The Best Short Stories of 1918 Part 8

"Over at Mrs. Hallowell's garage, of course."

"You have just left it there. Richard, don't you realize what a lawless thing you have done? To take another person's car without permission-"

"I did too have permission!" Buster's red crest reared. His black eyes flamed. "I had her opened up, and was studying the engine-gee, some peach!-and I told the doctor's chauffeur that I'd bet him a box of Gibraltars I could take that car clear to Doctor Lake's Boston office and back in two hours and not get pinched. And he said, 'I'm from Saint Joe, son. You gotta show me.' So I jumped aboard, and I'd beat it down the drive before he could say boo. And I made it in one hour and fifty-seven minutes, though I had to waste ten minutes, and a dollar besides, on the doctor's mutt of a doorman-making him understand why he must sign his name to a card saying I'd reported there at five sharp.

The big dummy, I don't believe the real reason has dawned on him yet.

But you oughter seen that chauffeur wilt when I whizzled her in, two minutes ago!"

"I feel wilted myself. When I think of the apologies I must make to Doctor Lake-"

"Apologies? What for? He ought to be delighted. It was a corking speed test for his car. Down that stem-winder cliff, let me tell you, she just naturally hung on by her eyebrows."

"Richard, the chauffeur did not mean to give you permission. You know that."

"W-Well. What if he didn't?"

"Richard, you are inexcusable." Aunt Charlotte ruffled her feathers and dashed into the fray. Whereat Richard exploded.

"Gee, ain't it fierce? Ain't it, now! How's a fellow to learn about cars and engines and things if folks won't ever give him a chance to try 'em out? And I've got to find out how to do things and make things and run things; I've _got_ to know!"

His solid fists clinched; his voice skittered comically from a ba.s.s bellow to an angry treble crow. I choked. He was so exactly like a pin-feathered young Shanghai rooster, hotly contending his right to live his own life, against two glum, elderly hens. But that didn't deter me from marching him over to Madam Hallowell's later.

"Nonsense, my dear Miss Edith!" Thus Doctor Lake, just a bit too Olympian in large white waistcoat and eminent calm. "It was my chauffeur's doing. He will answer to me. I beg you, give the matter no more thought."

None the less, in his bland eye lurked a yearning to seize on Buster and boil him in oil. Buster saw that look.

"Grown-up folks are so darn stingy!" he mused bitterly as we went away.

He aimed a vicious kick at the box hedge. "You'd think any man would be glad to let a fellow take his car to pieces and study it out, then test it for speed and endurance, 'specially when the fellow has never owned anything better than a measly little runabout in all his life. But no.

There he stands, all diked out like a cold boiled owl, with his eyes rolled up and his lip rolled out-'My chauffeur will answer to me.' When, all the time, he'd lick the hide off me if he just dasted. Old stuffed s.h.i.+rt!"

"You need not speak so disrespectfully-"

"I wouldn't-if folks wasn't so disrespectful to me." His eyes began to flash again, his sullen under-lip to quiver. "'Learn it all,' they tell you. 'Investigate every useful art.' That's what everybody pours down your throat, teachers, and relations, an' all the rest of 'em. How do they s'pose I'm going to learn about things if they lock everything up away from me? And I've got to find out about things; I've _got_ to know!"

I didn't say anything. What was the use? You might as well scold an active young dynamo for wanting to spark. But mild little Aunt Charlotte was quite sputtery, for her.

"Isabella and her Octavius have reared their child to have the tastes of a common mechanic. It is too ridiculous. Richard needs to understand problems of finance, not of cogs and axle-grease. If only American parents would adopt the German methods! _They_ teach their children what is best for them to know. They don't permit their young people to waste time and money on wild-goose flights."

"N-no." I s.h.i.+vered a little. For some reason, the annual percentage of school-boy suicides in Prussia flashed through my mind. When you multiplied that by a nation- "But perhaps it's as well that we give our boys more rope."

"To hang themselves with?" sniffed Aunt Charlotte. I subsided.

So did Buster, for some weeks-weeks so peaceful, they were all but sinister. Across the ocean, a harebrained student murdered a reigning duke and his d.u.c.h.ess. It made the newspapers very unpleasant reading for several days. Across the harbor, the yacht-club gave the most charming dinner dance of the year. Down East Gloucester way, a lank and close-mouthed youth from Salem had set up a shack of a hangar and was giving brief and gaspy flights to the summer populace at five dollars a head. Whereat Buster gravitated to East Gloucester, as the needle to the pole. He bribed Louisiana to give him his breakfast at seven; he s.n.a.t.c.hed a mouthful of lunch in the village; he seldom reached home before dusk.

