Part 13

Thus delivered from the Philistines, the equipage proceeded, amid the wonder and consternation of an ear-smitten public. But there was one who paid no tribute of notice to its thunderous progress. He stood on the corner of Fifth Avenue, and gazed into vacancy. The gleam of his candid shirt-front attracted the eye of the gob, who was acting as lookout.

“Lighthouse off the port bow,” he informed the chauffeur. “Seems to be deserted. Run alongside; I fain would hail it.”

The tank, after a preliminary wobble, drew up, facing the abstracted individual. He deigned to droop an uninterested eye at it, and straightway resumed his contemplation of nothingness. The gob semi-emerging from the tank’s door, addressed him.

“Cab, sir?”

“Eh? What?” said the other vaguely.

“Taxi, sir? Fine night for a ride,” said the gob persuasively.

“Certainly,” assented the bystander with the air of one who welcomes any diversion, however slight. He stepped inside.

“Where to, sir?”

The fare considered. “Eight-seventy-seven Park Avenue,” he said at length.

“What for?” interposed the flit with suspicion.

“To make a polite and formal call on a young lady.”

“Look at the time,” protested the flit. “Won’t she be asleep?”

“Not after little Pussyfoot enters the block,” said the fare with conviction. “Besides that--have I hired this hack or haven’t I?”

“You sure have,” confirmed the gob. “Montmorency, behave!” he admonished the flit. “We are about to go into Society. I can tell it by the address. By the left wheel, _hrrumph_!”

“One moment,” said the passenger. “It is my duty to tell you that Bingle Foxley will be coming down the Avenue drunk and chiefly on the wrong side, about this hour.”

“Who’s he?” demanded the chauffeur.

“The Demon Motorist. Traffic rules are a red rag to him. As a cousin of the Big Chief he’s immune from arrest, and gets a clear path.”

“What’s the big idea?” demanded the flit.

“Just so that you can slide out the way when you hear his siren,” returned the fare, with apparent innocence.

The flit grinned. “Ick hobby dick, Steefen, as we say in Coblenz,” he observed. “We’re off.”

* * * * *

The Fifth Avenue traffic obligingly made way again. After essaying several polite and casual observations in a stentorian tone, with the effect of a microbe’s whisper, the passenger gathered together his vocal powers, and stuck his voice into the gob’s ear.

“I want to explain. I’m going to LET YOU INTO A LITTLE SECRET,” he bellowed into a suddenly developed stillness, consequent upon the flit’s shutting off power at a crowded corner.

“One little tone louder,” suggested the gob, “and you’ll let in South Norwalk and the Oranges.”

“Let me explain to you all,” said the passenger while the gathering crowd outside passed the word that the tank was conveying a violently mad German spy to the asylum. “I’m very much interested in--”

“Not me!” expostulated the flit. “The last guy in a dress suit that explained what he was very much interested in, got me very much interested too, and stung me four months’ pay for four cents’ worth of phony stock.”

“This is a young lady,” said the other, with dignity. “She objects to me because she says I am too proper and conventional to be really human.”

“Are you?” inquired the sike with interest.

“Before the war, possibly. I admit it.”

“And the war cured you?”

“Judge for yourself. The third day of the Argonne debate I nearly got court-martialed for biting a chunk out of my captain’s ear. It was dark, and I thought when we came together after the charge and he tried to gouge my left eye out, that he was a Fritzie. Now I put it to you as pals, _is_ that overrefined and finicky?”

“Pals is right,” stated the flit heartily, “if you was at Argonne Woods. And as man to man and one having experience, I’d advise you to handle her likewise. Not bite her ear off, you get me? But join the tanks and treat ’em rough.”

“Precisely why I hired this cab.”

“So woman is your trouble,” observed the sike. “I salute you, Mr. Reuben Renssalaer Watts.”

“The devil you do!” retorted that gentleman. “When did you graduate into the Intelligence Department? Or have I met you in a previous existence?”

“Neither. It is quite simple,” began the sike, when a swelling, soaring, blare from up the Avenue cut him short.

“Mr. Foxley requests the courtesy of a clear path,” said Mr. Watts.

“Sure,” remarked the flit between his teeth. “Sic ’em, Maudie!”

