was back staring at the crate that concealed his dead self. He was helpless before it. The fleshly tenement of a great king who had later flashed upon the world as Napoleon I, and was now Bunker Bean! Could he bear to look? He trembled and knew himself weak. Yet it would be done, some time.

There was a vigorous knock at the door. All was discovered!

The crime of assault at the dark corner had been traced to his door. Balthasar had betrayed him. The Egyptian authorities had discovered their loss. The thing was there. He was caught red-handed.

He reached the door and cautiously opened it an inch. Cassidy stood there, armed with a hatchet. They would use violence!

"Hatchet!" said Cassidy, genially extending the weapon. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. The aroma of beer stole into the room.

"F'r brox brickybac!" insinuated Cassidy.

"Thanks!" said Bean, accepting the tool.

"We kem frum th' sem county, Mayo, him an' me," volunteered Cassidy. "G'night!"

Once more Bean faced the crate. It must be done at once. Discovery was too probable. Gingerly he forced the blade under one of the boards and pried. The nails screeched horribly as they were withdrawn. The task was simple enough; the crate was a flimsy affair to have withstood so difficult a journey. But after each board was removed he peered to the street from behind the closed blind, half expecting to find policemen drawn to the spot.

A smoothly packed layer of excelsior greeted his eyes. It was rather reassuring. He felt that he might be unpacking any casual object. Exposed at last was the wooden case that enveloped him!

Awestruck, he looked down at it for a long time. He recognized the workmanship, having seen a dozen such in the museum in the park. He knelt by it and ran a reverent hand over its painted surface. In many colours were birds and beasts, and men in profile, and queer marks that he knew to be picture-writing; processions of slaves and oxen, reapers and water-bearers. The tints were fresh under their overlaying lacquer. There was even a smell of varnish. He wondered if the contents—if It—were in the same remarkable state of preservation. He rapped on the thin wood—it was cedar, he thought, or perhaps sycamore. The sound was musical, resonant; the same note that had vibrated how many thousands of years before.

Nap came up to smell, seeming to suspect that the box might contain food. He stretched his forepaws to the top of the case and betrayed eagerness.

"Napoleon!" cried Bean sternly, putting the dog's complete name upon him for the first time. He was banished to his couch and made to know that leaving it would entail unpleasantness.

The thought of the Corsican came back with a new significance. In that embodiment he had felt, perhaps dimly recalled, his Egyptian life. Had he not been drawn irresistibly to Egypt? "In the shadow of the pyramids," he had read in a history, "the conqueror of Italy dreamed of the pomp and power of a crown and sceptre, and upon his return to France from the Egyptian expedition, with characteristic energy he set himself to work to bring the dream to pass—" It was plain enough. He knew now the inner meaning of that engraving he had bought, in which Napoleon stood in rapt meditation before the Sphinx. They had all—King, Emperor, Bean—been dreamers that brought their dreams to pass. He mused long, staring down at the case; a queerly shaped thing, fashioned to follow the lines of the human form. From the neck the shoulders rounded gracefully. They might have been cut to give the wearer the appearance of perfect physical development; at least they seemed to fit him neatly.

It occurred to Bean that the case should not lie prone. It suggested death where death was not. He pulled out more excelsior until he could raise the case. It was surprisingly light and he leaned it upright against the wall. He now tried to pretend that everything was over. He gathered boards, excelsior and the crate and piled them in the kitchenette, which they approximately filled.

But inevitably he was brought back. He stood with hands upon the cover of the upreared case, drew a long shivering breath and gently lifted it off. His eyes were upon the swathed figure within, then slowly they crept up the yellowed linen and came to rest upon the bared face.

He had tried feebly to prefigure this face, but never had his visioning approached the actual in its majestic, still beauty. The brow was nobly broad, the nose straight and purposeful, the chin bold yet delicate. The grimness of the mouth was relieved by a faint lift of the upper lip, perhaps an echo of the smile with which he greeted death. There was a gleam of teeth from under the lip. The eyes had closed peacefully; the lids lay light upon their secrets as if they might flutter and open again. On cheek and chin was a discernible growth of dark beard; the hair above the brow was black and abundant. It was a kingly face, a face of command, though benign. It was all too easy to believe that a crown had become it well. And there had been no weakening at the end, no sunken cheeks nor hollowed temples. The lines were full. The general colour was of rich red mahogany.