"Richard, you are not spending your allowance in aeroplane rides?"

"Say, listen, Cousin Edie. Where'd I get the coin for five-dollar jitney trips? I'm overdrawn sixty dollars on my allowance now, all on account of that beanery down the harbor-"

"The beanery? You haven't eaten sixty dollars' worth of beans!"

Buster jumped. He turned a sheepish red.

"Gosh, I forgot. Why-well, you see, the boss at that joint has just put in the grandest big new oven ever-iron and cement and a steam-chamber and everything. One day last week he had to go to Boston, and I asked him to let me fire it for him. It was the most interesting thing, to watch that steam-gauge hop up, only she hopped too fast. So I shut off the drafts, but I wasn't quick enough. There were forty-eight pounds of beans in the roaster, and they burnt up, crocks and all, and-well, between us, we hadn't put enough water in the boiler. So she sort of-er-well, she blew up. I wired dad for the money, and he came across by return mail. Dad's a pretty good sport. But I'll bet he doesn't loosen up again before Labor Day."

Well, I was sorry for the baker. But Buster, penniless, was far less formidable than Buster with money in his purse.

The green and golden days flowed on. The North Sh.o.r.e was its loveliest.

But the newspapers persisted in being unpleasant. Serbian complications, amazing p.r.o.nunciamentos, rumors that were absurd past credence; then, appalling, half-believed, the winged horror-tale of Belgium. Then, in a trice, our bridge-tables were pushed back, our yacht dinners forgotten.

Frowning, angrily bewildered, we were all making hurried trips to the village and heckling the scared young telegraph-operator with messages and money that must be cabled to marooned kinsfolk at Liverpool or Hamburg or Ostend. "This moment! Can't you _see_ how important it is?" A day or so more and we were all buying shoes and clothes for little children and rus.h.i.+ng our first boggled first-aid parcels to the wharf.

And, in the midst of all that dazed hurly, up rose Mrs. John B.

Connable. Aglow with panicky triumph, she flung wide the gates of Dawn Towers, her spandy-new futurist palace, to the first bazaar of the Belgian relief!

As one impious damsel put it, Belgium's extremity was Mrs. Connable's opportunity. Seven weary years, with the grim patience of stalwart middle age and seventeen millions, has Mrs. John B. labored to mount the long, ice-coated stair that leads from a Montana cow-camp to the thresholds of Beacon Hill. Six cruel seasons have beheld her falter and slip back. But on this, the seventh, by this one soaring scramble, she gained the topmost gliddery round. A bazaar for the Belgians? For once, something new. And Dawn Towers, despite its two-fisted chatelaine, was said to be a poet's dream.

Well, we went. All of us. Even to Madam Hallowell, in lilac chiffon and white fox fur, looking like the Wicked Fairy done by Drian; even to Aunt Charlotte, wearing the Curtice emeralds, her sainted nose held at an angle that suggested burnt flannel. I'll say for Mrs. Connable that she did it extremely well. The great, beautiful house was thrown open from turret to foundation-stone. Fortune-tellers lurked in gilded tents; gay contadinas sang and sold their laces-the prettiest girls from the Folies at that; Carli's band, brought from New York to play fox-trots; cleverest surprise of all, the arrival, at five o'clock, of a lordly limousine conveying three heavenborn "princ.i.p.als," a haughty young director in puttees, a large camera. Would Mrs. Connable's guests consent to group themselves upon the beach as background for the garden-party scene of "The Princess Patricia"-with Angela Meadow, from the Metropolitan, as the Princess, if you please, and Lou-Galuppi himself as the villain?

Mrs. Connable's guests would. All the world loves a camera, I reflected, as I observed Madam Hallowell drift languidly to the centre-front, the chill Cadwalladers from Westchester drape themselves unwittingly but firmly in the foreground, the D'Arcy Joneses stand laughingly holding hands in the very jaws of the machine. But Doctor Lake was the strategist of the hour. Chuckling in innocent mirth, he chatted with the radiant Angela until the director's signal brought the villain swaggering from the side-lines; then, gracefully dismayed, he stepped back at least six inches. If the camera caught Angela at all, the doctor would be there-every eminent inch of him.