Gathering speed, the tank proceeded to weave and writhe across the roadway in a manner suggestive of a beetle with the stomach-ache. Hoots, rude, imperative and monitory, sounded from ahead. A huge green car manned by a huge red youth came rushing down upon them. At sight of the tank, the car emitted a sublimated yawp of surprise and horror followed by penetrating shrieks as the brakes bit in, the youth uttered a whoop of desperation, the outfit hit the unmoved tank slantwise, skimmed across the sidewalk on two wheels and sought cover in a window placarded “Special Bargains in Lingerie” whence presently emerged the almost total ruin of Mr. Foxley draped pinkly in a chemise. It beat the air with frenzied hands, yelled feebly, and disappeared around the corner in the direction of its club. Revivified later (though not by the usual agencies, which he resolutely refused, to the alarm of his fellows), Mr. Foxley related how, while driving quietly down the Avenue he had been beset by a mud-turtle in armor. A very large, ferocious, prehistoric mud-turtle, waving an American flag, which without provocation had attacked his unoffending car, bitten off its two front wheels and chased it through a plate-glass window. And as for him, he wouldn’t care if July first came to-morrow! He was off it!

“Where do they come from and why did they let ’em out?” demanded Mr. Foxley passionately.

The maligned tank, passing upon its sentimental quest, was now spreading the echoes of Bedlam through peaceful Park Avenue. At number eight-seventy-seven, the equipage stopped. The clamor didn’t. A surprised and extremely attractive face beneath the cap of the National League for Woman’s Service Motor Corps appeared at a third-floor window.

“Shut off! Shut off!” yelled Reuben Renssalaer Watts. “I want to talk to her.”

“Can’t,” bellowed the flit. “She’s jammed.”

The face at the window became indignant. It made urgent gestures like a policeman.

“The lady wants us to move on,” the gob informed the perspiring Mr. Watts.

Out upon the sidewalk stepped the sike. He faced the lovely and indignant apparition overhead and squared his manly form. With his right hand he majestically indicated the zenith; his left he placed tenderly upon the pit of his stomach. Immediately he thrust his left north-northeast and started a pivot-blow with the other. He then boxed the compass in swift, successive two-arm movements. The ornament of the window nodded and disappeared.

“See here!” said Mr. Watts. “Do you _know_ that lady?”

“I do not,” returned the sike, “though I live in hopes.”

“Then why the convulsions?” demanded Mr. Watts severely.

“Semaphoring, my dear sir. I simply wigwagged the lady that if she would descend to Mother Earth, a communication of semi-official import having a vital bearing on her prospects in life would be made to her. _Or_ words to that effect,” said the sike. “The rest is up to you.”

The final observation might well have been addressed to the Mayor of New Rochelle, as, coincident with its utterance the chauffeur had stilled his engine. He joined the sidewalk group, followed by the gob. The girl emerged.

“Is it an ambulance job?” she asked professionally.

“No, madam,” answered the sike.

“Then why did you S. O. S. me?”

Mr. Reuben Renssalaer Watts stepped forward. “Renny!” she exclaimed and turned to a pink so delicate and bewitching that the gob hastily and surreptitiously extracted his beloved quid and tossed it under the iron monster.

“A social call,” said that gentleman. “Good evening, Carey.” He stepped forward and with nonchalance and promptitude kissed the newcomer fair and full upon the lips.

“Renny!” gasped the girl; and the pink deepened to a fiery red. “Wh-Wh-What--how--are you crazy?”

“I’ve joined the tanks,” exclaimed Mr. Watts urbanely. “‘Treat ’em rough’ is our motto. Come and have a joy-ride on me.”

The girl recovered herself. “Who are these gentlemen?”

“Hanged if I know. I hired the crew with the ship and they are now my fellow piratical voyagers on faerie seas forlorn. Fellows, this is Miss Carey Vail.”

“Pleased to meetcher,” said the flit, stepping forward courteously. “My name’s Mr. Slayter. The gob, here, is Chaw Veeder. He’s rough stuff from the gas-house, but with ladies present he’ll kindly soft-pedal. The other guy is a stuffed professor at home, at present considerable alive. Name, Perfessor James.” He turned to address Watts. “Now, where to, sir?”

“Where do you suggest?”

* * * * *

“If this is a ladies’ game,” responded the flit tentatively, “there’s a party named Miss Nora McSears who cashes at an all-night restaurant on East Fifty-eighth Street, very clean and respectable.”

“Right! Go to Fifty-eighth Street. Will you get in, Carey?”

Miss Carey Vail sniffed the air daintily and observed the tank with doubt. “Do you think your steed is safe?” she asked.

“He’s uncertain when hungry,” explained the gob; “but he’s just fed. He’s had one small dog, one large fruit-stand, three cans of garbage, a corner of the Waldorf-Astoria and a chew of the best plug. You could trust him to tow a baby-carriage down Peacock Alley.”

