In the Sweet Dry and Dry Part 9

The dreaded Bishop sat at an immense ebony flat-topped desk. The room was furnished like his mind, that is to say, spa.r.s.ely, and without any southern exposure. A peculiarly terrifying feature of the scene was that the top of the desk was completely bare, not a single paper lay on it. Remembering his own desk in the newspaper office, Bleak felt that this was unnatural and monstrous. He noticed a breathoscope on the mantelpiece, with its sensitive needle trembling on the scaled dial which read thus:--

As he watched the indicator oscillate rapidly on the dial, and finally subside uncertainly at zero, he thanked heaven that they had indulged in no psychic grogs that day.

The Bishop's black beard foamed downward upon the desk like a gloomy cataract. Quimbleton for a moment was almost abashed, and regretted that he had not thought to whitewash his own dingy thicket.

Bishop Chuff's piercing and cruel gaze stabbed all three. He ignored Theodolinda with contempt. His disdain was so complete that (as the unhappy girl said afterward) he seemed more like a younger brother than a father. There were no chairs: they were forced to stand. In a small mirror fastened to the edge of his desk the sneering potentate could note the dial-reading of the instrument without turning. He watched the reflected needle flicker and come to rest.

"So, Mr. Quimbleton," he said, in a harsh and untuned voice, "You come comparatively sober. Strange that you should choose to be unintoxicated when you face the greatest ordeal of your life."

The savage irony of this angered Quimbleton.

"One touch of liquor makes the whole world kin," he said. "I a.s.sure you I have no desire to claim kins.h.i.+p with your bitter and intolerant soul."

"Ah?" said the Bishop, with mock politeness. "You relieve me greatly. I had thought you desired to claim me as father-in-law."

"Oh, Parent!" cried Theodolinda; "How can you be so cruel? Sarcasm is such a low form of humor."

"I am not trying to be humorous," said the Bishop grimly. "You, who were once the apple of my eye, are now only an apple of discord. You, whom I considered such a promising child, are now a breach of promise.

You have sucked my blood. You are a Vampire."

"The Vampire on whom the sun never sets," whispered Quimbleton to the terrified girl, encouraging her as she shrank against him.

"This is no time for jest," said the Bishop angrily. "You said you had a matter of vital import to lay before me. Make haste. And remember that you are here only on sufferance. I shall be pitiless. I shall scourge the evil principle you represent from the face of the earth."

"We do not fear your threats," said Quimbleton stoutly. "We are not alarmed by your frown."

He was, greatly, but he was sparring for time to put his thoughts in order. He started to say "Uneasy lies the head that wears a frown,"

which was an aphorism of his own he thought highly of, but Theodolinda checked him. She knew that her father detested puns. It was perhaps his only virtue.

"Bishop Chuff," said Quimbleton, "perhaps you are not aware of the strength and tenacity of the sentiment we represent. I a.s.sure you that if you underestimate the power of the millions of thirsty mouths that speak through us, you will rue the consequences. Trouble is brewing--"

"Neither trouble, nor anything else, is brewing nowadays," said the terrible Bishop.

Theodolinda saw that Quimbleton was losing ground by his incorrigible habit of talking before he said anything. She broke in impetuously, and explained the plan for the Perpetual Souse. Her father listened to the end with his cold, forbidding gaze, while the sensitive needle of the recording instrument on the mantel danced and wagged in agitation.

"So this is your scheme, is it?" he said. "Abandoned offspring, you deserve the gallows."

"Wait a moment," said Quimbleton. "Now comes the other side of the argument. If you grant us this concession we in turn will put you in possession of a magnificent idea. You think that you have prohibited everything. Your vetoes c.u.mber the earth. But there is still one thing you have forgotten to prohibit."

"What is it?" said the Bishop coldly. His hard face was unmoved, but his eyes brightened a trifle.

"There is one thing you have forgotten to prohibit," said Quimbleton solemnly. "I can hardly conceive how it escaped you. The one thing that hara.s.ses human beings over the whole civilized world. The one thing which, if you were to abolish it, would make your name, foul as that now is, blessed in the ears of men. Oh, the joy of still having something to prohibit! The unmixed bliss and high privilege of the vetoing function! I envy you, from my heart, in still having something to forbid."

The Bishop stirred uneasily in his chair. "What is it?" he said.

Quimbleton watched him with a steady and slightly annoying smile.

"I like to dwell in imagination upon your surprise when you realize what you have overlooked. It seems so simple! To abolish, prohibit, banish, and remove, at one swoop, the chief preoccupation of mankind!

The simple and high-minded felicity of still having something prohibitable subject to your omnipotent legislation! But there, I dare say I am wrong. Probably you are weary of prohibiting things."

Quimbleton made a motion to his companions as though to leave the room.

The Bishop leaped to his feet, with curiously mingled anger and eagerness on his face. "Stop!" he cried. "You can't mean laughter? I abolished that some weeks ago. I don't believe there is anything left--"

"How quaint it is," said Quimbleton (as though talking to himself), "that it is always the plainly obvious that eludes! But, of course, the reason you have not abolished this matter before is that to do so would wholly alter and undermine the habits of the race. Nothing would be the same as before. I daresay a good deal of misery would be caused in the long run, who knows? Ah well, it seems a pity you forgot it--"

"h.e.l.l's bells!" roared the Bishop, bringing his fist down on the desk with fury--"What is it? Let me get at it!"

"I should be sorry to marry into a profane family," was Quimbleton's reply, moving toward the door.

The Bishop chewed the end of his beard with a crunching sound. This unpleasant gesture caused a tingle to pa.s.s along Bleak's sensitive spine, already strained to painful nervous tension. The office of the Perpetual Souse hung in the balance.

"Look here," said Bishop Chuff, "If I let you have your way about the--the Permanent Exhibit, will you tell me what it is I have forgotten to prohibit?"

"With pleasure," said Quimbleton. "Will you put it down in black and white, please?"

He secured the Bishop's signature to a doc.u.ment giving instructions for the necessary legislation to be pa.s.sed. Folding the precious paper in his pocket, Quimbleton faced the black-browed Bishop. He held Theodolinda by the hand.

"I am sorry," he said, "that I should have forgotten to bring a ring with me. If I had done so, you might have married us here and now. At least you will not refuse us your blessing?"

"Blessings have been abolished," said Chuff in a voice of exasperation.

"Now inform me what it is that I have forgotten to condemn."

"Work!" cried Quimbleton, and the three ran hastily from the room.

CHAPTER IX

THE ELECTION

In the days following Quimbleton's coup Chuff was in seclusion. It was rumored that he was ill; it was rumored that the sounds of breaking furniture had been heard by the neighbors on Caraway Street. But at any rate the Bishop lived up to his word. Orders over his signature went to Congress, and vast sums of money were appropriated immediately for

The establishment and maintenance of a national park with suitable buildings and appurtenances wherein might be maintained an elected individual in a state of freedom, with access to alcoholic beverages, in order that successive generations might view for themselves the devastating effects of alcohol upon the human system.

No political campaign was ever contested with more zeal and zest than that which led up to the election of the Perpetual Souse. Life had grown rather dreary under the innumerable prohibitions of the Chuff regime, and the citizens welcomed the excitement of the campaign as a notable diversion. Quimbleton appointed himself chairman of the committee to nominate Bleak, and the editor (acting under his friend's instructions) had hardly begun to deny vigorously that he had any intention of being a candidate before he found himself plunged into a bewildering vortex of meetings, speeches, and confessions of faith.

Marching clubs, properly outfitted with two-quart silk tiles and frock coats, were spatting their way plumply down the Boulevard. Torchlight processions tinted the night; ward picnics strewed the sh.e.l.ls of hard-boiled eggs on the lawns of suburban amus.e.m.e.nt parks, while Bleak, very ill at ease, was kissing adhesive babies and autographing tissue napkins and smiling horribly as he whirled about with the grandmothers in the agony of the carrousel. More than once, reeling with the endless circuit of a painted merry-go-round charger, the perplexed candidate became so confused that he kissed the paper napkin and autographed the baby.

He found Quimbleton a stern ringleader. Virgil was not satisfied with the old-fas.h.i.+oned method of stumping the country from the taff-rail of a Pullman car, and insisted on strapping Bleak into the c.o.c.kpit of a biplane and flying him from city to city. They would land in some central square, and the candidate, deafened and half-frozen, would stammer a few halting remarks. He felt it rather keenly that Quimbleton looked down on his lack of oratorical gift, and it was a frequent humiliation that when words did not prosper on his tongue his impatient pilot would turn on the motors and zoom off into s.p.a.ce in the very middle of a sentence.

Nevertheless, the campaign went famously. Bleak had one considerable advantage in being comparatively unknown. He had never permitted himself the luxury of making enemies: except for a few ex-reporters who had once worked on the Balloon he had not a foe in the world.

Quimbleton had been eager to import a covey of gunmen from other cities, but when these arrived there was really nothing for them to do.

They were glad to accept jobs from Bishop Chuff, and were well paid for waylaying and sniping the few grapes and apples that had escaped previous pogroms.

There was only one plank in Bleak's modest platform, but he walked it so happily that it began to look like a gangplank leading onto the s.h.i.+p of State. He expressed his doctrine very agreeably in his speech accepting the party nomination; though credit should be given to Theodolinda, who had a.s.sisted him by a little private seance before he addressed the convention.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he said (looking as he spoke at one of the handbills announcing his candidacy for the dignity of mouthpiece of the nation)--"I issue dodgers, but I never dodge the issue. I can Take It or Let It Alone, but frankly, I prefer to Take It. I hope I speak modestly: yet candor insists that both by past training and present inclination I feel myself fitted to deal with the problems of this exalted office. If elected to this high place of trust I shall regard myself solely as the servant of the public, solely as the representative of your sovereign will. As I raise the gla.s.s or peel the lemon, I shall not act in any individual capacity. My own good cheer (I beg you to believe) will be my last thought. I shall remember, in every gesture and every gulp, that my thirst is in reality the Thirst of a Nation, delegated to me by ballot; that my laughter and song (if things should go so far) are truly the mirth and music of a proud people expressing themselves through me. I shall be at all times accessible to my fellow-men, solicitous to hear their counsel and command. Believing (as I do) in moderation, yet I should not dream of permitting private sentiment to interfere with public interest when more violent measures should seem desirable.