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Bunker Bean

by Harry Leon Wilson · English · Gutenberg #15743 · 429,594 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Bunker Bean

Author: Harry Leon Wilson

Illustrator: Frederic Rodrigo Gruger


        
Release date: May 2, 2005 [eBook #15743]
                Most recently updated: December 14, 2020

Language: English

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BUNKER BEAN

by

HARRY LEON WILSON

Author of _The Spenders_, _The Lions of the Lord_, _The Boss of Little
Arcady_, etc.

Illustrated By F. R. Gruger

Garden City ... New York
Doubleday, Page & Company

1913







[Illustration: "Every time I get alone I just giggle myself into
spasms. Isn't it the funniest?"]




To H.G. WELLS




ILLUSTRATIONS


"Every time I get alone I just giggle myself into spasms. Isn't it
the funniest?"

It was a friendly young face he saw there, but troubled

"I feared he was discommoding you," ventured the Countess, elegantly
apologetic

"Daughter!" said Breede with half a glance at the flapper

In that instant Bean read the flapper's look, the look she had
puzzled him with from their first meeting

"Oh, put up your trinkets!" said Bean, with a fine affectation of
weariness

Thereafter, until late at night, the red car was trailed by the
taxi-cab

"Lumbago!" said Bean, both hands upon the life-belt




BUNKER BEAN




I


Bunker Bean was wishing he could be different. This discontent with
himself was suffered in a moment of idleness as he sat at a desk on a
high floor of a very high office-building in "downtown" New York. The
first correction he would have made was that he should be "well over six
feet" tall. He had observed that this was the accepted stature for a
hero.

And the name, almost any name but "Bunker Bean!" Often he wrote good
ones on casual slips of paper and fancied them his; names like
Trevellyan or Montressor or Delancey, with musical prefixes; or a good,
short, beautiful, but dignified name like "Gordon Dane." He liked that
one. It suggested something. But Bean! And Bunker Bean, at that! True,
it also suggested something, but this had never been anything desirable.
Just now the people in the outside office were calling him "Boston."

"Gordon Dane," well over six feet, abundant dark hair, a bit inclined to
"wave" and showing faint lines of gray "above the temples"; for Bean
also wished to be thirty years old and to have learned about women; in
short, to have suffered. Gordon Dane's was a face before which the eyes
of women would fall in half-frightened, half-ecstatic subjection, and
men would feel the inexplicable magnetism of his presence. He would be
widely remarked for his taste in dress. He would don stripes or checks
without a trace of timidity. He would quail before no violence of colour
in a cravat.

A certain insignificant Bunker Bean was not like this. With a soul
aspiring to stripes and checks that should make him a man to be looked
at twice in a city street, he lacked courage for any but the quietest
patterns. Longing for the cravat of brilliant hue, he ate out his heart
under neutral tints. Had he not, in the intoxication of his first free
afternoon in New York, boldly purchased a glorious thing of silk
entirely, flatly red, an article to stamp its wearer with distinction;
and had he not, in the seclusion of his rented room, that night hidden
the flaming thing at the bottom of a bottom drawer, knowing in his
sickened soul he dared not flaunt it?

Once, truly, had he worn it, but only for a brief stroll on a rainy
Sunday, with an entirely opaque raincoat buttoned closely under his
chin. Even so, he fancied that people stared through and through that
guaranteed fabric straight to his red secret. The rag burned on his
breast. Afterward it was something to look at beyond the locked door;
perhaps to try on behind drawn shades, late of a night. And how little
Gordon Dane would have made of such a matter! Floated in Bean's mind the
refrain of a clothing advertisement. "The more advanced dressers will
seek this fashion." "Something dignified yet different!" Gordon Dane
would be "an advanced dresser."

But if you have been afraid of nearly everything nearly all your life,
how then? You must be "dignified" only. The brave only may be
"different." It was all well enough to gaze at striking fabrics in
windows; but to buy and to wear openly, and get yourself pointed
at--laughed at! Again sounded the refrain of the hired bard of dress.
"_It is cut to give the wearer the appearance of perfect physical
development. And the effect so produced so improves his form that he
unconsciously strives to attain the appearance which the garment gives
him; he expands his chest, draws in his waist and stands erect._"

A rustling of papers from the opposite side of the desk promised a
diversion of his thoughts. Bean was a hireling and the person who
rustled the papers was his master, but the youth bestowed upon the great
man a look of profound, albeit not unkindly, contempt. It could be seen,
even as he sat in the desk-chair, that he was a short man; not an inch
better than Bean, there. He was old. Bean, when he thought of the
matter, was satisfied to guess him as something between fifty and
eighty. He didn't know and didn't care how many might be the years of
little Jim Breede. Breede was the most negligible person he knew.

He was nearly nothing, in Bean's view, if you came right down to it.
Besides being of too few inches for a man and unspeakably old, he was
unsightly. Nothing of the Gordon Dane about Breede. The little hair left
him was an atrocious foggy gray; never in order, never combed, Bean
thought. The brows were heavy, and still curiously dark, which made them
look threatening. The eyes were the coldest of gray, a match for the
hair in colour, and set far back in caverns. The nose was blunt, the
chin a mere knobby challenge, and between them was the unloveliest
moustache Bean had ever been compelled to observe; short, ragged, faded
in streaks. And wrinkles--wrinkles wheresoever there was room for them:
across the forehead that lost itself in shining yellow scalp; under the
eyes, down the cheeks, about the traplike mouth. He especially loathed
the smaller wrinkles that made tiny squares and diamonds around the back
of Breede's neck.

Sartorially, also, Bean found Breede objectionable. He forever wore the
same kind of suit. The very same suit, one might have thought, only Bean
knew it was renewed from time to time; it was the kind called "a decent
gray," and it had emphatically not been cut "to give the wearer the
appearance of perfect physical development." So far as Bean could
determine the sole intention had been to give the wearer plenty of room
under the arms and at the waist. Bean found it disgusting--a man who had
at least enough leisure to give a little thought to such matters.

Breede's shoes offended him. Couldn't the man pick out something natty,
a shapelier toe, buttons, a neat upper of tan or blue cloth--patent
leather, of course? But nothing of the sort; a strange, thin, nameless
leather, never either shiny or quite dull, as broad at the toe as any
place, no buttons; not even laces; elastic at the sides! Not _shoes_, in
any dressy sense. Things to be pulled on. And always the same, like the
contemptible suits of clothes.

He might have done a little something with his shirts, Bean thought; a
stripe or crossed lines, a bit of gay colour; but no! Stiff-bosomed
white shirts, cuffs that "came off," cuffs that fastened with hideous
metallic devices that Bean had learned to scorn. A collar too loose, a
black satin cravat, _and_ no scarf-pin; not even a cluster of tiny
diamonds.

From Breede and his ignoble attire Bean shifted the disfavour of his
glance to Breede's luncheon tray on the desk between them. Breede's
unvarying luncheon consisted of four crackers composed of a substance
that was said, on the outside of the package, to be "predigested," one
apple, and a glass of milk moderately inflated with seltzer. Bean
himself had fared in princely fashion that day on two veal cutlets
bathed in a German sauce of oily richness, a salad of purple cabbage, a
profusion of vegetables, two cups of coffee and a German pancake that of
itself would have disabled almost any but the young and hardy, or,
presumably, a German.

Bean guessed the cost of Breede's meal to be a bit under eight cents.
His own had cost sixty-five. He despised Breede for a petty economist.

Breede glanced up from his papers to encounter in Bean's eyes only a
look of respectful waiting.

"Take letter G.S. Hubbell gen' traffic mag'r lines Wes' Chicago dear sir
your favour twen'th instant--"

The words came from under that unacceptable moustache of Breede's like a
series of exhausts from a motorcycle. Bean recorded them in his
note-book. His shorthand was a marvel of condensed neatness. Breede had
had trouble with stenographers; he was not easy to "take." He spoke
swiftly, often indistinctly, and it maddened him to be asked to repeat.
Bean had never asked him to repeat, and he inserted the a's and the's
and all the minor words that Breede could not pause to utter. The letter
continued:

"--mus' have report at your earl's' convenience of earnings and expenses
of Grand Valley branch for las' four months with engineer's est'mate of
prob'le cost of repairs and maintenance for nex' year--"

Breede halted to consult a document. Bean glanced up with his look of
respectful waiting. Then he glanced down at his notes and wrote two
other lines of shorthand. Breede might have supposed these to record the
last sentence he had spoken, but one able to decipher the notes could
have read: "That is one rotten suit of clothes. For God's sake, why not
get some decent shoes next time--"

The letter was resumed. It came to its end with a phrase that almost won
the difficult respect of Bean. Of a rumour that the C. & G.W. would
build into certain coveted territory Breede exploded: "I can imagine
nothing of less consequence!" Bean rather liked the phrase and the way
Breede emitted it. That was a good thing to say to some one who might
think you were afraid. He treasured the words; fondled them with the
point of his pencil. He saw himself speaking them pithily to various
persons with whom he might be in conflict. There was a thing now that
Gordon Dane might have hurled at his enemies a dozen times in his
adventurous career. Breede must have something in him--but look at his
shiny white cuffs with the metal clasps, on the desk at his elbow!

Bean had lately read of Breede in a newspaper that "Conservative judges
estimate his present fortune at a round hundred million." Bean's own
stipend was thirty dollars a week, but he pitied Breede. Bean could
learn to make millions if he should happen to want them; but poor old
Breede could never learn to _look_ like anybody.

There you have Bunker Bean at a familiar, prosaic moment in an afternoon
of his twenty-third year. But his prosaic moments are numbered. How few
they are to be! Already the door of Enchantment has swung to his scared
touch. The times will show a scar or two from Bean. Bean the prodigious!
The choicely perfect toy of Destiny at frolic! Bean the innocent--the
monstrous!

       *       *       *       *       *

Those who long since gave Bean up as an insoluble problem were denied
the advantages of an early association with him. Only an acquaintance
with his innermost soul of souls could permit any sane understanding of
his works, and this it is our privilege, and our necessity, to make, if
we are to comprehend with any sympathy that which was later termed his
"madness." The examination shall be made quickly and with all decency.

Let us regard Bean through the glass of his earliest reactions to an
environment that was commonplace, unstimulating, dull--the little wooden
town set among cornfields, "Wellsville" they called it, where he came
from out of the Infinite to put on a casual body.

Of Bean at birth, it may be said frankly that he was not imposing. He
was not chubby nor rosy; had no dimples. His face was a puckered protest
at the infliction of animal life. In the white garments conventional to
his age he was a distressing travesty, even when he gurgled. In the nude
he was quite impossible to all but the most hardened mothers, and he was
never photographed thus in a washbowl. Even his own mother, before he
had survived to her one short year, began to harbour the accursed
suspicion that his beauty was not flawless nor his intelligence supreme.
To put it brutally, she almost admitted to herself that he was not the
most remarkable child in all the world. To be sure, this is a bit less
incredible when we know that Bean's mother, at his advent, thought far
less highly of Bean's father than on the occasion, seven years before,
when she had consented to be endowed with all his worldly goods. In the
course of those years she came to believe that she had married beneath
her, a fact of which she made no secret to her intimates and least of
all to her mate, who, it may be added, privately agreed with her. Alonzo
Bean, after that one delirious moment at the altar, had always
disbelieved in himself pathetically. Who was he--to have wed a Bunker!

When little Bean's years began to permit small activities it was seen
that his courage was amazing: a courage, however, that quickly
overreached itself, and was sapped by small defeats. Tumbles down the
slippery stairway, burns from the kitchen stove, began it. When a prized
new sailor hat was blown to the centre of a duck-pond he sought to
recover it without any fearsome self-communing. If faith alone could
uphold one, Bean would have walked upon the face of the waters that day.
But the result was a bald experience of the sensations of the drowning,
and a lasting fear of any considerable body of water. Ever after it was
an adventure not to be lightly dared to cross even the stoutest bridge.

And flying! A belief that we can fly as the birds is surely not
unreasonable at the age when he essayed it. Nor should a mere failure to
rise from the ground destroy it. One must leap from high places, and
Bean did so. The roof of the chicken house was the last eminence to have
an experimental value. On his bed of pain he realized that we may not
fly as the birds; nor ever after could he look without tremors from any
high place.

Such domestic animals as he encountered taught him further fear. Even
the cat became contemptuous of him, knowing itself dreaded. That
splendid courage he was born with had faded to an extreme timidity.
Before physical phenomena that pique most children to cunning endeavour,
little Bean was aghast.

And very soon to this burden of fear was added the graver problems of
human association. From being the butt of capricious physical forces he
became a social unit and found this more terrifying than all that had
gone before. At least in the physical world, if you kept pretty still,
didn't touch things, didn't climb, stayed away from edges and windows
and water and cows and looked carefully where you stepped, probably
nothing would hurt you. But these new terrors of the social world lay in
wait for you; clutched you in moments of the most inoffensive enjoyment.

His mother seemed to be director-general of these monsters, a ruthless
deviser of exquisite tortures. There were unseasonable washings,
dressings, combings and curlings--admonitions to be "a little
gentleman." Loathsomely garbed, he was made to sit stiffly on a chair in
the presence of falsely enthusiastic callers; or he was taken to call on
those same callers and made to sit stiffly again while they, with
feverish affectations of curiosity, asked him what his name was,
something they already knew at least as well as he did; made to overhear
their ensuing declarations that the cat had got his tongue, which he
always denied bitterly until he came to see through the plot and learned
to receive the accusation in stony silence.

Boys of his own age took hold of him roughly and laid him in the dust,
jeeringly threw his hat to some high roof, spat on his new shoes. Even
little girls, divining his abjectness, were prone to act rowdyish with
him. And this especially made him suffer. He comprehended, somehow, that
it was ignoble for a man child to be afraid of little girls.

Money was another source of grief. Not an exciting thing in itself, he
had yet learned that people possessing desirable objects would insanely
part with them for money. Then came one of the Uncle Bunkers from over
Walnut Shade way, who scowled at him when leaving and gave him a dime.
He voiced a wish to exchange this for sweets with a certain madman in
the village who had no understanding of the value of his stock. His
mother demurred; not alone because candy was unwholesome, but because
the only right thing to do with money was to "save" it. And his mother
prevailed, even though his father coarsely suggested that all the candy
he could ever buy with Bunker money wouldn't hurt him none. The mother
said that this was "low," and the father retorted with equal lowness
that a rigid saving of all Bunker-given money wouldn't make no one a
"Croosus," neither, if you come down to _that_.