Miss Vail embarked. Her next observation, “Do behave yourself, Renny,” was inferred rather than heard, in the commotion of their turning. Nor was their converse thereafter, though earnest, of import to the others, who considerately concentrated their attention upon the outer world.

The Recherché Restaurant was doing a languid, ten-cent-to-a-quarter trade, when East Fifty-eighth Street burst into “The Anvil Chorus.” Its entire clientèle rushed to the door, followed by a tall, calm-eyed girl with the cash-register in her arms. The tank brought up with a lurch opposite her.

“Good evening, Miss Nora,” said the flit, emerging.

“Good evening, yourself, and who are _you_?” returned Miss McSears placidly.

The flit assumed an air of profound injury. “Did you or did you not, one year back, come St. Patrick’s Day, after the Club dance at camp, take my regimental pin to wear and say you’d never forget Private F. Slayter, now corporal?”

“Maybe I did,” admitted the girl. “But your face was clean then.”

“I’ve joined the tanks since,” said Corporal Slayter. “Treat ’em rough.” Selecting the nearest dimple in Miss McSears’s piquant face, he saluted it in form.

“Move on!” cried that young lady, helpless by reason of the cash-machine, but wrathful. “My father’s a policeman and I’ll be telephoning for him.”

“Ask him can I keep company with his daughter,” suggested the unperturbed flit. “We’ll move on when you move with us.”

“In _that_?” retorted the girl, bestowing a scornful look upon the monster. “I don’t believe it’s even respectable. Who’s in there?”

Responding to the flit’s unspoken appeal, the woman passenger stepped out. “I’m Carey Vail,” she began in her quiet, assured voice. “You may know--”

“Hello, Vail,” interrupted Miss McSears.

“Why, Mac! Bless your old heart! How are you?”

The two did not fall on each other’s neck. They shook hands in manly fashion. “This is one of our emergency volunteers for the ‘flu’ work,” explained the girl in uniform. “They don’t make them any better.”

“They don’t need to, as far’s I’m concerned,” murmured Mr. Slayter, relieving the bearer of the cash-register. “Are you on for our little party, Nora?”

“Wait till I telephone for a substitute,” said Miss McSears. “And do you behave yourself, you with your ‘Nora’!”

Upon her return, after some delay, there was heard issuing from the tank’s interior dolorous music, in the sike’s plaintive baritone:

“No one to pity him, none to cay-ress No one to help _him_ in his sad dy-stress.”

“The Sweet Singer of Michigan has broken his parole,” observed the gob. “Hey, you inside, what’s on your bursting chest?”

“I’m lonely,” stated the sike. “All my lovely companions are faded and gone. Captive to the fair sex.

“Oh, bury me on the lone pray-_ree_! Where the wild ki-yotes can’t pester me.”

“Goodness gracious! What’s that?” queried Miss McSears.

“I believe it’s some kind of a professor,” explained Miss Vail, as the flit obligingly turned an interior light upon the sike. Miss McSears viewed the exhibit with critical approval.

“It looks good to me,” she said. “Couldn’t we get somebody to take care of it for the evening and make this a real party? Any of your crowd on, Vail?”

“Eleven twenty-five,” said the corps-girl, examining a wrist-watch. “Dolly Barrett’ll just be coming off duty. She’d fit in.”

“Great!” assented Miss McSears, and the two girls retired to telephone.

“Did you get her?” chorused the crew of the tank, when they returned.

“Of course,” said Miss Vail. “We told her to meet us at eleven-fifty on the south side of Columbus Circle where Broadway comes in.”

“That’s a nice, retired spot for a tryst,” said Mr. Watts sardonically. “Did you tell her how we were coming?”

“No. I just said we’d pick her up in a car.”

“She’ll be surprised.”

“Surprise will do her good. She’s been overworked lately and needs livening up.”

Surprise was obviously the trysted one’s portion when, with the sound of earthquake and avalanche, battle, murder, and sudden death, the “cab” arrived. Nor was the initial surprise the only one. A perfect stranger with a long, lean, pleasant face stepped out and regarded her with appreciative and twinkling eyes. In the background she dimly apprehended Miss Vail and Miss McSears. On his part the sike contemplated a small, trim young person with very black hair, very gray eyes under black brows and lashes and a mouth that was an enticement to disorderly conduct. His bedazzled regard failed to note certain features of her costume. His once professorial spirit was in a turmoil, a reckless, desperate glow.

“Good evening,” he said rapidly. “We’ve come to take you riding. Let me help you in. My name is Follansbee James. I’ve joined the tanks. Treat ’em rough.” Smack! The disorderly conduct was committed.