He ran a tremulous hand over the face, smoothed the thick hair, fingered the firm lips that almost smiled. Under the swathing of linen he could see where the hands were folded on the breast. Low down on the right jaw was unmistakably a mole, a thing that had strangely survived on Bean's own face. Again he ran a hand over the features, then a corroborating hand over his own. Intently and long he studied each detail, nostrils, eyebrows, ears, hair, the tips of the just-revealed teeth.

"God!" he breathed. It was hardly more than a whisper and was uttered in all reverence.

Then—

"God! how I've changed!"

On the following afternoon, among the Sunday throng in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a slender young man of inconsiderable stature, alert as to movement, but with an expression of absent dreaming, might have been observed giving special attention to the articles in those rooms devoted to ancient Egypt. Doubtless, however, no one did observe him more than casually, for, though of singularly erect carriage, he was garbed inconspicuously in neutral tints, and his behaviour was never such as to divert attention from the surrounding spoils of the archaeologist.

Had his mind been as an open book, he would surely have become a figure of interest. His mental attitude was that of a professional beau of acknowledged preeminence; he was comparing the self at home in the mummy case with the remnants of defunct Pharaohs here exposed under glass, and he was sniffing, in spirit, at their lack of kingly dignity and their inferior state of preservation. Their wooden cases were often marred, faded, and broken. Their shrouding linen was frayed and stained. Their features were unimpressive and, in too many instances, shockingly incomplete. They looked very little like kings, and the laudatory recitals of their one-time greatness, translated for the contemporary eye, seemed to be only the vapourings of third-class pugilists.

Sneering openly at a damaged Pharaoh of the fourth dynasty, he reflected that some day he would confer upon that museum a relic transcending all others. He saw it enshrined in a room by itself; it should never be demeaned by association with those rusty cadavers he saw about him. This would be when he had passed on to another body, in accordance with the law of Karma. He would leave a sum to the museum authorities, specifically to build this room, and to it would come thousands, for a glimpse of the superior Ram-tah, last king of the pre-dynastic period, surviving in a state calculated to impress every beholder with his singular merits. Ram-tah, cheated of his place in history's pantheon, should here at last come into his own; serene, beauteous, majestic, looking every inch a king, where mere Pharaohs looked like—like the coffee-stained, untidy fragments they were.

He left the place in a tolerant mood. He had weighed himself with the other great dead of the world.

That night he sat again before this old king, staring until he lost himself, staring as he had before stared into the depths of his shell. The shell, when he had looked steadily at it for a long time, had always seemed to put him in close touch with unknown forces. He had once tried to explain this to his Aunt Clara, who understood nearly everything, but his effort had been clumsy enough and had brought her no enlightenment. "You look into it—and it makes you feel!" was all he had been able to tell her.

But the shell was now discarded for the puissant person of Ram-tah. The message was more pointed. He drew power from the old dead face that yet seemed so living. He was himself a wise and good king. No longer could he play the coward before trivial adversities. He would direct large affairs; he would live big. Never again would he be afraid of death or Breede or policemen or the mockery of his fellows—or women! He might still avoid the latter, but not in terror; only in a dignified dread lest they talk and spoil it all.

He would choose, in due time, a worthy consort, and a certain Crown Prince would, in further due time, startle the world with his left-handed pitching. It was a prospect all golden to dream upon. His spirit grew tall and its fibre toughened.

To be sure, he did not achieve a kingly disregard for public opinion all in one day. There was the matter of that scarlet cravat. Monday morning he excavated it from the bottom of the trunk, where it lay beside "Napoleon, Man and Lover." He even adjusted it, carelessly pretending that it was just any cravat, the first that had come to hand. But its colour was still too alarming. It—so he usually thought of the great Ram-tah—would have worn the cravat without a tremor, but It had been born a king. One glance at the thing about his neck had vividly recalled the awkward circumstance that, to the world at large, he was still Bunker Bean, a youth incapable of flaunt or flourish.

Let it not be thought, however, that his new growth showed no result above ground. He purchased and wore that very morning a cravat not entirely red, it is true, but one distinguished by a narrow red stripe on a backing of bronze, which the clerk who manoeuvred the sale assured him was "tasty." Also he commanded a suit of clothes of a certain light check in which the Bean of uninspired days would never have braved public scrutiny. Such were the immediate and actual fruits of Ram-tah's influence.