"Ready-camera!"

The joyous chatter stilled. On every face fell smug sweetness, as a chrism. Clickety-click, click-click-

Then, amazingly, another sound mingled with that magic tick, rose, drowned it to silence-the high, snarling whine of a swift-coming aeroplane.

"Keep your places, please! Eyes right!"

n.o.body heard him. Swung as on one pivot, the garden-party turned toward the harbor, mazed, agape. Across that silver water, flying so low its propeller flashed through diamond spray, straight toward the crowd on the beach it came-the aeroplane from East Gloucester.

"There, I _knew_ he'd b.u.t.t in just at the wrong minute! I ordered him for six, sharp!" Mrs. Connable's voice rang hotly through the silence.

"Hi, there! Land farther down the beach; we ain't ready for you. Go on, I tell you! Oh, oh, my gracious goodness me! He's a-headin' right on top of us-"

That was all anybody heard. For in that second, pandemonium broke. The great, screaming bird drove down upon us with the speed of light, the blast of a howitzer sh.e.l.l. Whir-r-rip! The big marquee collapsed like a burst balloon. Cras.h.!.+ One landing-wheel grazed the band-stand; it tipped over like a fruit-basket, spilling out shrieking men. Through a dizzy mist I saw the garden-party, all its pose forgot, scuttle like terrified ants. I saw the scornful Cadwalladers leap behind an infant pine. I saw D'Arcy Jones seize his wedded wife by her buxom shoulders and fling her in front of him, a living s.h.i.+eld. I saw-can I believe?-the august Doctor Lake, pop-eyed and shrieking, gallop headlong across the beach and burrow madly in the low-tide sands. I saw-but how could my spinning brain set down those thousand spectacles?

However, one eye saw it all-and set it down in cold, relentless truth-the camera. True to his faith, that camera-man kept on grinding, even when the monster all but grazed his head.

Then, swifter even than that goblin flight, it was all over. With a deafening thud, the aeroplane grounded on a bed of early asters. Out of the observer's seat straddled a lean, tall shape-the aviator. From the pilot's sheath leaped a white-faced, stammering boy. White to his lips; but it was the pallor of a white flame, the light of a glory past all words.

"H'lo, Cousin Edie! See me bring her across the harbor? Some little pilot!" Then, as if he saw for the first that gurgling mult.i.tude, the wrecked tent, the over-turned band-stand: "Gee, that last puff of wind was more than I'd counted on. But she landed like thistledown, just the same. Just thistledown!"

I'll pa.s.s over the next few hours. And why attempt to chronicle the day that followed? Bright and early, I set forth to scatter olive-branches like leaves of Vallombrosa. Vain to portray the icy calm of the Misses Cadwallader, the smiling masks which hid the rage of the D'Arcy Joneses.

Hopeless to depict the bland, amused aplomb of Doctor Lake. To hear him graciously disclaim all chagrin was to doubt the word of one's own vision. Could I have dreamed the swoop of that mighty bird, the screech of a panic-stricken fat man galloping like a mad hippopotamus for the shelter of the surf?

As for Mrs. John B. Connable-h.e.l.l hath no fury like the woman who has fought and bled for years to mount that treacherous flight; who, gaining the last giddy step, feels, in one sick heartbeat, the ladder give way from under. I went from that tearful and belligerent empress feeling as one who has gazed into the dusk fires of the Seventh Ledge.

"We'll have to give a dinner for her, and ask the Cadwalladers and Cousin Sue Curtice and the Salem Bronsons. That will pacify her, if anything can." Thus Aunt Charlotte, with irate gloom. There are times when Aunt Charlotte's deep spiritual nature betrays a surprising grasp of mundane things.

"Especially if we can get that French secretary, and Madam Hallowell.

Now I'm off to soothe the aviator. Where did I put my check-book?"

The aviator stood at his hangar door, winding a coil of wire. His lean body looked feather-light in its taut khaki; under the leathern helmet, his narrow, dark eyes glinted like the eyes of a falcon hooded against the sun. Blank, unsmiling, he heard my maunder of explanation. Somehow his cool aloofness daunted me a bit. But when I fumbled for my checkbook, he flashed alive.