“Attention!” snapped the enraged victim of the caress.

The sike fell into a rigor, a paralysis, intended for a salute. His horrified eyes were riveted on the newcomer’s nearest shoulder. A silver bar shone there.

“Lord help me! I’ve kissed my superior officer,” groaned the sike, and collapsed into the waiting arms of the gob.

The others immediately supplied a chorus of explanation and apology, greatly enjoyed and appreciated by the gathering crowd. “Let’s get out of here,” said Lieutenant Dolly Barrett, bewilderedly rubbing the corner of her chin (for the sike had been nervous and his marksmanship below par). “Go into the Park, where it’s quiet.”

Their progress spread a horrific stridor through the peace and decorum of the Park’s ordered avenues, and the squirrels awoke in the tree-tops, gibbering with terror, and the birds took wing and fled into the unknown, and the new hippopotamus of the Zoo, surmising that the day of judgment was upon him, repented of his sins in a wail that scarred the ear-drums of the sleeping neighborhood; and policemen, singly and in squads, rushed to the scene and retired before the sight of a moving fortress displaying the American flag, and Reuben Renssalaer Watts chose that time as propitious for a whirlwind advance, under cover of the riot, upon the heart of Miss Carey Vail. As he pleaded earnestly, and with vast expenditure of lung-power, which did not reach beyond the attentive ear of the girl, who was listening with an expression somewhere between happiness, panic, and surrender, the flit tactlessly and abruptly shut down the power to inquire his way, and Mr. Watts was heard (from the Battery on the south to the Bronx on the north) proclaiming the finale and climax of his wooing:

“--GOING TO MARRY ME THIS VERY NIGHT, AS IS!”

A dead, blank, dismayed silence supervened. The unintentional eavesdroppers stared at each other and away from the pair. Ten blocks distant the hippopotamus laughed raucously. Mr. Watts, justly indignant, turned upon the chauffeur.

“Keep her going, you fourth-rate, donkey-engine misfit!” he roared, in tones which proved that he didn’t care who heard him this time.

“What church?” inquired the flit promptly.

“Not any church,” cried Miss Carey Vail. “I want to go ho-o-ome.”

“Oh, be a sport, Vail,” adjured her superior officer. “He looks all right to me. Why not marry him and put him out of his misery?”

“Go on; do!” urged Miss McSears. “It’ll be so romantic.”

“Maybe it’d be catching,” hopefully suggested Corporal Slayter, who appeared to be holding Miss McSears’s hand.

“Happy thought!” contributed the sike. “Don’t spoil the evening’s fun just because of a weak prejudice about formality.”

“Oh, I think you’re all mad!” declared Miss Vail tremulously, and suddenly, despite her uniform, she looked very small and feminine and helpless. “You, most of all, Renny, I don’t know what’s come to you.”

“I’ve joined the tanks,” said Reuben Renssalaer Watts promptly, “And--”

“Don’t!” wailed Miss Vail, half a second too late to forestall the action which went with the statement. “I want to go ho-o-ome!” she faltered. But there was more bewilderment than conviction in her appeal.

“Directly after the ceremony,” promised the progressive wooer. “We’ll ride up in my special taxi and break the news to the family.”

“Look here, folkses,” broke in the gob. “I’m all for this Lohengrin-Mendelssohn stuff. But it’ll take some scheming. We’ve got the rest of the night, free of entanglements and engagements, except the one we’ve just been witness to, is it not?”

“It is,” responded a chorus, minus the voice of Miss Carey Vail who was temporarily speechless.

“All right, I’m going to blow to supper.”

“Not at twelve-fifteen, in this man’s burg,” corrected Mr. Watts. “It’s closed.”

“If you can give a wedding party, I guess I can give a supper party,” retorted the gob. “And I’m going to if I have to hold up somebody else’s. Corporal, conduct Airy Fairy Lillian up Mr. Fifth’s well-known avenue while I man the lookout, and be ready to stop on signal.”

The signal was given, opposite a house of modest size (for that part of the thoroughfare) with evidences of activity in the front rooms. The gob ran up the steps and was met by a flustered-looking person who made gestures of expostulation, which presently were mollified to gestures of deprecation.

“Come one, come all,” invited the gob, returning. “There’ll be a short wait while my friend in the shirt-sleeves--”

“Who _is_ this guy, Chaw?” demanded the flit.

“He’s the butler.”

“Whose butler?” queried Miss McSears.

“Don’t make any odds whose. He’s ours at present.”