There were other effects, perhaps more subtle. Performing his accustomed work for Breede that day, he began to study his employer from the kingly, or Ram-tah, point of view. He conceived that Breede in the time of Ram-tah would have been a steward, a keeper of the royal granaries, a dependable accountant; a good enough man in his lowly station, but one who could never rise. His laxness in the manner of dress was seen to be ingrained, an incurable defect of soul. In the time of Ram-tah he had doubtless worn the Egyptian equivalent for detached cuffs, and he would be doing the like for a thousand incarnations to come. All too plainly Breede's Karmic future promised little of interest. His degree of ascent in the human scale was hardly perceptible.

Bean was pleased at this thought. It left him in a fine glow of superiority and sharpened his relish for the mad jest of their present attitudes—a jest demanding that he seem to be Breede's subordinate.

Naturally, this was a situation that would not long endure. It was too preposterous. Money came not only to kings but to the kingly. He troubled as little about details as would have any other king. Were there not steel kings, and iron kings, railway kings, oil kings—money kings? He thought it was not unlikely that he would first engage the world's notice as an express king. He had received those fifty shares of stock from Aunt Clara and regarded them as a presage of his coming directorship. But he took no pride in this thought. Baseball was to be his life work. He would own one major-league team, at least; perhaps three or four. He would be known as the baseball king, and the world would forget his petty triumphs as a director of express.

He deemed it significant that the present directors of that same Federal Express Company one day held a meeting in Breede's office. It showed, he thought, how life "worked around." The thing was coming to his very door. With considerable interest he studied the directors as they came and went. Most of them, like Breede, were men whose wealth the daily press had a habit of estimating in rotund millions. He regarded them knowingly, thinking he could tell them something that might surprise them. But they passed him, all unheeding, moneyed-looking men of good round girth, who seemed to have found the dollar-game worth while.

The most of them, he was glad to note, were in dress slightly more advanced than Breede. One of them, a small but important-looking old gentleman with a purple face and a white parted beard, became on the instant Bean's ideal for correctness. From his gray spats to his top-hat, he was "dignified yet different," although dressing, for example, in a more subdued key than Bulger. Yet he was a constantly indignant looking old gentleman, and Bean guessed that he would be a trouble-maker on any board of directors. It seemed to him that he would like to take this person's place on the board; oust him in spite of his compelling garments.

And Breede would know then that he was something more than a machine. On the whole, he felt sorry for Breede at times. Perhaps he would let him have a little of the baseball stock.

So he sat and dreamed of his great past and of his brilliant future. Perhaps, after all, Bean as the blind poet had been not the least authentic of Balthasar's visions.

And inevitably he encountered the flapper in this dreaming; "Chubbins," he liked to call her. More and more he was suspecting that Tommy Hollins was not the man for Chubbins. He would prefer to see her the bride of an older man, two or three, or even four, years older, who was settled in life. A young girl—a young girl's parents—couldn't be too careful!

He was not for many days at a time deprived of the sight of the young girl in question. She had formed a habit of calling for her father at the close of his day's hard work. And she did not wait for him in the big car; she sat in his office, where, after she had inquired solicitously about his poor foot, she settled her gaze upon Bean. And Bean no longer evaded this gaze. She was a clever, attractive little thing and he liked her well. He thought of things he would tell her for her own good at the first opportunity.

He wondered guiltily when Breede's next attack might be expected, and he had a lively impression that the flapper, too, was more curious than alarmed about this. He seemed to feel that she was actually wishing to be told things by him for her own good.

However that may be, his next summons to the country place came without undue delay, and it is not at all improbable that Breede fell a victim to what the terminology of one of our most popular cults identifies as "malicious animal magnetism."

On this occasion he was not oppressed by those attentions which the flapper and Grandma, the Demon, still bestowed upon him. Where he had once fled, he now put himself in the way of them. He listened with admirably simulated interest to Grandma's account of the suffrage play for which she was rehearsing. She was to appear in the mob scene. He was certain she would lend vivacity to any mob. But he was glad that the flapper was not to appear. Voting and smashing windows were bad enough.

He tried at first to talk to the flapper about Tommy Hollins, whom he airily designated as "that Hollins boy". It seemed to be especially needed, because the Hollins boy arrived after breakfast every day and left only in the late afternoon. But the flapper declined nevertheless to consider him as meat for serious converse.

Bean considered that this was sheer flirting, whereupon he flung principle to the winds and flirted himself.

"You show signs of life," declared Grandma, who was quick to note this changed demeanor. And Bean smirked like a man of the world.

"She never set her mind on anything yet that she didn't get it," added Grandma, naming no one. "She's like her father there."

And Bean strolled off to enjoy a vision of himself defeating her purpose to ensnare the Hollins youth. Once he would have considered it crass presumption, but that was before a certain sarcophagus on the left bank of the Nile had been looted of its imperial occupant. Now he merely recalled a story about a King Cophetua and a beggar maid. It was a comparison that would have intensely interested the flapper's mother, who was this time regarding Bean through her glazed weapon as if he were some queer growth the head gardener had brought from the conservatory.

Grandma deftly probed his past for affairs of the heart. She pointedly had him alone, and her intimation was that he might talk freely, as to a woman of understanding and broad sympathy. But Bean made a wretched mess of it.

Certainly there had been "affairs." There was the girl in Chicago, two doors down the street, whom he had once taken to walk in the park, but only once, because she talked; the girl in the business college who had pretty hair and always smiled when she looked at him; and another who, he was almost sure, had sent him an outspoken valentine; yes, there had been plenty of girls, but he hadn't bothered much about them.

And Grandma, plainly incredulous, averred that he was too deep for her. Bean was on the point of inventing a close acquaintance with an actress, which he considered would be scandalous enough to compel a certain respect he seemed to find lacking in the old lady, but he saw quickly that she would confuse and trip him with a few questions. He was obliged to content himself with looking the least bit smug when she said:

"You're a deep one—too deep for me!"

He tried hard to look deep and at least as depraved as the conventions of good society seemed to demand.

He was beginning to enjoy the sinful thing. The girl was of course plighted to the Hollins boy, and yet she was putting herself in his way. Very well! He would teach her the danger of playing with fire. He would bring all of his arts and wiles to bear. True, in behaving thus he was conscious of falling below the moral standards of a wise and good king who had never stooped to baseness of any sort. But he was now living in a different age, and somehow—

"I'm a dual nature," he thought. And he applied to himself another phrase he seemed to recall from his reading of magazine stories.

"I've got the artistic temper!" This, he gathered, was held to explain, if not to justify, many departures from the conventional in affairs of the heart. It was a kind of licensed madness. Endowed with the "artistic temper," you were not held accountable when you did things that made plain people gasp. That was it! That was why he was carrying on with Tommy Hollins' girl, and not caring what happened.

In his times of leisure they walked through the shaded aisles of those too well-kept grounds, or they sat in seats of twisted iron and honored the setting sun with their notice. They did not talk much, yet they were acutely aware of each other. Sometimes the silence was prolonged to awkwardness, and one of them would jestingly offer a penny for the other's thoughts. This made a little talk, but not much, and sometimes increased the awkwardness; it was so plain that what they were thinking of could not be told for money.

They did tell their wonderful ages and their full names and held their hands side by side to note the astonishing differences between the "lines." A palmist had revealed something quite amazing to the flapper, but she refused to tell what it was, with a significance that left Bean in a tumultuous and pleasurable whirl of cowardice. Their hands flew apart rather self-consciously. Bean felt himself a scoundrel—"leading on" a young thing like that who was engaged to another. It was flirting of the most reprehensible sort. But there was his dual nature; a strain of the errant Corsican had survived to debauch him.

And if she didn't want to be "led on," he thought indignantly, why did she so persistently put herself in the way of it? She was always there! Serve her right, then! Serve the Hollins boy right, too!

Grandma eyed them shrewdly with her Demon's glance of questioning, but did nothing to keep them apart. On the contrary, she would often brazenly leave them together after conducting them to remote nooks. She made no flimsy excuses. She seemed indifferent to the fate of this tender bud left at the mercy of one whom she affected to regard as a seasoned roué.

There were four days of this regrettable philandering. On the fifth Breede manifested alarming symptoms of recovery. He ceased to be the meek man he was under actual suffering, and was several times guilty of short-worded explosions that should never have reached the ears of good women.

Said the flapper in tones of genuine dismay that evening:

"I'm afraid Pops is going to be well enough to go to town to-morrow!"

Even Grandma, pacing a bit of choice turf near at hand, rehearsing her lines in the mob scene, was shocked at this.

"You are a selfish little pig!" she called.

"But he will have to go away, if Pops goes," said the flapper, in magnificent extenuation.

The words told. Grandma seemed to see things in a new light.

"You come with me," she commanded; "both of you."

Ahead of them she led the way to that pergola where Bean had once overheard their talk.

"Sit down," said Grandma, and herself sat between them.

"You are a couple of children," she began accusingly. "Why, when I was your age—" She broke off suddenly, and for some moments stared into the tracery of vines.

"When I was your age," she began once more, but in a curiously altered voice—"Lord! What a time of years!" She spoke slowly, softly, as one who would evoke phantoms. "Why, at your age," she turned slightly to the flapper, "I'd been married two years, and your father was crawling about under my feet as I did the housework."

She was still looking intently ahead to make her vision alive.

"What a time of years, and how different! Sixty years ago—why, it seems farther back than Noah's ark. The log cabins in the little clearings, and people marrying when they wanted to—always early, and working hard and raising big families. I was the only girl, but I had nine brothers. And Jim, your father's father, my dear, I remember the very moment he began to take notice of me, coming out of the log church one Sabbath. He only looked at me, that was all, and I had to pretend I didn't know. Then he came nights and sat in front of the big open fire, with all of us, at first. But after a little, the others would climb up the ladder to the loft and leave us, and we'd maybe eat a mince pie that I'd made—I was a good cook at sixteen—and there would be a pitcher of cider, and outside, the wind would be driving the snow against the tiny windowpanes—I can hear that sound now, and the sputtering of the backlog, and Jim—oh, well!" She waved the scene back.

"When we were married, Jim had his eighty acres all cleared, a yoke of nice fat steers, a cow, two pigs, and a couple of sheep; not much, but it seemed enough then. The furniture was home-made, the table-ware was tin plates and pewter spoons and horn-handled knives, and a set of real china that Pa and Ma gave us—that was for company—and a feather-bed and patch-work quilts I'd made, and a long-barrelled rifle, and the best coon-dog, Jim said, in the whole of York State. Oh, well!"

Bean became aware that the old lady had grasped his hand, and he divined that she was also holding a hand of the flapper.

"And my! such excitement you never did see when little Jim came! We began to save right off to send him to a good seminary. We were going to make a preacher out of him; and see the way he's turned out! Lord, what would his father make of this place and our little Jim, if he was to come back?

"I lost him before he got to see many changes in the world. I remember we did go to a party in Fredonia one time, where a woman from Buffalo wore a low-necked gown, and Jim never got over it. He swore to the day of his death that any woman who'd wear 'a dug-out dress' was a hussy. He didn't know what the world could be coming to, when they allowed such goings-on. Poor Jim! I was still young when he went, and of course—but I couldn't. I'd had my man and I'd had my baby, and somehow I was through. I wanted to learn more about the world, and little Jim was growing up and had a nice situation in the store at Fredonia, working early and late, sleeping under the counter, and saving his fifty dollars clear every year. I knew he'd always provide for me—Dear me! how I run on! Where was I?"

Bean's hand was released, and Grandma rose to her feet, turning to look down upon them.

"I forgot what I started to say, but maybe it was this, that the world hasn't changed so much as folks often think. I get to watching young people sometimes—it seems as if they were like the young people in my day, and I think any young man that's steady and decent and has a good situation—what I mean is this, that he—well, it depends on the girl, as it always did."

She turned and walked to the end of the pergola, fifty feet away. There she threw up a clenched fist and began to emit groans, cries of hoarse rage and ragged phrases of abuse. She was again rehearsing her lines in the mob scene of the equal-suffrage play. At the head of her fellow mobs-women, she hurled harsh epithets at the Prime Minister of the oldest English-speaking nation on earth. There seemed to be no escape for the Prime Minister. They had him.

"We've broken windows, we'll break heads!" shouted the Demon, and a gardener crossing the grounds might have been seen to quicken his pace after one backward look.

The pair on the bench were inattentive. They had instinctively drawn together, but they were silent. In Bean's mind was a confusion of many matters: Breede sleeping under a counter—people in log-cabins getting married—the best coon-dog in York State—a yoke of nice fat steers—

But beneath this was a sharpened consciousness of the girl breathing at his side. She seemed curiously to be waiting—waiting! The silence and their stillness became unbearable. Something must break ... their breaths were too long drawn. He got to his feet and the flapper was unaccountably standing beside him. It was too dark to see her face, but he knew that for once she was not looking at him; for once that head was bent. And then, preposterously, without volition, without foreknowledge, he was holding her tightly in his arms; holding her tightly and kissing her with a simple directness that "Napoleon, Man and Lover," could never have bettered.

There is no record of Napoleon having studied jiu-jitsu.

For one frenzied moment he was out of himself, a mere conquering male, unthinking, ruthless, exigent. Then the sweet strange touch of her cheek brought him back to the awful thing he had done. His reason worked with a lightning quickness. Terrified by his violence she would wrench herself free and run screaming to the house. And then—it was too horrible!

He waited, breathless, for retribution. The flapper did not wrench herself away. Slowly he relaxed the embrace that had made a brute of him. The flapper had not screamed. She was facing him now, breathless herself. He put her a little way from him; he wanted her to see it as he did.

The flapper drew a long and rather catchy breath, then she adjusted a strand of hair misplaced by his violence.

"I knew it!" she began, in tones surprisingly cool. "I knew it ever so long ago, from the very first moment!"

He tried to speak, but had no words. His utterance was formless. "When did you first know?" she persisted. She was patting her hair into place with both hands.

He didn't know; he didn't know that he knew now; but recalling her speech he had overheard, he had the presence of mind to commit a soulful perjury.

"From the very first," he lied glibly. "Something went over me—just like that. I can't tell you how, but I knew!"

"You made me so afraid of you," confessed the flapper.

"I never meant to, couldn't help it."

"I'm horribly shy, but I knew it had to be. I felt powerless."

"I know," he sympathized.

"Our day has come!" roared Grandma from out of the gloom. "We know our rights! We've broken glass! We break heads!" This was followed by "Ar! Ar! Ar!" meant for sinister growls of rage. It seemed to be the united voice of the mob.

They drew apart, once more self-conscious. They walked slowly out, passed the mob scene, which ignored them, and went with awkward little hesitations up the wide walk to the Breede portal. To Bean's suddenly cooled eye, the vast gray house towered above him as a menace. He had a fear that it might fall upon him.

At the entrance they stood discreetly apart. Bean wondered what he ought to say. His sense of guilt was overwhelming. But the flapper seemed clear-headed enough.

"You leave it to me," she said, as if he had confided his perplexity to her. "Leave it all to me. I've always managed."

"Yes," said Bean, meaning nothing whatever.

She made little movements that suggested departure. She was regarding him now with the old curious look that had puzzled him.

"You're just as perfectly nice as I knew you were," she announced, with an obvious pride in this bit of proved wisdom.

"Good-night!"

From a distance of five feet she bestowed the little double-nod upon him and fled.

"Good-night!" he managed to call after her. Then he was aware that he had wanted to call her "Chubbins!" He liked that name for her. If he could only have said "Good-night, Chubbins—"

For that matter he basely wanted again to—but he thought with shame that he had done enough for once. A pretty night's work, indeed! If Breede ever found it out—

When he left with Breede in the morning, she was on the tennis-court. Brazenly she engaged in light conversation across the net with no other than Thomas Hollins, Junior. She did not look up as the car passed the court, though he knew that she knew. Something in the poise of her head told him that.

He didn't wonder she couldn't face him in the light of day. He smiled bitterly, in scorn for the betrayed Tommy.

Back in the lofty office that Saturday morning he sat under the eye of Breede, in outward seeming a neat and efficient amanuensis. In truth he was pluming himself as a libertine of rare endowments. He openly and shamelessly wished he had kissed the creature again. When the next opportunity came she wouldn't get off so lightly, he could tell her that. It was base, but it was thrilling. He would abandon himself. He would take her hand and hold it the very first time they were alone together. Well might she be afraid of him, as she had confessed herself to be. She little knew!

It was, though, pretty light conduct on her part. It was possible that he would not see her again. Perhaps a baggage like that would already have forgotten him; would have treated the thing as trivial, an incident to laugh about, even to regale her intimates with. Probably he had done nothing more than make a fool of himself as usual. Votes for women, indeed! He thought they should first learn how to behave properly with young men who weren't expecting things of that sort.

"—this 'mount'll then become 'vailable f'r purpose shortenin' line an' reducin' heavy grades," dictated the unconscious father of the baggage.

"I kissed that smug-faced little brat of yours last night," wrote Bean immediately thereafter. He didn't care. He would put the thing down plainly, right under Breede's nose.

"With 'creased freight earnin's these 'provements may be 'spected t' pay f'r 'emselves," continued Breede.

"And I don't say I wouldn't do the same thing over again," Bean slipped in skilfully.

He winced to think he might some day have a daughter of his own that would "carry on" just so with young men who would be all right if they were only let alone. He found new comfort in the reflection that his first-born would be a boy—to grow up and be the idol of a nation.

But a little later he was again thinking of her as "Chubbins," wishing he had called her that, wishing she had stayed longer out in the scented night—the wonderful smoothness of her yielding cheek! Her little tricks of voice and manner came back to him, her quick little patting of Grandma's back at unexpected moments, the tilting of her head like a listening bird, that inexplicable look as her eyes enveloped him, a tiny scar at her temple, mark of an early fall from her pony.

He became sentimental to a maudlin degree. She would go on in her shallow way of life, smashing windows, voting, leading perfectly decent young men to do things they never meant to do; but he, the tender, the true, the ever-earnest, he would not recover from the wound that frail one had so carelessly inflicted. He would be a changed man, with hair prematurely graying at the temples, like Gordon Dane's, hiding his hurt under a mask of light cynicism to all but persons of superior insight. The heartless quip, the mad jest on his lips! And years afterward, a deeply serious and very beautiful woman would divine his sorrow and win him back to his true self.

The wedding! The drive from the church! The carriage is halted by a street crowd. A stalwart policeman appears. He has just arrested two women, confirmed window-smashers—Grandma, the Demon, and the flapper. The flapper gives him one long look, then bows her head. She sees all the nobility she has missed. Serve her right, too!

Noon came and he was about to leave the office. He was still the changed man of quip and jest. Desperately he jested with old Metzeger, who was regretfully, it seemed, relinquishing his adored ledgers from Saturday noon until Monday morning.

"Say, I want to borrow nineteen thousand eleven hundred and eighty-nine dollars and thirty-seven cents until the sixteenth at seven minutes to eleven."

Old Metzeger repeated the numbers accurately. He looked wistful, but he knew it was a jest.

"Telephone for Boston Bean!" cried an office boy, dryly affecting to be unconscious of his wit.

He rushed nervously for the booth. No one in the great city had ever before found occasion to telephone him. He thought of Professor Balthasar. Balthasar would warn him to fly at once; that all was discovered.

He held the receiver to his ear and managed a husky "Hello!"

At first there were many voices, mostly indignant: "I want the manager!" "Get off the line!" "A hundred and nine and three quarters!" "That you, Howard? Say, this is—" "Get—off—that—line!" "Or I'll know the reason why before to-morrow night!" And then from Bedlam pealed the voice of the flapper, silencing these evil spirits.

"Hello! Hello! This line makes me perfectly furious. To-morrow about three o'clock—you're to give us tea and things, some nice place—Granny and me. Be along in the car. I remember the number. Be there. Good-bye!"

There was the rattle of a receiver being hung up. But he stood there not believing it—tea and car and be there—The receiver rattled again.

"You knew who I was, didn't you?"

"Yes, right away," muttered Bean. Then he brightened. "I knew your voice the moment I heard it." The madness was upon him and he soared. "You're Chubbins!" He waited.

"Cut out the Chubbins stuff, Bill, and get off there!" directed a coarse masculine voice from the unseen wire-world.

He got off there with all possible quickness. His first thought was that she probably had not heard the magnificent piece of daring. It was too bad. Probably he never could do it again. Then he turned and discovered that he had left the door of the telephone booth ajar. Chubbins might not have heard him, but Bulger assuredly had.

"Well, well, well!" declaimed Bulger in his best manner. "Look whom we have with us here to-night! Old Mr. George W. Fox Bean, keeping it all under his hat. Chubbins, eh? Some name, that! Don't tell me you thought it up all by yourself, you word-painter! Miss Chubbsy Chubbins! Where's she work?"

Bean saw release.

"Little manicure party," he confessed; "certain shop not far from here. Think I'm going to put you wise?"

Bulger was pleased at the implication.

"Ain't got a friend, has she?"

"No," said Bean. "Never did have one. Some class, too," he added with a leer that won Bulger's complete respect. He breathed freely again and was humming, "Love Me and the World Is Mine," as they separated.

But when he was alone the song died. The thing was getting serious. And she was so assured. Telling him to be there as if she were Breede himself. How did she know he had time for all that tea and Grandma nonsense? Suppose he had had another engagement. She hadn't given him time to say. Hadn't asked him; just told him. Well, it showed one thing. It showed that Bunker Bean could bring women to his feet.

His afternoon recreation, there being no baseball, was to lead Nap triumphantly through Central Park to be seen of an envious throng. He affected a lordly unconsciousness of the homage Nap received. He left adoring women in his wake and covetous men; and children demanded bluntly if he would sell that dog; or if he wouldn't sell him would he give him away, because they wanted him.

Surfeited with this easily won attention, he sat by the driveway to watch the endless parade of carriage folk. His eye was for the women in those shining equipages. Young or old, they were to him newly exciting. His attitude was the rather scornful one of a conqueror whose victories have cost him too little. They had been mysteries to him, but now, all in a day, he understood women. They were vulnerable things, and men were their masters. Votes, indeed!

His own power over them was abundantly proved. Any of them passing heedlessly there would, under the right conditions, confess it. Let him be called to their notice and they'd be following him around, forgetting plighted vows, getting him into places screened with vines and letting themselves be led on; telephoning him to give them and Grandma tea and things of a Sunday in some nice place—hanging on his words. Of course it had always been that way, only he had never known it. Looking back over his barren past he surveyed minor incidents with new eyes. There was that girl with the pretty hair in the business college, who always smiled in the quick, confidential way at him. Maybe she wouldn't have been a talker!

And how far was this present affair going? Pretty far already: clandestine meetings and that sort of thing. Still, he couldn't help being a man, could he? And Tommy Hollins, poor dupe!

In the steam-heated apartment It had been locked in a closet, which in an upright position It fitted nicely. He did not open the door that night. He felt that he was venturing into ways that the wise and good king would not approve. He could not face the thing while guilt was in his heart. A woman had come between them.

At three o'clock the next afternoon he lounged carelessly against the basement railing of the steam-heated apartment. With Nap on a leash he was keenly aware that he was "some class." He was arrayed in the new suit of a quiet check. The cravat with the red stripe shimmered in the sunlight. He had a new straw hat with a coloured band, bought the day before at a shop advertising "Snappy Togs for Dressy Men." He lightly twirled a yellow stick and carried yellow gloves in one hand. He was almost the advanced dresser, dignified but unquestionably a bit different. He seemed to be one who has tamed the world to his ends; but, though he stood erect, expanded his chest and drew in his waist, as instinctively do all those who wear America's greatest eighteen-dollar suit, he was nevertheless wondering with a lively apprehension just what was going to be done with him. This life of "affairs" was making him uncomfortable.

Taking Nap along, he somehow felt, was a wise precaution. He didn't know what mad thing you might expect of Grandma, the Demon, but surely nothing very discreditable could occur in the presence of that innocent dog. And he would play the waiting game; make 'em show their hands.

At twenty minutes after three he wondered if he mightn't reasonably disappear. He would walk in the park and say afterward—if there should be an afterward—that he had given them up. An easy way out. He would do it. Twenty minutes more passed and he still meant to do it, knowing he wouldn't.

Then came the blare of a motor horn and Breede's biggest and blackest car descended upon him, stopping neatly at the curb.

He retained his calm, nonchalantly doffing the new straw hat.

"Just strolling off," he said; "given you up."

"Pops wanted to come," explained the flapper. "I had a perfectly annoying time not letting him. What a darling child of a dog! Does he want to—well, he shall!"

And Nap did at once. He seemed in the flapper to be greeting an old friend. He interrogated his lawful owner from the flapper's embrace, then reached up to implant a moist salute upon the ear of Grandma, who at once removed herself from his immediate presence.