It resulted in his being told that he could play freely with his dime
one whole afternoon before the unexciting process of saving it began.
Well enough, that! He had grown too fearful of life to lose that coin
vulgarly out in the grass, as another would almost surely have done.

But he was beguiled in the mart of the money changers. To him, standing
safely within the front gate where nothing could burn him, fall upon
him, or chase him, "playing" respectfully with his new dime, came one of
slightly superior years and criminal instincts demanding to inspect the
treasure. The privilege was readily accorded, to arouse only contempt.
The piece was too small. The critic himself had a bigger one, and showed
it.

The two coins were held side by side. Bean was envious. The small coin
was of silver, the larger of copper, but he was no petty metallurgist.
He wanted to trade and said so. The newcomer assented with a large air
of benevolence, snatched the despised smaller coin and ran hastily
off--doubtless into a life of prosperous endeavour. And little Bean,
presently found by his mother crooning over a large copper cent, was
appalled by what followed. He had brought back "a bigger money," yet he
had done something infamous. It was the first gleam of an incapacity for
finance that was one day to become brilliant. He came to think money was
a pretty queer thing. People cheated it from you or took it away for
your own good. Anyhow, it was not a matter to bother about. You never
had it long enough.

Then there was language. Language was words, and politeness. Certain
phrases had to be mouthed to strangers, designed to imply a respect he
was generally far from feeling. This was bad enough, but what was worse
was that you couldn't use just any word you might hear, however
beautiful it sounded. For example, there was the compelling utterance he
got from the two merry gentlemen who passed him at the gate one day. So
jolly were they with their songs and laughter that he followed them a
little way to where they sat under a tree and drank turn by turn from a
bottle. His ear caught the thing and his lips shaped it so cunningly
that they laughed more than ever. He returned to his gate, intoning it;
the fresh voice rose higher as the phrasing became more familiar. Then
he was on the porch, chanting as a bard from the mere sensuous beauty of
the words. Through the open door he saw three faces. The minister and
his wife were calling on his mother.

The immediate happenings need not be set down. After events again became
coherent he was choking back sobs and listening to the minister pray for
those of unclean lips. And the minister prayed especially for one among
them that he might cease to pervert the right ways of the Lord. He knew
this to mean himself, for his mother glared over at him where he knelt;
he was grateful for the kneeling posture at that moment; he would not
have cared to sit. But all he had learned was that if you are going to
use words freely it had much better be when you are alone; this, and
that the minister had enormous feet, kneeling there with the toes of his
boots dug into the carpet.

No sooner was this language spectre laid than another confronted him;
that of class distinction. Certain people were "low" and must be shunned
by the high, unless the high perversely wished to be thought equally
low. His mother was again the arbiter. Her rule as applied to children
of his own age wrought but little hardship. She considered other
children generally to be low, and her son feared them for their deeds of
coarsely humorous violence. But he was never quite able to believe that
his father was an undesirable associate.

In all his young life he had found no sport so good as riding on the
seat beside that father while he drove the express wagon; a shiny green
wagon with a seat close to the front and a tilted rest for one's feet,
drawn by a grand black horse with a high-flung head, that would make
nothing of eating a small boy if it ever had the chance. You drove to
incoming trains, which was high adventure. But that was not all. You
loaded the wagon with packages from the trains and these you proceeded
to deliver in a leisurely and important manner. And some citizen of
weight was sure to halt the wagon and ask if that there package of stuff
from Chicago hadn't showed up yet, and it was mighty funny if it hadn't,
because it was ordered special. Whereupon you said curtly that you
didn't know anything about _that_--you couldn't fetch any package if it
hadn't come, could you? And you drove on with pleased indignation.

Yet so fine a game as this was held by his mother to be unedifying. He
would pick up a fashion of speech not genteel; he would grow to be a
"rough." She, the inconsequent fair, who had herself been captivated by
the driver of that very wagon, a gay blade directing his steed with a
flourish! To be sure, she had found him doing this in a mist of romance,
as one who must have his gallant fling at life before settling down. But
the mist had cleared. Alonzo Bean, no longer the gay blade, had settled
down upon the seat of his wagon. Once he had touched the guitar, sung an
acceptable tenor, jested with life. Now he drove soberly, sang no more,
and was concerned chiefly that his meals be served at set hours.

Small wonder, perhaps, that the mother should have feared the Bean and
laboured to cultivate the true Bunker strain in her offspring. Small
wonder that she kept him when she could from the seat of that wagon and
from the deadening influence of a father to whom Romance had broken its
fine promises. Little Bean distressed her enough by playing at
express-wagon in preference to all other games. He meant to drive a real
one when he was big enough--that is, at first. Secretly he aspired
beyond that. Some day, when he would not be afraid to climb to a higher
seat, he meant to drive the great yellow 'bus that also went to trains.
But that was a dream too splendid to tell.

In the summer of his seventh year, when his mother was finding it
increasingly difficult to supply antidotes for this poison, she even
consented to his visiting some other Beans. Unfortunately, there were no
Bunkers to harbour the child of one who had made so palpable a
mésalliance; but the elder Beans would gladly receive him, and they at
least had never driven express wagons.

To the little boy, who had no sense of their relationship, they were
persons named "Gramper" and "Grammer" whom he would do well to look down
upon because they were not Bunkers. So much he understood, and that he
was to ride in a stage and find them on a remote farm. It was to be the
summer of his first feat of daring since he had reached years of moral
discretion.

He was still so timid at the beginning of the wonderful journey that
when the kind old gentleman who drove the stage stopped his horses at a
point on the road where ripe red apples hung thickly on a tree, climbed
the fence and returned with a capacious hat full of the fruit, he was
chilled with horror at the crime. He had been freely told what was
thought of people, and what was done with them, who took things not
their own. Afraid to decline the two apples proffered by the robber, who
resumed his seat and ate brazenly of his loot, the solitary passenger
would still be no party to the outrage. He presently dropped his own two
apples over the back of the stage, and later, lacking the preacher's
courage, averred that he had eaten them--and couldn't eat another one,
thank you. He was not a little affected by the fine bravado with which
the old man ate apple after apple along miles of the road, full in the
gaze of passersby, to whom he nodded in open-faced greeting, as might an
honest man; but he was disappointed that there was no quick dragging to
a jail, nor smiting by the hand of God, which quite as often occurred,
if his mother and the minister knew anything about such matters. He
decided that at least the elderly reprobate would wake up in the dark
that very night and cry out in mortal agony under the realization of his
sin.

And yet he, the unsullied, the fine theoretical moralist, was to return
along that road a thief. A thief of parts, of depraved daring.

"Gramper" and "Grammer" proved to be an incredibly old couple, brown and
withered and gray of locks, shrunken in stature, slow and feeble in
action, and even rather timid themselves in their greetings. They made
much of this grandchild, but they were diffident. Slowly it came to his
knowledge that he was set up as a creature to adore. He enjoyed a
blissful new sensation of being deferred to. Thereafter he lorded it
over them, speaking in confident tones and making wild demands of
entertainment. His mother had been right. They were Beans and,
therefore, not much. He had brought his own silver napkin-ring and had
meant to show them how wonderfully he folded and rolled his napkin after
each meal. But it seemed they possessed no napkins whatever. Even his
mother hadn't thought anything so repulsive as that of these people. He
now boldly played the new game at table that his mother had frowned on.
This was to measure off your meat and potatoes into an equal number of
"bites," so that they would "come out even." If you were careful and
counted right, the thing could be done every time.

And for the first time in all his years he asked for more pie. Of course
this was anarchy. He knew well enough that one piece of pie is the
heaven-allotted portion; that no one, even partly a Bunker, should crave
beyond it; yet this fatuous old pair seemed to invite just that
licentiousness, and they watched him with doting eyes while he swaggered
through his second helping.

If more had been needed to show the Beanish lowness, it would have come
after the first supper, for Gramper and Grammer sat out on a little
vine-covered porch and smoked cob-pipes which they refilled at intervals
from a sack of tobacco passed companionably back and forth. His own
father was supposed to smoke but once a week, on Sunday, and then a
cigar such as even a male Bunker might reputably burn. But a _pipe_, and
between the lips of Grammer! She managed it with deftness and exhaled
clouds of smoke into the still air of evening with a relish most painful
to her amazed descendant. Yet she inspired him with an unholy ambition.

Asked the next day about the habit of smoking, Gramper said it was a bad
habit; that it stunted people and shortened their days. Both he and
Grammer were victims and warnings. Grammer had lumbago sometimes so you
wouldn't hardly believe any one could suffer that way and live. As for
Gramper himself, he had a cough brought on by tobacco that would carry
him off dead one of these days; yes, sir, just like that! And then, to
point his warning, Gramper coughed falsely. Even to the unpractised ear
of his grandson the cough did not ring true. It lacked poignance.

Late that afternoon, when both the old ones slept, he abstracted a pipe,
stuffed it with the rich black flakes and fled with matches to a nook of
charming secrecy in the midst of the lilac clump. Thence arose presently
clouds of smoke from the strongest tobacco money could buy.

At last he had dared something that didn't hurt him. He puffed
valiantly, blowing out the smoke even as Grammer had done. Up to a
certain moment his exaltation was intense, his scared soul expanding to
greater deeds.

Then he coughed rather alarmingly. But that was to be expected. He drew
in another breath of the stuff and coughed again. It was an honest
cough; no doubt about that. Perhaps Gramper's cough had been honest.
Perhaps the pipe he had selected was Gramper's own pipe, the one that
made coughs. He became conscious of something more than throaty
discomfort. Tiny beads of sweat bejewelled his brow, the lilac bush
began to revolve swiftly about him. He must have taken Grammer's pipe
after all--the one that led to lumbago. From revolving with a mere
horizontal motion the lilacs now began also to whirl vertically. He had
eaten a great deal at dinner....

A pallid remnant of himself declined supper that night. Never could he
sit at table again to eat of food. Gramper and Grammer were at first
alarmed and there was talk of sending for a veterinary, the nearest to a
professional man of medicine within miles and miles. But this talk died
out after Gramper had made a cursory examination of the big yard, with
especial attention to the lilac clump, where a pipe and other evidence
was noticed. After that they not only became strangely reassured, but
during their evening smoke on the little porch they often chuckled as if
relishing in secret some rare jest. It did not occur to Bean that they
laughed at him. He did not suspect that any one could laugh at a little
boy who had nearly died of lumbago. And he sat far away that night. The
sight of the fuming pipes made him dizzy. His lesson had told. He was
never to become an accomplished smoker.

His new spirit of adventure being thus blunted, he spent much of the
next day indoors. Grammer opened the "front room" for him, no small
concession, for this room was never put to vulgar use; rarely entered,
indeed, save once a month for dusting. Here he found an atmosphere in
keeping with his own chastened gloom, a musty air of mortality and
twilight.

Such poor elegance as could be achieved by Beans alone, unaided by any
Bunker, was here concentrated; a melodeon that groaned to his touch,
with the startling effect of a voice from a long-closed tomb; a
centre-table, luminous with varnish; gilded chairs in formal array;
portraits in gilded frames; and best of all, a "whatnot," a thing to fit
a corner, having many shelves and each shelf loaded with fascinating
objects that maddened one because they must not be touched. Varnished
pine-cones, flint arrow-heads, statuettes set on worsted mats, tiny
strange boxes rarely ornamented--you mustn't even shake them to see if
they contained anything--a small stuffed alligator in the act of
climbing a pole; a frail cup and saucer; a watch-chain fashioned from
Grammer's hair probably long before she fell into evil habits; a pink
china dog that simpered; a dusty black cigar with a gay red-and-gold
belt that had once upon a time been given to Gramper by a gentleman in
Chicago; a silver cup inscribed "Baby"; a ball of clearest glass, bigger
than any marble, with a white camel at its centre looking out
unconcernedly; a gilded horseshoe adorned with a bow of blue ribbon; an
array of treasure, in short, that made one suspect the Beans might have
been something after all if only they had tried.

Then on the lower shelf, when Grammer, relying on his honour, had left
the room, he made his wondrous discovery--a thing more beautiful than
ever he had dreamed of beauty; a thing that caught all the light in the
room and shot it back like a risen sun; a thing that excited, enchained,
satisfied with a satisfaction so deep that somehow it became pain. It
was a shell from the sea, polished to a dazzling brilliance of opal and
jade, amethyst and sapphire, delicately subdued, blending as the tints
in the western sky at sunset, soft, elusive, fluent. To his rapturously
shocked soul, it was a living thing. Instantly a spell was upon him;
long he gazed into its depths. It was more than deep; it was bottomless.
In some magic solution he there beheld himself and all the world;
imperiously it commanded his being. To his ear utterance came from that
lucent abyss, a murmur of voices, a confusion of tones; and then
invisible presences seemed to reach out greedy hands for him. It was no
place for a small boy, and his short legs twinkled as he fled.

Out in the friendly, familiar yard, he looked curiously about him,
basking in the sudden peace of it. A light wind stirred in the trees,
the sky was a void of blue, the scent of the lilacs came to him. That
was all reassuring; but something more came: a consciousness that he
could translate only as something vast, yet without shape or substance,
that opened to him, enfolded him, lifted him. It was a vision of
boundless magnitudes and himself among them--among them and with a power
he could put upon them. While it lasted he had a child's dim vision of
the knowledge that life would be big for him. He heard again the
confusion of voices, and his own among them, in far spacious places. He
always remembered this moment. In after years he knew it had been given
him then to run an eye along the line of his destiny.

The moment passed; his mind was again vacant. He picked a green apple
from the low tree under which he stood, bit into it, chewed without
enthusiasm, then hurled the remnant at an immature rabbit that he saw
regarding him from the edge of the lilac clump. The missile went wild,
but the rabbit fled and Bean pursued it. He was not afraid of a
rabbit--not of a young rabbit.

