The Auction Block Part 7

"Debt of honor. I heard she was due here with some kind of an electric thrill, so I offered her my share of the sweepstakes to further disgrace herself by dancing with me. She's an expensive doll; she needs that thousand--mortgage on the old family opera- house, no shoes for little sister, and mother selling papers to square the landlord." He caught Lorelei's eye and stared boldly.

"h.e.l.lo! I believe in fairies, too, dad. Introduce me to the Princess."

Merkle volunteered this service, and Bob promptly hitched his chair closer. Lorelei saw that he was very drunk, and marveled at his control during the recent exhibition.

"Tell me more about the 'Parti-color Petticoat' and 'Dentol Chewing-Gum,' Miss Knight. Your face is a household word in every street-car," he began.

She replied promptly, quoting haphazard from the various advertis.e.m.e.nts in which she figured. "It never shrinks; it holds its shape; it must be seen to be appreciated; is cool, refres.h.i.+ng, and prevents decay."

"How did you meet that French dancer?" Hannibal Wharton queried, sourly, of his son.

"I stormed the stage door, bullied the door-man, and waylaid her in the wings. She thought I was you, dad. Wharton is a grand old name." He chuckled at his father's exclamation. "She's a good fellow, though, and I don't blame the King of What's-its-name.

Kings have to spend their money somewhere. Maybe I can induce her to invest some of the royal dough in stocks and bonds. The prospect dizzies me."

"The crowd in your office would give you a banquet if you sold something," Merkle told him.

Wharton, Senior, pressed for further information. "Where did you learn those Argentine wiggles?"

"Hard times are to blame, dad. The old men on the Exchange play golf all day, and the young ones turkey-trot all night. I stay up late in the hope that I may find a quarter that some suburbanite has dropped. It's dangerous to drive an automobile through a dark street these days; one's liable to run down a starving banker or an indigent broker with a piece of lead pipe and a mask. You find it so, don't you, Miss Knight?"

"I have no automobile," said the girl.

"Strange. Show business on the blink, too, eh?" The elder men rose and sauntered away in the direction of their host, whereupon Bob winked.

"They've left us flat. Why? Because the wicked Mlle. Demorest has finally made her appearance as a guest. My dad is a splendid shock-absorber. Naughty, naughty papa!"

"It's probably well that you came with her; fathers are so indiscreet."

Young Wharton signaled to a waiter who was pa.s.sing with a wine- bottle in a napkin.

"Tarry!" he cried. "Remove the shroud, please, and let me look at poor old Roderer. Thanks. How natural he tastes." Then to Lorelei: "The governor is a woman-hater; but, just the same, I'm glad you drew Merkle instead of him to-night, or there'd surely be a scandal in the Wharton family. No man is safe in range of your liquid orbs, Miss Knight, unless he has his marriage license sewed into his clothes. Mother keeps hers framed. Wouldn't she enjoy reading the list of Hammon's guests at this party? 'Among those present were Mr. Hannibal C. Wharton, the well-known rolling-mill man; Miss Lorelei Knight, Princ.i.p.al First-Act Fairy of the Bergman Revue; and Mlle. Adoree Demorest, the friend of a king. A good time was had by all, and the diners enjoyed themselves very nice.'" He laughed loudly, and the girl stirred.

"She'd be pleased to read also that you came late, but highly intoxicated."

"Ah! Salvation Nell." Bob took no offense. "If the hour was late she'd know that my intoxication followed as a matter of course. It always does, just as the dew succeeds the sunset, as the track follows the wheelbarrow, as the cracker pursues the cheese. I am a derivative of alcohol, the one and infallible argument against temperance, Miss Knight. In me you behold the s.h.i.+ning example of all that puts the reformer to rout and gladdens the heart of the cafe-keeper."

"You talk as if you were always drunk."

"Oh--not always. By day I am frequently sober, but at such times I am fit company for neither man nor beast; I am harsh and unsympathetic; I scheme and I connive. With nightfall, however, there comes a metamorphosis. Ah! Believe ME! When the Clover Club is strained and descends like the gentle dew of heaven, when the Bronx is mixed and the Martini s.h.i.+mmers in the first rays of the electric light, then I humanize and harmonize, For me gin is a tonic, rum a restorative, vermuth a balm. Once I am stocked up with ales, wines, liquors, and cigars, I become attuned to the n.o.bler sentiments of life. I aspire. I make friends with lonely derelicts whose digestions have foundered on seas of vichy and b.u.t.termilk, and I show them the joys of alcoholism--without cost.