“How did you get him?” questioned Watts.

“It’s a long story of my seamy past,” answered the gob. “He’s an ex-con, and I’ve got a strangle-hold on him. So he’s invited us to supper and when the family gets home from the country in the morning he can fix up his own explanation of the ice-box to suit himself and them. I’ve ordered fizz.”

“That’s all very well,” observed Miss McSears with firmness. “But I don’t go to midnight suppers in other folks’ houses, with a bunch of strangers--”

“Strangers once but lovers now,” stated the flit firmly, “speaking for self _and_ lady friend.”

“--and no chaperon,” pursued the spokeswoman of the proprieties, reddening but obstinate. “So you count--”

“Silence in the ranks!” ordered Dolly Barrett. “I’m an officer and a widow. Is that enough?”

“Plenty for me, and praise to Heaven for the good news,” said the sike, enthusiastically. “I don’t mean the officer part,” he added significantly, “but the other.”

Mr. Watts regarded him curiously. “There may be more in these Western universities than a Harvard man would suspect,” he murmured.

“And to think,” sighed the sike, “that a few weeks hence I shall be pouring pious platform platitudes into the happy ears of inattentive youth!”

“Forward in light foraging order!” commanded the gob.

* * * * *

The party entered the house, which was evidently being hastily cleaned for the return of the owners. A subdued noise as of servants in commotion could be heard in the rear. On a hall stand stood a collection of mail in three piles. The flit chancing to glance at it, stood petrified. Selecting a post-card he advanced upon the rear of the unheeding gob, turned up the bottom of the wide and floppy left trouser-leg, read from the sewn-in slip the name inscribed thereon, compared it with the address on the post-card, turned down the trouser-leg to one fold and with a sudden, sardonic inspiration not only left it so, but adjusted the other one to match it.

“Mr. Schuyler Tappan Veeder,” he observed with concentrated bitterness, straightening up.

“Here,” responded the gob, cheerfully. “What about it?”

“This is _your_ joint,” declared the flit in solemn accusation.

“Not while my fond parents enjoy their present health,” was the genial reply.

But the soul of Corporal Slayter was hot with suspicion. “What kinda con game you been workin’ on me?” he said, surlily. “Call yourself Chaw Veeder.”

“Barring the presence of ladies, you’re a liar,” retorted the gob promptly. “It’s my pals call me Chaw. Which reminds me.” Producing a rich-hued bar from his pocket, he bit off a generous chunk and expertly stowed it. The angry eyes of his pal flickered a little. But he was unconvinced.

“You’re phony,” he growled. “A masqueradin’ dude.” He pointed to the trousers which he had left “cuffed.” “That’s your style,” he asserted. “Me, I’m through. I’ll not be made a guy of. C’mon, Nora.”

* * * * *

The gob stretched forth an iron-muscled hand which he inserted forcibly and affectionately between the flit’s neck and his collar. “Pause a moment, Claude,” he besought. “Girls, will you kindly muffle your ears? Thanks. Now, Freddie, you lop-sided, cross-grained, bone-headed, swivel-eared, pizen-souled descendant of ten generations of mule-thieves, before I break your jaw in three places at once, listen while I tell you what you are.” And he told him. But of the telling there is no record, because after the preface, Mr. Watts retired for air and the sike ran out to seek a pencil and paper and returned too late for the exordium. The flit, spell-bound, relaxed his expression of disfavor. When it was over he bent down and readjusted the gob’s trouser-legs to the regulation straightness. Apology could go no further.

“You win, Chaw,” said he shamefacedly. “Speed up the wedding feast.”

It is recorded in the unwritten history of Fifth Avenue’s most costly and exclusive section, that there came, upon a midnight clear, a din as of ten thousand structural riveters in progressive action, giving place to sounds of revelry by early morning, which in turn was succeeded by the Anvil Chorus, above the surface of which soared a valiant barytone proclaiming, “The Voice that Breathed O’er Eden.” Mr. Chaw Veeder’s supper-party, back in the tank, was adjourning to night-court to seek a marrying magistrate. For, as in the old song, love (in the person of Mr. Reuben Renssalaer Watts) had found out the way, and the telephone, reaching a friendly judge, had arranged a special emergency license.

Many queer equipages with strange cargoes visit night-court on sundry errands; but the tank with its wedding-party broke the record.

Court adjourned informally, to rush out and ascertain who was bombing the locality and why. When the party entered, they beheld two policemen struggling to extricate the magistrate from the frantic embrace of Mr. Bingle Foxley, who was yelling: