Bunker Bean/8
VIII
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 archæologist.
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 preëminence; 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 manœuvred 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 Rollins' 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 window-panes—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.