We share each other's pleasures and perplexities, at my expense.

They are my brothers. I am optimistic; I laugh; I play cards for money; I turkey-trot. I become a living, palpitating influence for good, spreading happiness and prosperity in my wake."

"Do you consider yourself in such a condition now?" queried Lorelei, who had been vaguely amused at this Rubaiyat.

"I am, and, since it is long past the, closing hour of one and the tango parlors are dark, suppose we blow this 'Who's Who in Pittsburg' and taxi-cab it out to a roadhouse where the ba.s.s fiddle is still inhabited and the second generation is trotting to the 'Robert E. Lee'?"

Lorelei shook her head with a smile.

"Don't you dance?"

"Doesn't everybody dance?"

"Then how did you break your leg?"

"I don't care to go."

"Strange!" Mr. Wharton helped himself to a goblet of wine, appearing to heap the liquor above the edge of the gla.s.s. "Now, if I were sober I could understand how you might prefer these 'pappy guys' to me, for n.o.body likes me then, but I'm agreeably pickled.

I'm just like everybody you'll be likely to meet at this time of night. Merkle won't take you anywhere, for he's full of distilled water and has a directors' meeting at ten. I overflow with spirits and have a noontide engagement with an Ostermoor."

"Why don't you ask Miss Demorest? She came with you?"

Wharton sighed hopelessly. "Something queer about that Jane. D'you know what made us so late? She went to ma.s.s on the way down."

"Ma.s.s? At that hour?"

"It was a special midnight service conducted for actors. I sat in the taxi and waited. It did me a lot of good."

Some time later Merkle returned to find Bob still animatedly talking; catching Lorelei's eye, he signified a desire to speak with her, but she found it difficult to escape from the intoxicated young man at her side. At last, however, she succeeded, and joined her supper companion at the farther edge of the fountain, where the tireless cupids still poured water from the cornucopias.

Merkle was watching his friend's son with a frown.

"You have just left the personification of everything I detest,"

he volunteered. "You heard what his father said about raising him --how he taught Bob to drink when he drank and follow in his footsteps? Well, sometimes the theory works and a boy grows up with open eyes, but more often it turns out as it has in this case. Bob's an alcoholic, a common drunkard, and he'll end in an inst.i.tution, sure. He'd be there now if it wasn't for Hannibal's money. He's run the gamut of extravagance; he's done everything freakish that there is to do. But that isn't what I want to say to you. Help me feed these foolish goldfish while I talk."

"Do you think anybody would understand if they overheard you? I fancied you and I were the only sober ones left."

"Some of the girls are all right." Merkle eyed his companion closely. "Don't you drink?"

"I daren't, even if I cared to."

"Daren't?"

"You'll notice that most of the pretty girls are sober."

"Right."

"I have nothing but my looks. Wouldn't I be a fool to sacrifice them?"

"You seem to be sensible, Miss Knight. Something tells me you're very much the right sort. I know you're trying to get ahead, and-- I can help you if you'll help me."

"Help you 'get ahead'?"

He smiled. "Hardly. I need an agent, and I'll pay a good price to the right person."

"How mysterious!"

"I'll be plain. That affair yonder"--he nodded toward Jarvis Hammon and Lilas Lynn--"strikes you as a--well, as a flirtation of the ordinary sort. In one way it is; in another way it is something very different, for he's in earnest. He thinks he is injuring no one but himself with this business, and he is willing to pay the price; but the fact is he is putting other people in peril--me among the rest. I'm not arguing for his wife nor the two Misses Hammon. I don't go much on the ordinary kinds of morality, and n.o.body outside of a man's family has the right to question his private life so long as it is private in its consequences. But when his secret conduct affects his business affairs, when it endangers vast interests in which others are concerned, then his a.s.sociates are ent.i.tled to take a hand. Do I make myself clear?"

"Perfectly. But you don't want me; you want a detective."