Returning from the chase, an unavailing one, he believed, only because
the game used quite unfair tactics of concealment, he remembered the
shell. A longing for possession seized him. It was more than that. The
thing was already his; had always been his. Yet he foresaw
complications. His ownership might be stupidly denied.

He went in to drag Grammer again before the whatnot, his mind sharpened
to subtlety.

"Are everything there yours?" He pointed to the top shelf.

"Everything!"

He lowered the pointing finger to the second shelf.

"Are everything there yours?"

"All of 'em!"

"Everything _there_?"

"Yes, yes!"

"And this one, too?"

"For the land's sake, yes!" averred Grammer of the choice contents of
the fourth shelf. She was baking pies and found herself a bit impatient
of this new game.

"Well, that's all, now!" and he dismissed her, not daring to inquire as
to the lower shelf. He had seen the way things were going--a sickening
way. But, having shrewdly stopped at the lower shelf, having prevented
Grammer from saying that those valuable objects were also hers, he had
still the right to come into his own. If the shell mightn't belong to
her it might belong to him; therefore it did belong to him; which, as
logic, is not so lame as it sounds. At least it is a workaday average.

It occurred to him once to ask for the shell bluntly. But reason forbade
this. It was not conceivable that any one having so celestial a treasure
would willingly part with it. When a thing was yours you took it, with
dignity, but quietly.

During the remainder of his stay he was not conspicuously an occupant of
the front room. No day passed that he did not contrive at least one look
at his wonderful shell, but he craftily did not linger there, nor did he
ever utter words about the thing, though these often crowded perilously
to his lips.

A later day brought a letter to Grammer, and Gramper delightedly let it
be known that the doctor at Wellsville had brought little Bean a fine
new baby brother. Bean himself was not delighted at this. He had
suffered the ministrations of that same doctor and he could imagine no
visit of his to result in a situation at all pleasant to any one
concerned. If he had brought a baby it was doubtless not a baby that
people would care to have around the house. He was not cheered when told
that he might now go home.

He meant to stay on, and said so.

But the second day brought another letter that had a curious effect on
Gramper and Grammer. Grammer cried, and Gramper told him with a strange,
grave manner that now he must go. He knew that he was not told why;
something, he overheard them agree, needn't be told "just yet." This was
rather exciting and reconciled him to leaving.

He crept softly down the narrow stairs that night, alleging, when called
to by Grammer, the need of a drink of water. When he returned his hands
trembled about the shell. Swiftly it went to the bottom of his small
box, his extra clothing, all his little belongings, being packed
cleverly about it.

They kissed him many times the next morning, and when he looked back
under the trees to where the old couple stood in front of the little
weather-beaten house he saw that Grammer was crying again. His
conscience hurt him a little; he wondered how they would get along
without the shell. But they couldn't have it, because it was his shell.

The stage turned after a bit, and suddenly there was Gramper at the
roadside, breathless after his run across a corner of the east forty.
Instantly he was in the clutch of a great fear; the loss had been
discovered. He sat frozen, waiting.

But Gramper only flourished the napkin-ring, and humorously taunted him
with not having packed everything, after all. The stage drove on, but
for the next mile his breathing was jerky.

Toward the end of the day-long ride--Gramper couldn't be running after
them _that_ far--he surrendered to his exultation, opened the box and
drew out the shell, fondling it, fascinated anew by its varying sheen,
excited by the freedom with which he now might touch it. Again he was
the sole passenger and he called to the old driver, to whom nothing at
all seemed to have happened because of his filching fruit.

"See my shell I found at Grammer's!"

But the old man was blind to beauty. He turned a careless eye upon the
treasure, turned it off again with a formless grunt that might have been
perfunctory praise, and resumed his half-muttered talk to himself,
marked by little oblique nods of triumph--some endless dispute that he
seemed to hold with an invisible opponent.

The owner of the shell was chilled but not daunted. There would surely
be others less benighted who must acclaim the shell's charm.

Presently he was at the familiar front gate and his father, looking
unusual, somehow, came to lift him down.

"See my shell I found at Grammer's!"

"Your mother is dead."

"See my shell I found at Grammer's!"

"Your mother is dead."

It was the sinister iteration by which he was stricken, rather than the
news itself. The latter only stunned. His hand in his father's, he went
up the walk and into the house. There were women inside, women who moved
with an effect of bustling stillness, the same women who had so often
asked him what his name was. They seemed to know it well enough now. He
was aware that his entrance created no little sensation. One of them
kissed him and told him not to cry, but he had no thought of crying. He
became aware of the thing in his hands.

"See my shell I found at Grammer's!"

The invitation was a general one. They looked in silence and some of
them moved about, and then through a doorway he saw in the next room an
object long and dark and shining set on two chairs.

He had never seen anything like it, but its suggestion was evil. The
women waited. Something seemed to be expected of some one. His father
led him into that room and lifted him up to see. His mother's face was
there under a glass. He could see that she wore her pretty blue dress,
and on one arm beside her was something covered with white. He called
softly to her.

"Mamma! Mamma!"

But she did not open her eyes.

Then he was out again where the people were, and the people seemed to
forget about him. He went to his little room under the sloping roof. He
had not let go of the shell and now, in the fading light from the low
window, he lost himself once more in its depths. Inwardly he knew that a
terror lurked near, but he had not yet felt it. Only when bedtime came
did the continued silence of his mother become meaningful. When he was
left alone, he cried for her, still clutching his shell.

The minister came the next day, and many people, and the minister talked
to them about his mother. The two Uncle Bunkers were there, grim,
hard-mouthed, glaring, for they hated each other as only brothers can
hate. He wondered if they would still let him be partly a Bunker, now
that his mother was gone. He wondered also at the novel consideration he
saw being shown to his father. Dressed in a new suit of black, with an
unaccustomed black hat, his father was plainly become a man of
importance. He was one apart, and people of undoubted consequence
deferred to him--to the very last. He earnestly wished his mother could
see that; his nervous little mother with the flushed face and tired
eyes, always terrifically concerned about one small matter or another.
He thought she would have liked to see that his father was some one,
after all.




II


The Chicago epoch began a year later. The true nature of its causes
never lay quite clearly in the mind of Bean. There was, first, an
entirely new Uncle Bunker whom he had never seen, but whom he at once
liked very much. He was a younger, more beautiful uncle, with a gay,
light manner and expensive clothing. He wore a magnificent gold watch
and chain, and jewelled rings flashed from his white fingers as he, in
absent moments, daintily passed a small pocket-comb through the meshes
of his lustrous brown side-whiskers. Little Bean knew that he did
something on a board in Chicago; that he "operated" on the Board of
Trade was the accustomed phrasing. He liked the word, and tried to
picture what "operating" might mean in relation to a board.

The good people of Wellsville regarded this uncle with quite all the
respect so flashing a figure deserved. Not so the two other Uncle
Bunkers from over Walnut Shade way. Their first known agreement, voiced
of this financier, was in saying something wise about a fool and his
money.

Later, and perhaps for the last time on earth, they agreed once more.
That was when the news of his marriage came to them--for what was she?
Nothing but his landlady's daughter! Snip of a girl that helped her
mother run a cheap Chicago boarding-house! Him that could have taken his
pick, if he was going to be a fool and tie himself up! You could bet
that the pair had "worked" him, that mother and the girl; landed him for
his money, that was plain! Well, he'd made his bed!

Bean was not slow to liken this uncle to his mother, who had also
"made her bed." He had at first a misty notion that the bride might
a little resemble his father, a notion happily dispelled when he saw
her. For the pair came to Wellsville. It was a sort of honeymoon
combined vaguely with business. The bride was wonderfully pretty,
Bean thought; dark and dainty and laughing, forever talking the most
irresistible "baby-talk" to her adoring mate. Her name for him was
"Boo'ful."

Bean at once fell deeply in love with this bride, a passion that was to
endure beyond the life of most such affairs. She professed an
infatuation equal to his own, and regretted that an immediate marriage,
which he timidly advocated in the course of their first interview, was
not practicable. That she was frivolous, light-minded, and would never
settle down to be a good worker, was a village verdict he scorned. Who
would have her otherwise? Not he, nor the adoring Boo'ful, it is
certain. He determined to go to live at her house, and, strangely
enough--for these sudden plans of his were most often discouraged--the
thing seemed feasible. For one thing, his father was going to bring home
a new mother; a lady, he gathered, who had not only settled down to be a
good worker, but who, in espousing his father, would curiously not marry
beneath her. Without being told so, he had absorbed from his first
mother a conviction that this was possible to but few women. He felt a
little glow of pride for his father in this affair.

Another matter that seemed to bear on his going away was that this
brilliant and human Uncle Bunker was a "trustee." Not only a trustee,
but _his_ trustee; his very own, like his shell, or anything. This led
to his discovery that he had money. His mother, it seemed, had left it
to him; Bunker money that the two older uncles had sought and failed to
divert from her on the occasion of her wedding one below her station.
Money! and the capable Uncle Bunker as trustee of that money! Money one
could buy things with! He was pleasantly conscious of being rather
important under the glance of familiars. Even his father spoke formal
words of counsel to him, as if a gulf was between them--his father now
bereft of all Bunker prestige, legal or social.

And the new uncle was to "educate" him, though this was to be paid for
out of that money of his very own. He was rudely shocked to learn that
you had to pay money to go to school. Loathing school as he did, to pay
money for your own torture--money that would buy things--seemed
unutterably silly. But despite this inbecility the prospect retained its
glamour.

He would have suffered punishments even worse than school for the
privilege of existing near that beautiful bride, whom he was now
calling, at her especial request, "Aunt Clara." She readily understood
any affair that he chose to explain to her; understood about his shell
and said it was the most beautiful thing in all the world. She
understood, too, and was deeply sympathetic about Skipper, the dog.
Skipper was one of a series of puppies that Bean had appropriated from
the public highway. Some had shamefully deserted him after a little time
of pampering. Others, and these were the several that had howled
untimely in the far night, had mysteriously disappeared. Bean had
sometimes a hurt suspicion that his father knew more than he cared to
tell about these vanishings. But Skipper had stayed and had not howled.
Buffeted wastrel of a thousand casual amours, soft-haired, confiding,
ungainly, he was rich in understanding if not in beauty. And yet he must
be left. Even the discriminating and ever-just Aunt Clara felt that
Skipper would not do well in a great city. Of course she was not clumsy
enough to suggest that there were other dogs in the world, as did her
less discerning husband. But she said that it would come out all right,
and Bean trusted her. She knew, too, what would happen on his first
night away, and came softly to his bed and solaced him as he lay crying
for Skipper.

Those first Chicago days were rich in flavour. The city was a marvel of
many terrors, a place of weird sounds, strange shapes and swift
movements, among which--having been made timid by much adversity--you
had need to be very, very careful if your hand was in no one's. The
house itself was wonderful: a house of real brick and very lofty. If you
started in the basement you could go "upstairs" three distinct times in
it before you reached the top. He had never imagined such a house for
any but kings to live in. Within were many rooms; he hardly could count
them all; and regal furnishings, gay with colour; and, permeating it
all, a most appetizing odour of cooked food, eloquent tale of long-eaten
banquets, able reminder of those to come.

Out beside the front door was a rather dingy sign that said "Boarders
Wanted." His deduction after reading the sign was that the person who
wanted the boarders was Aunt Clara's mother. She was like Aunt Clara in
that she was dark and small, but in nothing else. She did not wear
pretty dresses nor laugh nor address baby talk to "Boo'ful." She was
very old and not nice to look at, Bean thought; and an uneasy woman, not
knowing how to be quiet. Mostly she worked in the kitchen, after a hasty
morning tour of the house to "do" the rooms. Bean was much surprised to
learn that her name, too, was Clara. She did not look at all like any
one whose name would be Clara.

And presently there was to be a house even more magnificent than this,
where they would all live together and where, so they jested, the old
Clara wouldn't know what to do, because there would be nothing to do.
The house would be ready just as soon as Boo'ful made his "next turn,"
and that was so near in time that there was already a fascinating
picture of the lines of the house, white lines on blue paper, over which
Boo'ful and Aunt Clara spent many an evening in loving dispute. It
seemed that you could change the house by merely changing those lines.
Sometimes they put a curve into the main stairway or doubled the area of
stained-glass window in the music-room; sometimes it was a mere detail
of alteration in the butler's pantry, or the coachman's room over the
stable. The old Clara displayed no interest in these details. She seemed
to be content to go on wanting boarders.

This was not, as he saw it, an unlovely want. It surrounded her with gay
companions at meal-time; they were "like one big family," as one of the
number would frequently observe. He was the one that most often set them
all to laughing by his talk like that of a German who speaks English
imperfectly, which he didn't have to do at all. It was only
make-believe, but very funny.

After this joyous group and his Aunt Clara, who really came first, his
preference in humans was for a lady who lived two doors away. If you
rang her bell she might be one of three persons. It depended on what you
were looking for. She might be the manicure and chiropodist whose sign
was displayed; she might be Madam Wanda, the world-renowned clairvoyant,
sittings from 9 A.M. to 5 P.M., Advice on Love, Marriage and Business;
sign also displayed; or she might be merely Mrs. Jackson, with a choice
front room for a single gentleman, as declared by the third sign. In any
case she was a smiling, plump lady with a capable blue eye and abundant
dark hair that was smooth and shiny.

It was in company with his uncle that he first made her acquaintance.
His uncle knew all that one need know about Love and Marriage, but it
seemed that his knowledge of Business could be extended. There were
times when only the gifts of a world-renowned clairvoyant could enable
one to say what May wheat was going to do.

The acquaintance, lightly enough begun, ripened soon to intimacy, and so
were the eyes of Bean first opened to mysteries that would later affect
his life so vitally. He was soon carrying wood and coal up the back
stairs of Mrs. Jackson, in return for which the lady ministered to him
in her professional capacities. At their first important session on a
rainy Saturday of leisure she trimmed and polished each of his ten
finger-nails, told his past, present and future--he was going to cross
water and there was a dark gentleman he had need to beware of--and
suggested that his feet might need attention.

He squirmingly demurred at this last operation, and successfully
resisted it. But the bonds of their friendship were sealed over a light
collation which she served. She was a vegetarian, she told him. You
couldn't get on to a high spiritual plane if you ate the corpses of
murdered animals. But her food seemed sufficing and she drank beer which
he brought her in a neat pitcher from the cheerful store on the corner
where they sold such things. Beer, she explained to him, was a strictly
vegetable product, though not the thing for growing boys. The young must
discriminate, even among vegetables.

They liked each other well and in a little time he had absorbed the
simple tale of her activities. When you rented rooms, people sometimes
left without paying you. So had gone Professor de Lavigne, the
chiropodist; so had vanished the original Madam Wanda. They had left
their signs, and nothing else. The rest was simple after you had been
seeing how they did it--a little practice with a nail-file, a little
observation of parties that came in with crêpe on, to whom you said,
"Standing right there I see some one near and dear to you that has
lately passed on to the spirit land"; or male parties that looked all
fussed up and worried, to whom you said that the deal was coming out all
right, only they were always to act on their first impulse and look out
for a man with kind of brownish hair who carried a gold watch and
sometimes wore gloves. She said it was strange how she could "hit it"
sometimes, especially where there were initials in the hats they left
outside in the hall, or a name inside the overcoat pocket. It was
wonderful what she had been able to tell parties for a dollar.

Bean cared little for these details, but he was excited by the theory
back of them; a world from which the unseen spirits of the dead will
counsel and guide us in our daily affairs if we will listen. It was a
new terror added to a world of terrors--they were all about you,
striving with futile hands to touch you, whispering words of cheer or
warning to your deaf ears.

Mrs. Jackson herself believed it implicitly and went each week to
consult one or another of the more advanced mediums. The last one had
seen the spirit of her Aunt Mary, a deceased person so remote in time
that she had been clean forgotten. But it was a valuable pointer. When
you come to think about it, at least seven parties out of ten, if they
were any way along in years, had a dead Aunt Mary. And it was best to go
to the good ones. Mrs. Jackson admitted that. You paid more, but you got
more.

Uncle Bunker became of this opinion very soon. What Mrs. Jackson
disclosed to him about May wheat had seemed to be hardly worth the
dollar she asked. He began going to the good ones, and Bean gathered
that even their superior gifts left something to be desired. The
brilliant uncle began to accustom his home circle to frowns. Bean and
the older Clara (she was beginning to complain about not sleeping and a
pain in her side) were sensible of this change, but the younger Clara
only pouted when she noticed it at all, prettily accusing her splendid
consort of not caring for her as he had once professed to. She spent
more time over her hair and shopped extensively for feminine trappings.

Then one day his uncle came home, a slinking wreck of beauty, and told
Aunt Clara that all was lost save honour. Bean heard the interesting
announcement, and gathered, after a question from his aunt, that his own
patrimony had been a part of that all which was lost save honour. He
heard his uncle add tearfully that one shot would end it now.

He was frightened by this, but his Aunt Clara seemed not to be. He heard
her say, "There, there! Did a nassy ol' martet do adainst 'ums!" And
later she was seen to take him up tea and toast and chicken.

       *       *       *       *       *

The years seemed to march more swiftly then--school and growing and
little changes in the house. Boo'ful never fired the shot that would
have ended all. The older Clara inconsequently died and the frivolous
Clara took her place in the kitchen. She had not corrected her light
manner, but slowly she changed with the years until she was almost as
faded as the old Clara had been. More ambitious, however, and working to
better purpose. They went to a new and finer house that would hold more
boarders; and the sign, which was lettered in gold, said, "Boarders
Taken," a far more dignified sign than the old with its frank appeal of
"Boarders Wanted." That new sign intimated a noble condescension.

Aunt Clara had not only settled down to be a worker, but she had proved
to be a manager. Boo'ful actually performed little services about the
house, staying in the kitchen at meal-time to carve and help serve the
food. Aunt Clara had been unexpected adamant in the matter of his taking
a fine revenge on the market that had gone against him. She refused to
provide the very modest sum he pleaded for to this end, and as the two
old Uncle Bunkers were equally obdurate--they said they had known when
he married that flutter-budget just how he would end--his leisure was
never seriously menaced.

Aunt Clara was especially firm about the money because of the
considerable life-insurance premium she soon began to pay. It was her
whim that little Bean had not been of competent years to lose all save
honour, and she had discovered a life-insurance company whose officers
were mad enough to compute Boo'ful's loss to the world in dollars and
cents. He was, in fact, considered an excellent risk. He did not fade
after the manner of the busy Aunt Clara, that gay little wretch whose
girlish graces lingered on incongruously--like jests upon a tombstone.

Bean grew to college years. Aunt Clara had been insistent about the
college; it was to be the best business college in Chicago. Bean
matriculated without formality and studied stenography and typewriting.
Aunt Clara had been afraid that he might "get in" with a fast college
set and learn to drink and smoke and gamble. It may be admitted that he
wished to do just these things, but he had observed the effects of
drink, his one experience with tobacco remained all too vivid, and
gambling required more capital than the car fare he was usually provided
with. Besides, you came to a bad end if you gambled. It led to other
things.

Nor would he, on the public street, join with any number of his class in
the college yell. He was afraid a policeman would arrest him. Even in
the more mature years of a comparatively blameless life he remained
afraid of policemen, and never passed one without a tremor. All of which
conduced to his efficiency as a student. When others fled to their
questionable pleasures he was as likely as not to remain in his chair
before a typewriter, pounding out again and again, "_The swift brown fox
jumps over the lazy dog--_" a dramatic enough situation ingeniously
worded to utilize nearly all the letters of our alphabet.

At last he was pronounced competent, received a diploma (which Aunt
Clara framed handsomely and hung in her own room beside the pastel
portrait of Boo'ful in his opulent prime) and took up a man's work.

       *       *       *       *       *

The veil that hangs between mortal eyes and the Infinite had many times
been pierced for him by the able Mrs. Jackson. He was now to enter
another and more significant stage of his spiritual development.

His first employer was a noble-looking old man, white-bearded, and vast
of brow, who came to be a boarder at Aunt Clara's. He was a believer in
the cult of theosophy and specialized on reincarnation. Neither word was
luminous to Bean, but he learned that the old gentleman was writing a
book and would need an amanuensis. They agreed upon terms and the work
began. The book was a romance entitled, "Glimpses Through the Veil of
Time," and it was to tell of a soul's adventures through a prolonged
series of reincarnations. So much Bean grasped. The terminology of the
author was more difficult. When you have chiefly learned to write, "Your
favour of the 11th inst. came duly to hand and in reply we beg to
state--" it is confusing to be switched to such words as
"anthropogenesis" and to chapter headings like "Substituting Variable
Quantities for Fixed Extraordinary Theoretic Possibilities." Even when
the author meant to be most lucid Bean found him not too easy. "In order
to simplify the theory of the Karmic cycle," dictated the white-bearded
one for his Introduction, "let us think of the subplanes of the astral
plane as horizontal divisions, and of the types of matter belonging to
the seven great planetary Logoi as perpendicular divisions crossing
these others at right angles."

What Bean made of this in transcribing his notes need not be told. What
is solely important is that, as the tale progressed, he became
enthralled by the doctrine of reincarnation. It was of minor consequence
that he became expert in shorthand.

Had he lived before, would he live again? There must be a way to know.
"Alclytus," began an early chapter of the tale, "was born this time in
21976 B.C. in a male body as the son of a king, in what is now the
Telugu country not far from Masulipatam. He was proficient in riding,
shooting, swimming and the sports of his race. When he came of age he
married Surya, the daughter of a neighbouring rajah and they were very
happy together in their religious studies--"

Had he, Bunker Bean, perhaps once espoused the daughter of a rajah, and
been happy in religious studies with her? Had he, perchance, been even
the rajah himself? Why not?

The romance was never finished. A worried son of the old gentleman
appeared one day, alleged that he had run off from a good home where he
was kindly treated, and by mild force carried him back. But he had
performed his allotted part in Bean's life.

A few books had been left and these were read. Death was a recurring
incident in an endless life. Wise men he saw had found this an answer to
all problems--founders of religions and philosophies--Buddha,
Pythagoras, Plato, the Christ. Wise moderns had accepted it, Max Müller
and Hume and Goethe, Fichte, Schelling, Lessing. Bean could not appraise
these authorities, but the names somehow sounded convincing and the men
had seemed to think that reincarnation was the only doctrine of
immortality a philosopher could consider.

It remained, then, to explore the Karmic past of Bunker Bean; not in any
mood of lightness. A verse quoted by the old man had given him pause:

  "Who toiled a slave may come anew a prince
    For gentle worthiness and merit won;
  Who ruled a king may wander earth in rags
    For things done and undone."

What might he have been? For ruling once as a king, a bad king, was he
now merely Bunker Bean, not precisely roaming the earth in rags, but
sidling timidly through its terrors, disbelieving in himself, afraid of
policemen, afraid of life?

So he confronted and considered the thing, fascinated by its vistas as
once he had been by the shell. If it were true that we cast away our
worn bodies and ever reclothe ourselves with new, why should not the
right member of Mrs. Jackson's profession one day unfold to him his
beginningless past?




III


"The courts havin' decided," continued Breede, in staccato explosions,
"that the 'quipment is nes'ry part of road, without which road would be
tot'ly crippled, you will note these first moggige 'quipment bonds take
pri'rty over first-moggige bonds, an' gov'n y'sef 'cordingly your ver'
truly--"

He glanced up at Bean, contracted his brows to a black menace and
emitted a final detonation.

"'S all for 's aft'noon!"

He bit savagely into his unlighted cigar and began to rifle through a
new sheaf of documents. Bean deftly effaced himself, with a parting
glare at the unlighted cigar. It was a feature of Breede that no
reporter ever neglected to mention, but Bean thought you might as well
chew tobacco and be done with it. Moreover, the cigars were not such as
one would have expected to find between the lips of a man whose present
wealth was estimated at a round hundred million. Bulger, in the outer
office, had given up trying to smoke them. He declared them to be the
very worst that could be had for any money.

Before beginning the transcription of his notes, Bean had to learn the
latest telephone news from the ball-ground. During the last half-hour he
had inwardly raged more than usual at Breede for being kept from this
information. Bulger always managed to get it on time, beginning with the
third inning, even when he took dictation from Breede's confidential
secretary, or from Tully, the chief clerk.

Bean looked inquiringly at Bulger now. Bulger nodded and presently
strolled from his own desk to Bean's, where he left a slip of paper
bearing the words, "Cubs, 3; Giants, 2; 1st 1/2 4th."

Bean had envied Bulger from the first for this man-of-the-world ease. In
actual person not superior to Bean, he had a temperament of daring. In
every detail he was an advanced dresser, specializing in flamboyant
cravats. He would have been Bean's model if Bean had been less a coward.
Bulger was nearly all that Bean wished to be. He condescended to his
tasks with an air of elegant and detached leisure that raised them to
the dignity of sports. He had quite the air of a wealthy amateur with a
passion for typewriting.

He had once done Breede's personal work, but had been banished to the
outer office after Bean's first try-out. Breede had found some
mysterious objection to him. Perhaps it was because Bulger would always
look up with pleased sagacity, as if he were helping to compose Breede's
letters. It may have been simple envy in Breede for his advanced
dressing. Bulger had felt no unkindness toward Bean for thus supplanting
him in a desirable post. But he did confide to his successor that if he,
Bulger, ever found Breede under his heel, Breede could expect no mercy.
Bulger would grind him--just like that!

Bean dramatized this as he wrote his letters; Breede pleasantly
disintegrating under the iron heel of Bulger: Breede "The Great
Reorganizer," as he was said to be known "in the Street," old "steel and
velvet," meeting a just fate! So nearly mechanical was his typewriting
that he spoiled one sheet of paper by transcribing two lines of
shorthand not meant to be a part of the letter. Only by chance did a
certain traffic manager of lines west of Chicago escape reading a
briefly worded opinion of the clothes he wore that would have puzzled
and might have pained him, for Breede, such had come to be his
confidence in Bean, always signed his letters without reading them over.
Bean gasped and wisely dismissed the drama of Bulger's revenge from his
mind.

At four-thirty the day's work ended and Bean was free to forget until
another day the little he had been unable to avoid learning about high
railroad finance; free to lead his own secret life, which was a thing
apart from all that wordy foolery.

He changed from his office coat to one alleged by its maker to give him
the appearance of perfect physical development, and descended to the
street-level in company with Bulger. Bean would have preferred to walk
down; he suffered the sensations of dying each time the elevator seemed
to fall, but he could not confess this to the doggish and intrepid
Bulger.

There were other weaknesses he had to cloak. Bulger proffered cigarettes
from a silver case at their first meeting. Bean declined.

"Doctor's orders," said he.

"Nerves?" suggested Bulger, expertly.

"Heart--gets me something fierce."

"Come in here to Tommy's and take a bracer," now suggested the
hospitable Bulger. But again the physician had been obdurate.

"Won't let me touch a thing--liver," said Bean. "Got to be careful of a
breakdown."

"Tough," said Bulger. "Man needs a certain amount of it, down here in
the street. Course, a guy can't _sop_ it up, like you see some do. Other
night, now--gang of us out, y'understand--come too fast for your Uncle
Cuthbert. Say, goin' up those stairs where I live I cert'n'ly must 'a'
sounded like a well-known clubman gettin' home from an Elks' banquet.
Head, next A.M.?--ask me, _ask_ me! Nothing of the kind! Don't I show
up with a toothache and con old Tully into a day off at the dentist's to
have the bridge-work tooled up. Ask me was I at the dentist's? Wow!
Not!--little old William J. Turkish bath for mine!"

Bean was moved to raw envy. But he knew himself too well. The specialist
he professed to have consulted had put a ban upon the simplest
recreations. Otherwise how could he with any grace have declined those
repeated invitations of Bulger's to come along and meet a couple of
swell dames that'd like to have a good time? Bulger, considered in
relation to the sex not his own, was what he himself would have termed
"a smooth little piece of work." Bean was not this. Of all his terrors
women, as objects of purely male attention, were the greatest. He longed
for them, he looked upon such as were desirable with what he believed to
be an evil eye, but he had learned not to go too close. They talked,
they disconcerted him horribly. And if they didn't talk they looked
dangerous, as if they knew too much. Some day, of course, he would nerve
himself to it. Indeed he very determinedly meant to marry, and to have a
son who should be trained from the cradle with the sole idea of making
him a great left-handed pitcher; but that was far in the future. He
longed tragically to go with Bulger and meet a couple of swell dames,
but he knew how it would be. Right off they would find him out and laugh
at him.

Bulger consumed another high-ball, filled his cigarette case, and the
two stood a moment on Broadway. Breede, the last to leave his office,
crossed the pavement to a waiting automobile.

"There's his foxy Rebates going to the arms of his family," said Bulger,
disrespectfully applying to Breede a term that had more than once made
him interesting to the Interstate Commerce Commission.

"See the three skirts in the back? That's the Missis and the two squabs.
Young one's only a flapper, but the old one's a peacherine for looks. Go
on, lamp her once!"

Bean turned his diffident gaze upon the occupants of the tonneau with a
sudden wild dream that he would stare insolently. But his eyes
unaccountably came to rest in the eyes of the young one--the flapper. He
saw only the eyes, and he felt that the eyes were seeing him. The motor
chugged slowly up Broadway, nosing for a path about a slowly driven
truck; the flapper looked back.

"Not half bad, that!" said Bean, recovering, and speaking in what he
felt was the correct Bulger tone.

"Not for mine," said Bulger firmly. "Big sister, though, not so worse.
Met up with her one time out to the country place, takin' stuff for the
old man the time he got kidneys in his feet. I made a hit with her, too,
on the level, but say! nothin' doing there for old John W. me! I dropped
the thing like it was poison ivy. Me doin' the nuptial in a family like
that, and bein' under Pop's thumb the rest of my life? Ask me, that's
all; _ask_ me! Wake me up any time in the night and ask me."

Again Bean was thrilled, resolving then and there that no daughter of
Breede's should ever wed him. Bulger was entirely right. It wouldn't do.
Bulger looked at his watch.

"Well, s'long; got a date down in the next block. She's out at five.
Say, I want you to get a flash at her some day. Broadway car, yesterday,
me goin' uptown with Max, see? she lookin' at her gloves. 'Pipe the
queen in black,' I says to Max, jes' so she could hear, y' understand.
Say, did she gimme the eye. Not at all! Not at _all_! Old William H.
Smoothy, I guess yes. Pretty soon a gink setting beside her beats it,
and quick change for me. Had her all dated up by Fourteenth Street.
Dinner and a show, if things look well. Some class to her, all right.
One the manicures in that shop down there. Well, s'long!"

Looking over his shoulder with sickish envy after the invincible Bulger,
Bean left the curb for a passing car and came to a jolting stop against
the biggest policeman he had ever seen. He mumbled a horrified apology,
but his victim did not even turn to look down upon him. He fled into the
car and found a seat, still trembling from that collision. From across
the aisle a pretty girl surveyed him with veiled insolence. He furtively
felt of his neutral-tinted cravat and took his hat off to see if there
could be a dent in it. The girl, having plumbed his insignificance, now
unconcernedly read the signs above his head. There was bitterness in the
stare he bestowed upon her trim lines. Some day Bulger would chance to
be on that car with her--then she'd be taken down a bit--Bulger who, by
Fourteenth Street, had them all dated up.

Presently he was embarrassed by a stout, aggressive man who clutched a
strap with one hand and some evening papers with the other, a man who
clearly considered it outrageous that he should be compelled to stand in
a street car. He glared at Bean with a cold, questioning indignation,
shifting from one foot to the other, and seeming to be on the point of
having words about it. This was not long to be endured. Bean glanced out
in feigned dismay, as if at a desired cross-street he had carelessly
passed, sprang toward the door of the car and caromed heavily against a
tired workingman who still, however, was not too tired to put his sense
of injury into quick, pithy words of the street. The pretty girl
tittered horribly and the stout man, already in Bean's seat, rattled his
papers impatiently, implying that people in that state ought to be kept
off in the first place.

He had meant to leave the car and try another, but there at the step was
another too-large policeman helping an uncertain old lady to the ground,
so he slinkingly insinuated himself to the far corner of the platform,
where, for forty city blocks, a whistling messenger boy gored his right
side with the corners of an unyielding box while a dreamy-eyed man who,
as Bulger would have said, had apparently been sopping it up like you
see some do, leaned a friendly elbow on his shoulder, dented his new hat
and from time to time stepped elaborately on his natty shoes with the
blue cloth uppers. Also, the conductor demanded and received a second
fare from him. What was the use of saying you had paid inside? The
conductor was a desperate looking man who would probably say he knew
that game, and stop the car....

Something of the sort always happened to him in street cars. It was bad
enough when you walked, with people jostling you and looking as if they
wondered what right you had to be there.

At last came the street down which he made a daily pilgrimage and he
popped from the crowd on the platform like a seed squeezed from an
orange.

Reaching the curb alive--the crossing policeman graciously halted a huge
motor-truck driven by a speed-enthusiast--he corrected the latest dent
in his hat, straightened his cravat, readjusted the shoulder lines of
the coat appertaining to America's greatest eighteen-dollar
suit--"$18.00--No More; No Less!"--and with a fear-quickened hand
discovered that his watch was gone, his gold hunting-case watch and
horseshoe fob set with brilliants, that Aunt Clara had given him on his
twenty-first birthday for not smoking!

A moment he stood, raging, fearing. His money was safe, but they might
decide to come back for that. Or the policeman might come up and make an
ugly row because he had let himself be robbed in a public conveyance. He
would have to prove that the watch was his; probably have to tell why
Aunt Clara had given it to him.

With a philosophy peculiarly his own, a spirit of wise submission that
was more than once to serve him well, he pulled his hat sharply down,
braced and squared such appearance of perfect physical development as
the eighteen dollars had achieved, and walked away. He had always known
the watch would go. Now it was gone, no more worry. Good enough! As he
walked he rehearsed an explanation to Bulger: cleverly worded
intimations that the watch had been pawned to meet a certain quick
demand on his resources not morally to his credit. He made the
implication as sinister as he could.

And then he stood once more before the shrine of Beauty. In the
show-window of a bird-and-animal store on Sixth Avenue was a
four-months-old puppy, a "Boston-bull," that was, of a certainty, the
most perfect thing ever born of a mother-dog. Already the head was
enormous, in contrast, yet somehow in a maddening harmony with the
clean-lined slender body. The colour-scheme was golden brown on a
background of pure white. On the body this golden brown was distributed
with that apparent carelessness which is Art. Overlaying the sides and
back were three patches of it about the size and somewhat the shape of
maps of Africa as such are commonly to be observed. In the colouring of
the noble brow and absurdly wide jaws a more tender care was evident.
There was the same golden brown, beginning well back of the ears and
flowing lustrously to the edge of the overhanging upper lip, where it
darkened. Midway between the ears--erectly alert those ears were--a
narrow strip of white descended a little way to open to a circle of
white in the midst of which was the black muzzle. At the point of each
nostril was the tiniest speck of pink, Beauty's last triumphant touch.

As he came to rest before the window the creature leaped forward with
joyous madness, reared two clumsy white feet against the glass (those
feet that seemed to have been meant for a larger dog), barked ably--he
could hear it even above the din of an elevated train--and then fell to
a frantic licking of the glass where Bean had provocatively spread a
hand. Perceiving this intimacy to be thwarted by some mysterious barrier
to be felt but not seen, he backed away, fell forward upon his chest,
the too-big paws outspread, and smiled from a vasty pink cavern. Between
the stiffened ears could be seen the crooked tail, tinged with just
enough of the brown, in unbelievably swift motion. Discovering this pose
to bring no desired result, he ran mad in the sawdust, excavating it
feverishly with his forepaws, sending it expertly to the rear with the
others.

The fever passed; he surveyed his admirer for a moment, then began to
revolve slowly upon all four feet until he had made in the sawdust a bed
that suited him. Into this he sank and was instantly asleep, his
slenderness coiled, the heavy head at rest on a paw, one ear drooping
wearily, the other still erect.

For two weeks this daily visit had been almost the best of Bean's
secrets. For two weeks he had known that his passion was hopeless, yet
had he yearned out his heart there before the endearing thing. In the
shock of his first discovery, spurred to unwonted daring, he had
actually penetrated the store meaning to hear the impossible price. But
an angry-looking old man (so Bean thought) had come noisily from a back
room and glowered at him threateningly over big spectacles. So he had
hastily priced a convenient jar of goldfish for which he felt no
affection whatever, mumbled something about the party's calling,
himself, next day, and escaped to the street. Anyway, it would have been
no good, asking the price; it was bound to be a high price; and he
couldn't keep a dog; and if he did, a policeman would shoot it for being
mad when it was only playing.

But some time--yet, would it be this same animal? In all the world there
could not be another so acceptable. He shivered with apprehension each
day as he neared the place, lest some connoisseur had forestalled him.
He quickened to a jealous distrust of any passerby who halted beside him
to look into the window, and felt a great relief when these passed on.

Once he had feared the worst. A man beside him holding a candy-eating
child by the hand had said, "Now, now, sir!" and, "Well, well, _was_ he
a nice old doggie!" Then they had gone into the store, very
businesslike, and Bean had felt that he might be taking his last look at
a loved one. Lawless designs throbbed in his brain--a wild plan to
shadow the man to his home--to have that dog, _no matter how_. But when
they came out the child carried nothing more than a wicker cage
containing two pink-eyed white rabbits that were wrinkling their noses
furiously.

With a last cherishing look at most of the beauty in all the world--it
still slept despite the tearing clatter of a parrot with catarrhal
utterance that shrieked over and over, "Oh, what a fool! Oh, what a
fool!"--he turned away. What need to say that, with half the
opportunity, his early infamy of the shell would have been repeated. He
wondered darkly if the old man left that dog in the window nights!

He reached for his watch before he remembered its loss. Then he reminded
himself bitterly that street clocks were abundant and might be looked at
by simpletons who couldn't keep watches. He bought an evening paper that
shrieked with hydrocephalic headlines and turned into a dingy little
restaurant advertising a "Regular Dinner de luxe with Dessert, 35 cts."

There was gloom rather than gusto in his approach to the table. He
expected little; everything had gone wrong; and he was not surprised to
note that the cloth on the table must also have served that day for a
"Business Men's Lunch, 35 cts.," as advertised on a wall placard.
Several business men seemed to have eaten there--careless men, their
minds perhaps on business while they ate. A moody waiter took his order,
feebly affecting to efface all stains from the tablecloth by one magic
sweep of an already abused napkin.

Bean read his paper. One shriek among the headlines was for a railroad
accident in which twenty-eight lives had been lost. He began to go down
the list of names hopefully, but there was not one that he knew.
Although he wished no evil to any person, he was yet never able to
suppress a strange, perverse thrill of disappointment at this
result--that there should be the name of no one he knew in all those
lists of the mangled. His food came and he ate, still striving--the game
of childhood had become unconscious habit with him now--to make his meat
and potatoes "come out even." The dinner de luxe was too palpably a
soggy residue of that Business Men's Lunch. It fittingly crowned the
afternoon's catastrophes. He turned from it to his paper and Destiny
tied another knot on his bonds. There it was in bold print:

    COUNTESS CASANOVA
  Clairvoyant ... Clairaudient
    Psychometric.
  Fresh from Unparalleled European Triumphs.
    Answers the Unasked Question.

There was more of it. The Countess had been "prevailed upon by eminent
scientists to give a brief series of tests in this city." Evening tests
might be had from 8 to 10 P.M. Ring third bell.

The old query came back, the old need to know what he had been before
putting on this present very casual body. Was his present state a reward
or a penance? From the time of leaving the office to the last item in
that sketchy dinner, he had been put upon by persons and circumstances.
It was time to know what life meant by him.

And here was one who answered the unasked question!

Precisely at eight he rang the third bell, climbed two flights of narrow
stairs and faced a door that opened noiselessly and without visible
agency. He entered a small, dimly lighted room and stood there
uncertainly. After a moment two heavy curtains parted at the rear of the
room and the Countess Casanova stood before him. It could have been no
other; her lustrous, heavy-lidded dark eyes swept him soothingly. Her
hair was a marvellously piled storm-cloud above a full, well-rounded
face. Her complexion was wonderful. One very plump, very white hand
rested at the neck of the flowing scarlet robe she wore. A moment she
posed thus, beyond doubt a being capable of expounding all wingy
mysteries of any soul whatsoever.

Then she became alert and voluble. She took his hat and placed it in the
hall, seated him before the table at the room's centre and sat
confronting him from the other side. She filled her chair. It could be
seen that she was no slave to tight lacing.

Although foreign in appearance, the Countess spoke with a singularly
pure and homelike American accent. It was the speech he was accustomed
to hear in Chicago. It reassured him.

The Countess searched his face with those wonderful eyes.

"You are intensely psychic," she announced.

Bean was aware of this. Every medium he had ever consulted had told him
so.

The Countess gazed dreamily above his head.

"Your spiritual aura is clouded by troubled curnts, as it were. I see
you meetin' a great loss, but you mus' take heart, for a very powerful
hand on the other side is guardin' you night an' day. They tell me your
initials is 'B.B.' You are employed somewheres in the daytime. I see a
big place with lots of other people employed there--"

The Countess paused. Bean waited in silence.

"Here"--she came out of the clouds that menaced her sitter--"take this
pad an' write a question on it. Don't lemme see it, mind! When you got
it all wrote out, fold it up tight an' hold it against your forehead.
Never leggo of it, not once!"

Bean wrote, secretly, well below the table's edge.

"_Who was I in my last incarnation?_"

He tore the small sheet from the pad, folded it tightly and, with elbows
on the table, pressed it to his brow. If the Countess answered that
question, then indeed was she a seer.

She took up the pad from which he had torn the sheet.

"Concentrate," she admonished him. "Let the whole curnt of your
magnetism flow into that question. Excuse me! I left the slate in the
nex' room. My control will answer you on the slate."

She withdrew between the curtains, but reappeared very soon. Bean was
concentrating.

"That'll do," said the Countess. "Here!" She presented him with a double
slate and a moist sponge. "Wipe it clean."

He washed the surfaces of the slate and the seer placed it upon the
table between them, enclosing within its two sections a tiny fragment of
slate pencil. She placed her hands upon the slate and bade her sitter do
likewise.

"You often hear skeptics say they is sometimes trickery in this," said
the Countess, "but say, listen now, how could it be? I leave it to you,
friend. I ain't seen your question; you held it a minute and then put it
in your pocket. An' you seen the slate was clean. Now concentrate; go
into the Silence!"

Bean went into the Silence without suspicion, believing the Countess
would fail. She couldn't know his question and no human power could
write on the inside of that slate without detection. He waited with
sympathy for the woman who had overestimated her gifts.

Then he was startled by the faintest sound of scratching, as of a pencil
on a slate. It seemed to issue from beneath their hands at rest there in
plain sight. The medium closed her eyes. Bean waited, his breath
quickening. Little nervous crinklings began at the roots of his hair and
descended his spine--that scratching, faint, yet vigorous, did it come
from beyond the veil?

The scratching ceased. The ensuing silence was portentous.

"Open it and look!" commanded the Countess. And Bean forthwith opened it
and looked a little way into his dead and dread past. Apparently upon
the very surface he had washed clean were words that seemed to have been
hurriedly inscribed:

"_The last time you was Napolen Bonopart._"

He stared wonderingly at those marks made by no mortal hand. He thrilled
with a vast elation; and yet instantly a suspicion formed that here was
something to his discredit, something one wouldn't care to have known.
He had read as little history as possible, yet there floated in his mind
certain random phrases, "A Corsican upstart," "An assassin," "No
gentleman!"

"I--I suppose--you're sure there can't be any doubt about this?"

He looked pleadingly at the Countess. But the Countess was a mere
psychic instrument, it seemed, and had to be told, first of the
question--he produced it with a suspicion that she might doubt his
honesty--and then of the astounding answer. Thus enlightened, she
protested that there could be no doubt about the truth of the answer;
she was ready to stake her professional reputation on its truth. She
regarded Bean with an awe which she made no attempt to conceal.

"You had your _day_," she said significantly; "pomps and powers and--and
attentions!"

Bean was excitedly piecing together what fragments of data his reading
had left him.

"Emperor of France--"

But some one else had rung the third bell, perhaps one of those
scientists coming to be dumfounded.

"He was," the Countess replied hurriedly, "the husban' of Mary Antonett,
an' they both got arrested and gilletined in the great French
revolution."

He was pretty certain that this was incorrect, but the Countess, after
all, was a mere instrument of higher intelligence, and she now made no
pretence of speaking otherwise than humanly.

"An' my controls say they'll leave me in a body if I take a cent less 'n
three dollars."

One of the controls seemed to be looking this very threat or something
like it from the medium's sharpened eyes.

Bean paid hastily, thus averting what would have been a calamity to all
earnest students of the occult. The advertisement, it is true, had
specifically mentioned one dollar as the accustomed honorarium, but this
was no time to haggle.

_Napoleon!_

"Don't furgit the number," urged the Countess, "an' if you got any
friends, I'd appreciate--"

"Certainly! Sure thing!" said the palpitating one, and blindly felt his
way into the night.

The same stars shone above the city street; the same heedless throng
disregarded them; disregarded, too, the slight figure that paused a
moment to survey the sky and the world beneath it through a new pair of
eyes.

_Napoleon!_




IV


He walked buoyantly home. He had a room at the top of a house in an
uptown cross-street. Having locked his door and lighted a gas-jet he
stood a long time before his mirror. It was a friendly young face he saw
there, but troubled. The hair was pale, the eyes were pale, the nose
small. The mouth was rather fine, cleanly cut and a little feminine. The
chin was not a fighter's chin, yet neither chin nor mouth revealed any
weakness. He scanned the features eagerly, striving to relate them with
vaguely remembered portraits of Napoleon. He was about the same height
as the Little Corporal, he seemed to recall, but an eagle boldness was
lacking. Did he possess it latently? Could he develop it? He must have
books about this possible former self of his. He had early become
impatient of written history because when it says sixteen hundred and
something it means the seventeenth century. If historians had but agreed
to call sixteen hundred and something the sixteenth century, he would
have read more of them. It was annoying to have to stop to figure.

Before retiring he went through certain exercises with an unusual
vehemence. He was taking a course in jiu-jitsu from a correspondence
school. Aforetime he had dreamed of a street encounter, with some
blustering bully twice his size, from which, thanks to his skill, he
would emerge unscarred, unruffled, perhaps flecking a bit of dust from
one slight but muscular shoulder while his antagonist lay screaming with
pain.

With the approach of sleep all his half-doubts were swept away. Of course
he had been Napoleon. He could almost remember Marengo--or was it
Austerlitz? There was a vague but not distressing uncertainty as to
which of these conflicts he had directed, but he could--almost--remember.

And he had been one who commanded, and who, therefore, would make
nothing of pricing a dog. He would enter that store boldly to-morrow,
give its proprietor glare for glare, and demand to be told the price of
the creature in the window. Napoleon would have made nothing of it.

       *       *       *       *       *

The old man came noisily from his back room and again glowered above his
spectacles. But this time he faced no weakling who made a subterfuge of
undesired goldfish.

Bean gulped once, it is true, before words would come.

"I--uh--what's the price of that dog in the window?"

The old man removed his spectacles, ran a hand through upstanding white
hair, and regarded his questioner suspiciously.

"You vant him, hey? Vell, I tell. Fifdy dollars, you bed your life!"

The blood leaped in his veins. He had expected to hear a hundred at
least. Still, fifty was a difficult enough sum. He hesitated.

"Er--what's his name?"

"Naboleon."

"_What?_" He could not believe this thing.

"Naboleon. It comes in his bedigree when I giddim. You bed your life I
gif him nod such names--robber, killer, Frenchman!"

Bean felt assaulted.

"He was a fighter?"

"Yah, fider--a killer unt a sdealer. You know what?"--his face lightened
a little with garrulity--"my granmutter she seen him, yah, sure she seen
him, seddin' on his horse when he gone ridin' into Utrecht in eighdeen
hunderd fife, with soljus. Sure she seen him; she loogs outer a winda'
so she could touch him if she been glose to him, unt a soljus rides oop
unt says, 'Ve gamp right here, not?' unt Naboleon he shneer awful unt
say, 'Gamp here vere dey go inter dem cellus from der ganal-side unt get
unter us unt blow us high wit bowder--you sheep's head! No; we gamp back
in der Malibaan vere is old linden drees hunderd years old, eighd rows
vun mile long, dere is vere we gamp, you gread fool!' Sure my granmutter
seen him. He pull his nose mit t'um unt finger, so! Muddy boods, vun
glofe off, seddin' oop sdraighd on a horse. Sure, she seen him. Robber
unt big killer-sdealer! She vas olt lady, but she remember it lige it
was to-morrow."

Excitement engendered by this reminiscence had well-nigh made Bean
forget the dog. Once he had made people afraid. The world had trembled
before him. Policemen had been as insects.

"I'll take that dog," he announced royally--then faltered--"but I
haven't the money now. You keep him for me till I get it."

"Yah, you know vot? A olt man, lige me, say that same ofer lasd mont'
ago, unt I nefer see him until yet!"

It was a time for extreme measures. Bean pressed seven dollars upon the
dog's owner.

"And ten dollars every week; maybe more!"

The old man stowed the bills in a pocket under his apron and scratched
the head of the parrot that was incisively remarking, "Oh! What a fool!"
and giggling fatuously at its own jest.

"I guess you giddim. I guess mebbe you lige him, hey! He iss a awful
glutton to eat!"

Napoleon!

And in the street car the first headline he saw in his morning paper
was, "Young Napoleon of Finance Flutters Wall Street!"

The thing was getting uncanny.

       *       *       *       *       *

[Illustration: It was a friendly young face he saw there, but troubled]

A Napoleon of Finance!

Something, Napoleonic at least for Bunker Bean, had to be done in
finance immediately. He had reached the office penniless. He first tried
Bulger, who owed him ten dollars. But this was a Waterloo.

"Too bad, old top!" sympathized Bulger. "If you'd only sejested it
yesterday. But you know how it is when a man's out; he's got to make a
flash; got to keep up his end."

He considered the others in the office. Most of them, he decided, would,
like Bulger, have been keeping their ends up. Of course, there was
Breede. But Napoleon at his best would never have tried to borrow money
of Breede, not even on the day of his coronation. Tully, the chief
clerk, was equally impossible. Tully's thick glasses magnified his eyes
so that they were terrible to look at. Tully would reach out a nerveless
hand and draw forth the quivering heart of his secret. Tully would know
right off that a man could have no respectable reason for borrowing five
dollars on Thursday.

There remained old Metzeger who worked silently all day over a set of
giant ledgers, interminably beautifying their pages with his meticulous
figures. True, Bean had once heard Bulger fail interestingly to borrow
five dollars of Metzeger until Saturday noon, but a flash of true
Napoleonic genius now enabled him to see precisely why Bulger had not
succeeded. Metzeger lived for numerals, for columned digits alone. He
carried thousands of them in his head and apparently little else. He
could tell to the fraction of a cent what Union Pacific had opened at on
any day you chose to name. He had a passion for odd amounts. A flat
million as a sum interested him far less than one like $107.69-3/4. He
could remember it longer. It was necessary then to appeal to the poetry
in the man.

A long time from across his typewriter he studied old Metzeger, tall,
angular, his shoulders lovingly rounded above one of the ledgers, a
green shade pulled well over his eyes, perhaps to conceal the
too-flagrant love-light that shone there for his figures. Napoleon had
won most of his battles in his tent.

Bean arose, moved toward the other and spoke in clear, cool tones.

"Mr. Metzeger, I want to borrow five dollars--"

The old man perceptibly stiffened and bent his head lower.

"--five dollars and eighty-seven cents until Saturday at ten minutes
past twelve."

Metzeger looked up, surveying him keenly from under the green shade.

"_How_ much?'

"Five eighty-seven."

There was a curious relenting in the sharpened old face. The man had
been struck in a vital spot. With his fine-pointed pen he affectionately
wrote the figures on a pad: "$5.87--12:10." They were ideal; they
vanquished him. Slowly he counted out money from various pockets, but
the sum was $5.90.

"Bring me the change," he said.

Bean brought it from the clerk who kept the stamp-box. Metzeger replaced
three pennies in a pocket, and Bean moved off with the sum he had
demanded, feeling almost as once he might have felt after Marengo.

It must be true! He couldn't have done the thing yesterday.

He omitted his visit to the dog that day and loitered for an hour in a
second-hand bookshop he had often passed. He remembered it because of a
coloured print that hung in the window, "The Retreat from Moscow." He
had glanced carelessly enough at this, hardly noting who it was that
headed the gloomy procession. Now he felt the biting cold, and shivered,
though the day was warm. There were pleasanter prints inside. In one,
Napoleon with sternly folded arms gazed down at a sleeping sentry. In
another he reviewed troops at Fontainebleau, and again, from an
eminence, he overlooked a spirited battle, directing it with a masterly
wave of his sabre. These things were a little disconcerting to one in
whom the blood-lust had diminished. He was better pleased with a steel
engraving of the coronation, and this he secured for a trifle. It was a
thing to nourish an ailing ego, a scene to draw sustenance from when
people overwhelmed you in street cars and took your gold watch.

Then there were books about Napoleon, a whole shelf of them. A lot of
authors had thought him worth writing about. He examined several
volumes. One was full of dreadful caricatures that the English had
delighted in. He found this most offensive and closed it quickly.
Probably that explained why he had always felt an instinctive antipathy
for the English.

"If you're interested in Napoleon things--" said the officious clerk,
and Bean went cold. He wondered if the fellow suspected something.

"Not at all, not at all!" he protested, and refused to look at any more
books.

He took his print of the coronation, securely wrapped, and went to
another store several blocks away. He could get a Napoleon book there,
where they wouldn't be suspicious. He found one that looked promising,
"Napoleon, Man and Lover," and still another entitled "The Hundred
Days." The latter had illustrations of the tomb, which he noted was in
Paris. Its architecture impressed him, and his hands trembled as he held
the book open. He had been buried with pomp, even with flamboyance.
Robber and killer he might have been, but the picture showed a throng of
admiring spectators looking down to where the dead colossus was chested,
and on the summit of the dome that rounded above that kingly
sarcophagus, a discriminating nation had put the cross of Christ in
gold.

Let people say what they would! With all this glory of sepulchre there
must be something in the man not to be wholly ashamed of.

And yet "Napoleon, Man and Lover," which he read that night, confirmed
his first impression that this strangely uncovered incident in his
Karmic past was, on the whole, scandalous; not a thing he would like to
have "get about." He sympathized with the poor boy driven from his
Corsican home, with the charity student of Brienne, with the young
artillery officer, dreaming impossible dreams. But as lover--he blushed
for that ruthless dead self of his; the Polish woman, the little
actress, sending for them as if they were merchandise. It seemed to him
that even the not too-fastidious Bulger would have been offended by such
direct brutality.

Well, he was paying dearly for it now; afraid to venture into the
presence of a couple of swell dames not invincibly austere, lacking the
touch-and-go gallantry of a mere Bulger who had probably never been
anybody worth mentioning.

And there was the poor pathetic Louise of Prussia. Bean had already
fallen in love with her face, observed in advertisements of the Queen
Quality Shoe. He recalled the womanly dignity of the figure descending
the shallow steps, the arch accost of the soft eyes, the dimple in the
round check. She had been sent to sue him, the invader, to soften him
with blandishments. He had kept her waiting like a lackey, then had
sought cynically to discover how far her devotion to her country's
safety would carry her. And when her pitiful little basket of tricks had
been emptied, her little traps sprung, he had sent her back to her
husband with a message that crushed her woman's pride and shattered the
hopes of her people. He had heard the word "bounder." It seemed to him
that Napoleon had shown himself to be just that--a fearful and
impossible bounder. He tingled with shame. He wished he might speak to
that Queen now as a gentleman would.

And yet he could not read the book without a certain evil quickening.
Brutal though his method of approach had been, the man had conquered
more than mere force may ever conquer. The Polish woman had come to love
him; the little actress would have followed him to his lonely island.
Others, too many others, had confessed his power.

He was ashamed of such a past, yet read it with a guilty relish. He
recalled the flapper who had so boldly met his glance. He thought she
would have been less bold if she could have known the man she looked at.
He placed "Napoleon, Man and Lover" at the bottom of his trunk beside
the scarlet cravat he had feared to wear. It was not a book to "leave
around."

"The Hundred Days," which he read the following night, was a much less
discouraging work. It told of defeat, but of how glorious a defeat! The
escape from Elba, the landing in France and the march to Paris,
conquering, where he passed, by the sheer magnetism of his personality!
His spirit bounded as he read of this and of the frightened exit of that
puny usurper before the mere rumour of his approach. Then that audacious
staking of all on a throw of the dice--Waterloo and a deathless
ignominy. He heard the sob-choked voices of the Old Guard as they bade
their leader farewell--felt the despairing clasp of their hands!

Alone in his little room, high above the flaring night streets, the
timid boy read of the Hundred Days, and thrilled to a fancied memory of
them. The breath that checked on his lips, the blood that ran faster in
his veins at the recital, went to nourish a body that contained the
essential part of that hero--he was reading about himself! He forgot his
mean surroundings--and the timidities of spirit that had brought him
thus far through life almost with the feelings of a fugitive.

The Lords of Destiny had found him indeed untractable as the great
Emperor, the world-figure, and, for his proudness of spirit, had decreed
that he should affrightedly tread the earth again as Bunker Bean.
Everything pointed to it. Even the golden bees of Napoleon! Were there
not three B's in his own name? The shameful truth is that he had been
christened "Bunker Bunker Bean." His fond and foolish mother had thus
ingenuously sought to placate the two old Uncle Bunkers; unsuccessfully,
be it added, for each had affected to believe that he took second place
in the name. But the three B's were there; did they not point
psychically to the golden bees of the Corsican? Indeed, an astrologist
in Chicago had once told him, for a paltry half-dollar, that those B's
in his name were of a profoundly mystic significance.

Again, he was of distinguished French origin. Over and over had his
worried mother sought to impress this upon him. The family was an old
and noble one, fleeing from France, during a Huguenot persecution, to
Protestant England where the true name "de Boncoeur" had been corrupted
to "Bunker." At the time of his earliest dissatisfaction with the name
he had even essayed writing it in the French manner--"B. de Boncoeur
Bien"--supposing "Bien" to be approximate French for "Bean."

What more natural than that the freed soul, striving for another body,
should have selected one of distinguished French ancestry? The commoner
would inevitably seek to become a patrician.

It was a big thing; a thing to dream and wonder and calculate about.
When he was puzzled or disturbed he would resort to the shell--a thing
he had clung tenaciously to through all the years--sitting before it a
long time, his eyes fixed upon it with hypnotic tensity.

What should it mean to him? How was his life to be modified by it? He
did not doubt that changes would now ensue. He was already bolder in the
public eye. If people stared superciliously at him, he sometimes stared
back. That aggressive stout man could not now have bullied him out of
his seat in the car with any mere looks.

The phrase "Napoleon of Finance" had stayed in his mind. Modernly the
name seemed briefly to suggest some one who made a lot of money out of
nothing but audacity. Certainly it was not being applied to soldiers or
statesmen. This was interesting. If he made a lot of money he could move
to the country and have plenty of room for the dog. And it seemed about
the only field of adventure left for this peculiar genius. He began to
think about making money. He knew vaguely how this was done: you bought
stocks and then waited for the melon to be cut. You got on the inside of
things. You were found to have bought up securities that trebled in
value over night. Those that decreased in value had been bought by
people who were not Napoleons. That was the gist of it. A Napoleonic
mind would divine the way. "Napoleon knew human nature like a book,"
said one of the inspired historians. That was all you needed to know. He
resolved to study human nature.

At precisely ten minutes past twelve on the following Saturday he laid
upon old Metzeger's desk the exact sum of five dollars and eighty-seven
cents. One less gifted as to human nature would have said, "Thank you!"
and laid down five dollars and ninety cents. Bean fell into neither
trap. Metzeger looked quickly at the clock and silently took the money.
He had become the prey of a man who surmised him accurately.

Then occurred one of those familiar tragedies of the wage slave. The
whole week long he had looked forward to the ball game. In the box that
afternoon would be the Greatest Pitcher the World Had Ever Known. This
figure had loomed in his mind that week bigger at times than all his
past incarnations. He was going to forego a sight of his dog in order to
be early on the ground. He would see the practice and thrill to the
first line-up. He had lived over and over that supreme moment when the
umpire sweeps the plate with a stubby broom and adjusts his mask.

The correct coat was buttoned and the hat was being adjusted when the
door of the inner office opened with a sharp rattle.

"Wantcha!" said Breede.

There was a fateful, trembling moment in which Breede was like to have
been blasted; it was as if the magnate had wantonly affronted him who
had once been the recipient of a second funeral in Paris. Keeping Bean
from a ball game aroused that one-time self of his as perhaps nothing
else would have done. But Breede was Breede, after all, and Bean
swallowed the hot words that rose to his lips. His perturbation was
such, however, that Breede caught something of it.

"Hadjer lunch?"

"No!" said Bean, murderously.

"Gitcha some quick. Hurry!"

He knew the worst now. The afternoon was gone.

"Don't want any!" It was a miniature explosion after the Breede manner.

"C'mon, then!"

He was at the desk and Breede dictated interminably. When pauses came he
wrote scathing comments on Breede's attire, his parsimony in the matter
of food, his facial defects, and some objectionable characteristics as a
human being, now perceived for the first time. He grew careless of
concealing his attitude. Once he stared at Breede's detached cuffs with
a scorn so malevolent that Breede turned them about on the desk to
examine them himself. Bean went white, feeling "ready for anything!" but
Breede merely continued his babble about "Federal Express" stock, and
"first mortgage refunding 4 per cent. gold bonds," and multifarious
other imbecilities that now filled a darkened world.

He jealously watched the letters Breede answered and laid aside, and the
sheaf of reports that he juggled from hand to hand. His hope had been
that the session might be brief. There was no clock in the room and he
several times felt for the absent watch. Then he tried to estimate the
time. When he believed it to be one o'clock he diversified his notes
with a swift summary of Breede's character which only the man's
bitterest enemies would have approved. At what he thought was two
o'clock he stripped him of the last shreds of moral decency. When three
o'clock seemed to arrive he did not dare put down, even in secretive
shorthand, what he felt could justly be said of Breede. After that it
was no good hoping. He relaxed into the dullness of a big despair,
merely reflecting that Bulger's picture of Breede under his heel had
been too mushily humane. What Bean wished at the moment was to have
Breede tied to a stake, and to be carving choice morsels from him with a
dull knife. He made the picture vivacious.

At what he judged to be four-thirty a spirited rap sounded on the door.

"C'min," yelled Breede.

Entered the flapper. Breede looked up.

"Seddown! View of efforts bein' made b' cert'n parties t' s'cure 'trol
of comp'ny by promise of creatin' stock script on div'dend basis, it is
proper f'r d'rectors t' state policy has been--"

The flapper had sat down and was looking intently at Bean. There was no
coquetry in the look. It was a look of interest and one wholly in
earnest. Bean became aware of it at Breede's first pause. At any other
time he would have lowered his eyes before an assault so direct and
continuous. Now in his hot rage he included the flapper in the glare he
put upon her unconscious father.

He saw that she was truly enough a flapper; not a day over eighteen, he
was sure. Not tall; almost "pudgy," with a plump, browned face and gray
eyes like old Breede's, that looked through you. He noted these details
without enthusiasm. Then he relented a little because of her dress. The
shoes--he always looked first at a woman's shoes and lost interest in
her if those were not acceptable--were of tan leather and low, with
decently high heels. (He loathed common-sense shoes on women.) The hose
were of tan silk. So far he approved. She wore a tailored suit of blue
and had removed the jacket. The shirtwaist--he knew they were called
"lingerie waists" in the windows--was of creamy softness and had the
lines of the thing called "style." Her hat was a straw that drooped
becomingly. "Some dresser, all right!" he thought, and then, "Why don't
she take a look at old Cufflets there, and get him in right?"

Again and again he hardened his gaze upon her. Her eyes always met his,
not with any recognition of him as a human being, but with some curious
interest that seemed remote yet not impersonal. He indignantly tried to
out-stare her, but the thing was simply not to be done. Even looking
down at her feet steadily didn't dash her brazenness. She didn't seem to
care where _he_ looked. After a very few minutes of this he kept his
eyes upon his note-book with dignified absorption. But he could feel her
glance.

"--to c'nserve investment rep'sented by this stock upon sound basis
rather than th' spec'lative policy of larger an' fluc'chating div'dends
yours ver' truly what time's 'at game called?"

Thus concluded Breede, with a sudden noisy putting away of papers in an
open drawer at his side.

Bean looked up at him, in open-mouthed fear for his sanity.

"Hello, Pops!" said the flapper.

"'Lo, Sis! What time's 'at game called?"

"Three," said Bean, still alarmed.

Breede looked at his watch.

"Jus' got time to make it."

He arose from the desk. Bean arose. The flapper arose.

"Take y' up in car," said Breede, most amazingly.

Bean pulled his collar from about his suddenly constricted throat.

"Letters!" He pointed to the note-book.

"Have 'em ready Monday noon. C'mon! Two-thirty now."

The early hour was as incredible as this social phenomenon.

"Daughter!" said Breede, with half a glance at the flapper, and deeming
that he had performed a familiar social rite.

"Pleased to meet you!" said Bean, dazedly. The flapper jerked her head
in a double nod.

Of the interval that must have elapsed before he found himself seated in
the grandstand between Breede and the flapper he was able to recall but
little. It was as if a dense fog shut him in. Once it lifted and he
suffered a vision of himself in a swiftly propelled motor-car, beside an
absorbed mechanician. He half turned in his seat and met the cool,
steady gaze of the flapper; she smiled, but quickly checked herself to
resume the stare; he was aware that Breede was at her side. And the fog
closed in again. It was too unbelievable.

A bell clanged twice and his brain cleared. He saw the scurry of
uniformed figures to the field, the catcher adjusted his mask. The
Greatest Pitcher the World Has Ever Known stood nonchalantly in the box,
stooped for a handful of earth and with it polluted the fair surface of
a new ball. A second later the ball shot over the plate. The batter
fanned, the crowd yelled.

All at once Bean was coldly himself. He knew that Breede sat at his
right; that on his left was a peculiar young woman. He promptly forgot
their identities, and his own as well, and recalled them but seldom
during the ensuing game.

It is a phenomenon familiar to most of us. The sons of men, under the
magic of that living diamond, are no longer little units of souls
jealously on guard. Heart speaks to heart naked and unashamed; they
fraternize across deeps that are commonly impassable, thrilling as one
man to the genius of the double-play, or with one voice hurling merited
insults at a remote and contemptuous umpire. It is only there, on earth,
that they love their neighbour. There they are fused, and welded into
that perfect whole which is perhaps the only colourable imitation ever
to be had on earth of the democracy said to prevail in Heaven.

There was no longer a Bean, a Breede, a flapper. Instead were three
merged souls in three volatile bodies, three voices that blended in
cheers or execration. At any crisis they instinctively laid gripping
hands upon each other and, half-rising, with distended eyes and tense
half-voices, besought some panting runner to "Come on! Come _on_, you!
Oh, come _on_!" There were other moments of supreme joy when they were
blown to their feet and backs were impartially pounded. More than once
they might have been observed, with brandishing fists, shouting,
"Robber! Robber! _Robber!!!_" at the unperturbed man behind the plate
who merely looked at an indicator in his hand and resumed his
professional crouch quite as if nothing had happened.

And there were moments of snappy, broken talk, comments on individual
players, a raking over the records. It was not Breede who talked to Bean
then. It was one freed soul communicating with another. He none too
gently put Breede right in the matter of Wagner's batting average for
the previous year and the price that had been paid for the new
infielder. And Breede in spirit sat meekly at his feet, grateful for his
lore.

Of an absent player, Breede said he was too old--all of thirty-five.
He'd never come back.

"They come back when they learn to play ball above the ears," retorted
Bean with crisp sapience. "How about old Cy Young? How about old
Callahan of the Sox? How about Wagner out there--think he's only
nineteen--hey? Tell me _that_!"

He looked pityingly at the man of millions thus silenced.

Two men scored from third and second, thanks to a wild throw.

"Inside play, there?" said Breede.

"Inside, nothing!" retorted Bean arrogantly. "Matty couldn't get back to
second and they _had_ to run. If that Silas up there hadn't gone foamy
in the fighting-top and tried to hit that policeman over by the fence
with the ball, where'd your inside play been? D'you think the Pirates
are trying to help 'em play inside ball? Inside, nothing!"

Again Breede looked respectful, and the flapper listened, lustrous-eyed.

The finish was close. With two men out in the last half of the ninth and
two strikes called on the batter, a none too certain single brought in
the winning run. The clinging trio shrieked--then dazedly fell apart.
Life had gone from the magic. The vast crowd also fell apart to units,
flooding to the narrow gates.

Outside Breede looked at Bean as if, faintly puzzled, he was trying to
recall the fellow's face. One could fancy him saying, "Prob'ly some chap
works in m' office."

Father and daughter entered the car. Bean raised his dented hat. Breede
was oblivious; the flapper permitted herself a severe double nod. The
motor chugged violently. Bean, moving on a few steps, turned. The
flapper was looking back. She stared an instant then most astonishingly
smiled, a smile that seemed almost vocal with many glad words. Bean felt
himself smile weakly in response.

He walked a long way before he took a car, his eyes on the pavement, his
mind filled with a vision. When the flapper smiled it did something to
him, but what it was he couldn't tell. She had a different face when she
smiled; her parting lips made a new beauty in the world. He thought the
golden brown of her hair rather wonderful. It was like the golden brown
of the new dog. He recalled little details of her face, the short upper
lip, the forward chin, the breadth of the brow. There was something
disconcerting about that brow and the eyes like her father's--probably
have her own way! Then he remembered that he must have noticed a badge
pinned to the left lapel of a jacket that had been fashioned--with no
great difficulty, he thought--to give its wearer the appearance of
perfect physical development. He couldn't remember when he had precisely
noted this badge, perhaps in some frenzied moment in the game's
delirium, but it was vividly before him now--"VOTES FOR WOMEN!" What did
that signify in her character? Perhaps something not too pleasant.

Still--he lived again through the smile that had seemed to speak.

       *       *       *       *       *

Three days later, at the close of an afternoon's grinding work, the grim
old man at the desk looked up as Bean was leaving the room.

"S'good game!"

"Fine!" said Bean, as he closed the door.

But for this reference and one other circumstance Bean might have
supposed that Breede had forgotten the day. The other circumstance was
an area of rich yellowish purple on the arm which Breede had madly
gripped in moments of ecstasy, together with painful spots on his right
side where the elbow of Breede had almost continuously jabbed him.




V


The latest Napoleonic dynasty was tottering. The more Bean read of
that possible former self, the less he admired its manifestations. A
Corsican upstart, an assassin, no gentleman! It was all too true.
Very well, for that vaunted force of will, but to what base ends had
it been applied! He was merciless to himself, an egotist and a
vulgarian. How it would shock that woman, as yet unidentified, who
was one day to be the mother of the world's greatest left-handed
pitcher. Take the flapper--impossible, of course, but just as an
example--suppose she ever came to know about the Polish woman and
the actress, and the others! How she would loathe him! And you
couldn't tell what minute it might become known. People were taking
an interest in such matters. He wished he had cautioned the Countess
Casanova to keep the thing quiet. Probably she had talked.

He must go further into that past of his. Doubtless there were lessons
to be drawn from the Napoleonic episode, but just now, when he was all
confused, the thing--he put it bluntly--was "pretty raw."

"With Napoleon, to think was to act." So he had read in one chronicle.
Very well, he would act. Again he would stand, with fearless eyes, at
the portal of the vaulted past.

At eight o'clock that night he once more rang the third bell. He had
feared that the Countess Casanova might have returned to European
triumphs, but the solicitations of the scientific world were still
prevailing.

He stood in the little parlour and again the Countess appeared from
behind the heavy curtains, a plump white hand at the throat of her
scarlet gown.

He was obliged to recall himself to her, for the Countess began to tell
him that his aura was clouded with evil curnts.

"You told me what I was--last time, don't you remember? You know, you
said, it was written on the slate what I was--" He could not bring
himself to utter the name. But the Countess remembered.

"Sure; perfectly! And what was you wishing to know now?"

She surveyed him with heavy-lidded eyes, a figure of mystery, of secret
knowledge.

"I want you to tell me who I was before that--before _him_."

The Countess blinked her eyes rapidly, as if it hurried calculation.

"And I don't mean _just_ before. I want to go 'way back, thousands of
years--what I was _first_." He looked helplessly around the room, then
glanced appealingly at the Countess. The flushed and friendly face was
troubled.

"Well, I dunno." She pondered, eying her sitter closely. "Of course all
things is possible to us, but sometimes the conditions ain't jest right
and y'r c'ntrol can't git into rapport with them that has been gone
more'n a few years. Now this thing you're after--I don't say it can't be
done--f'r money."

"If I learned something good, I wouldn't care anything about the money,"
he ventured.

The Countess glanced up interestedly.

"That's the way to look at it, friend, but how much you got on you?"

"Twenty-two dollars," confessed Bean succinctly.

"Would you part from twenty, if you was told what you want to know?"

"Yes; I can't stand that other thing any longer."

The Countess narrowed her eyes briefly, then became animated.

"Say, listen here, friend! That's a little more delikit work than I been
doin', but they's a party near here--lemme see--" She passed one of the
plump white hands over her brow in the throes of recollection. "I think
his name is Professor Balthasar. I ain't ever met him, understand what I
mean? but they say he's a genuine wonder an' no mistake; tell you
anything right off the reel. You set right there and lemme go see if I
can't call him up by telephone."

She withdrew between the curtains, behind which she carefully pulled
sliding doors. Bean heard the murmur of her voice.

He waited anxiously. His Napoleon self was already fading. If only they
would tell him something "good." Little he cared for the twenty dollars.
He could get along by borrowing seventeen-seventy-nine from Metzeger.
The voice still murmured. Only the well-fitting doors prevented Bean
from hearing something that would have been of interest to him.

"That you, Ed?" the Countess was saying. "Listen here. 'Member th' one I
told you about, thinks he's the original N.B.--you know who--well he's
a repeater; here now wantin' t' know who he was before then, who he was
_first_ y'understand. An' say, I ain't got the right dope for that an' I
want you to get over here quick's you can an' give him about a
ten-minute spiel. Wha's that? Well, they's twenty, an' I split with you.
But listen here, Ed, I get the idee this party's worth nursin' along. I
dunno, something _about_ him. That's why I'm tellin' you. I want it done
right. Course, I could do enough stallin' muself t' cop the twenty; tell
him Julius Caesar or the King of China or somebody, but I ain't got the
follow-up, an' you can't tell _how_ much he might be good for later.
Take my tip: he's a natural born believer. Sure, twenty! All right!"

The doors slid back and the Countess reappeared between the curtains.

"I'm 'fraid I'll have to disappoint you," she began. "The Professer was
called out t' give some advice to one the Vandabilts. But I got his
private secatary on the wire an' he's gone out to chase him up. We'll
haf to wait an' see."

Bean was sorry to be causing this trouble.

"Perhaps I better come another night."

"No, you don't! You set right there!" She seemed to listen to unspoken
words, looking far off. "There! My control says he's comin'; he's on the
way."

Bean was aghast before this power.

"'Nother thing," pursued the Countess in her normal manner, "keep
perfec'ly still when he comes. Don't tip him off what you want. Let him
do the talkin'. If he's the real thing he'll know what you want. They
say he's a wonder, but what do _we_ know about it? Let him prove it!"

Bean felt that he and the Countess were a pair of shrewd skeptics.

The third bell rang and a heavy tread was heard on the stairs. The mere
sound of its mounting was impressive. The Countess laid a reminding
finger on her lips, as she moved toward the door.

There appeared an elderly man, in a black frockcoat, loose-fitting and
not too garishly new, a student's coat rather than a fop's.

"Is this Perfesser Balthasar?" inquired the Countess in her best manner.

"At your service, Madam!" He permitted himself a courtly inclination,
conferred upon the Countess a glistening tall hat, and then covered his
expansive baldness with a skullcap of silk which he drew from an inner
pocket.

"I feared we was discommoding you," ventured the Countess, elegantly
apologetic; "your secatary said you was out advisin' one the
Vandabilts--"

"A mere trifle in the day's work, Madam!" He brushed it aside with an
eloquent hand. "My mission is to serve. You wished to consult me?"

"Not me; but this young gentaman here--"

"Ah!" He turned to face Bean, who had risen, regarding him with serious
eyes and twirling a curled moustache meditatively.

"I see, I see! An imprisoned soul seeking the light!" He came nearer to
Bean, staring intently, then started with dramatic suddenness as if at
an electric shock from concealed wires.

"What is this--what is this--what _is_ this?"

Bean backed away defensively. The professor seemed with difficulty to
withdraw his fascinated gaze, and turned apologetically to the Countess.

"You will pardon me, Madam, but I must ask you to leave us. My control
warns me that I am in the presence of an individuality stronger than my
own. His powerful mind is projecting the most vital queries. I shall be
compelled to disclose to him matters he would perhaps not wish a third
person to overhear. I see a line of mighty rulers, ruthless,
red-handed--the past of his soul."

The Countess murmurously withdrew. The two males faced each other.

[Illustration: "I feared he was discommoding you," ventured the
Countess, elegantly apologetic]

The professor was a mere sketch of a man, random, rakish, with head
aslant and shifty eyes forever dropping away from a questioner's face.
He abounded in inhuman angles and impossible lines. It seemed that he
must have been rather dashingly done in the first place, then half
obliterated and badly mended with fumbling, indecisive touches. His
restless hands unceasingly wrung each other as if he had that moment
made his own acquaintance and was trying to infuse a false geniality
into the meeting.

When he spoke he had a trick of opening his mouth for a word and holding
it so, a not over-clean forefinger poised above an outheld palm. It
seemed to the listener that the word when it came would mean much. His
white moustache alone had a well-finished look, curving jauntily upward.

"Sit there!" An authoritative finger pointed Bean to the chair he had
lately occupied.

He sat nervously, suffering that peculiar apprehension which physicians
and dentists had always inspired.

"Most amazing! Most astounding!" muttered the professor as if to his own
ear alone. He sat in a chair facing Bean and regarded him long and
intently. At brief intervals his face twitched, his body stiffened, he
seemed to writhe in some malign grasp.

Bean gripped the arms of his chair. His tingling nerves were accurately
defining his spine. He waited, breathless.

"I see it all," breathed the professor in low, solemn tones, his eyes
fixed above Bean's head. "First the pomp and glitter of a throne. You
wrench it from a people whose weakness you play upon with a devilish
cunning, you ascend to it over the bodies of countless men slain in
battle. Power through blood! You are cruel, insatiable, a predatory
monster. But retribution comes. You are hurled from your throne. Again
you ascend it, but only for a brief time. You fight your last battle;
you _lose_! You are captured and taken to a lonely island somewhere far
to the south, there to be imprisoned until your death. Afterward I see
your body returned to the city that was once your capital. It now lies
in a heavy stone coffin. It is in a European city. I can almost hear the
name, but not plainly. I cannot get the name under which you ruled. I
look into the abyss and the cries of your victims drown it. Horror piles
upon horror!"

Bean was leaning forward, tense with excitement, his mouth open. "Yes,
that's just the way I felt about it," he murmured.

"But this was only a few paltry years ago, perhaps a hundred. It passes
from my view. I am led back, away from it--far back--the cries of those
you slaughtered echo but faintly--the scene changes--"

The professor paused. Bean had cowered in his chair, wincing under each
blow. He wiped his face and crumpled the moist handkerchief tightly in
one hand.

"Perhaps the name may come to me now," continued the professor. "But
your superior personality overwhelmed me at first; you are so
self-willed, so dominant, so ruthless. The name, the name!" He cried the
last words commandingly and snapped his fingers at the delinquent
control. "There! I seem to hear--"

"Never mind that name," broke in Bean hastily. "Let it go! I--I don't
want to know it. Go on back farther!"

Again the professor's look became trancelike.

"Ah! What a relief to be free from that blood-lust!" He breathed deeply
and his eyes rolled far up under their lids.

"What is this? A statesman, still crafty, still the lines of cunning
cruelty about the mouth. The city is Venice in the fourteenth century.
He is dressed in a richly bejewelled robe and toys with an inlaid
dagger. He is plotting the assassination of a Doge--"

"Please get still farther back, can't you?" pleaded Bean.

The seer struggled once more with his control.

"I next see you at the head of a Roman legion, going forth to battle.
You are a tyrant, ruling by fear alone, and with your own sword I see
you cut off the heads of--"

"Farther back," beseeched the sitter. "I--I've had enough of all that
battle and killing. I--I don't _like_ it. Go on back to the very first."

Patiently the adept redirected his forces.

"I see a poet. He sings his deathless lay by a roadside in ancient
Greece. He is an old man, feeble, blind--"

"Something else," broke in the persistent sitter, resolving not to pay
twenty dollars for having been a blind poet.

The professor glanced sharply at him. Perhaps his control did not relish
these interruptions. He seemed to suppress words of impatience and began
anew.

"Ah! Now I see your very first appearance on this planet. You were born
from another as yet unknown to our astronomers. You are now"--he lowered
his eyes to the sitter's face--"an Egyptian king."

Detecting no sign of displeasure at this, he continued with refreshed
enthusiasm.

"It is thousands of years ago. You are the last king of the pre-dynastic
era--"

"What kind of a king--one of those fighters?"

"You are a wise and good king. I see a peaceful realm peopled by
contented subjects."

"_That's_ what I want to know. Go on; tell me more. Married?"

"Your wife is a princess of rare beauty from--from Mesopotamia. You have
three lovely children, two boys and a girl, and your palace on the banks
of the Nile is one of the most beautiful and grand palaces ever erected
by the hand of man. You are ministered to by slaves, and your
councillors of state come to you with their reports. You are tall,
handsome and of a most kingly presence. Your personal bravery is
unquestioned, you are an adept in all manly sports, but you will not go
to war as you very properly detest all violence. For this reason there
is little to relate of your reign. It was uneventful and distinguished
only by your wise and humane statesmanship--"

"What name?" asked Bean, in low, reverent tones.

"The name--er--the name is--oh, yes, I get it--the name is Ram-tah."

"Can I find him in the histories?"

"You cannot," answered the seer emphatically. "I am probably the only
living man that can tell you very much about him."

"When did he--pass on?"

"At the age of eighty-two years. He was deeply mourned by all his
people. He had been a king of great strength of character, stern at
moments, but ever just. His remains received the treatment customary in
those times, and the mummy was interred in the royal sepulchre which is
now covered by the sands of the centuries. Anything else?"

Bean was leaning forward in his chair, his eyes lost in that far,
glorious past.

"Nothing else, now, I think. If I could see you again some time, I'd
like to ask--"

"My mission is to serve," answered the other, caressing the moustache
with a deft hand. "Anything I can do for you, any time, command me."

The Countess appeared from between the curtains.

"Was the conditions right?" she asked.

"They have been, at least _so_ far," replied the professor crisply, with
a side-glance at Bean who seemed on the point of leaving.

"Say, friend, I guess you're forgetting something, ain't you?" demanded
the Countess archly.

And Bean perceived that he had indeed forgotten something. He rectified
the oversight with blushing apologies, while the professor inspected the
mantel ornaments with an absent air. What was twenty dollars to a king
and a sire of kings? He bowed himself from the room.

They listened until the hall door closed.

"There's yours, Ed. You earned it all right, I'll say that. My! don't I
wish I was up on that dope."

"You were the wise lady to send for me, Lizzie. You'd have killed him
off right here. As it is, he'll come back. He's a clerk somewhere,
drawing twenty-five a week or so. He ought to give up at least five of
it every week; cigarette money, anyway. Anything loose in the house?"

"They's a couple bottles beer in the icebox. Gee! ain't he good, though!
If he only had the roll some has!"

       *       *       *       *       *

In his little room far up under the hunched shoulders of the house,
Bunker Bean sat reviewing his Karmic past. Over parts of it he
shuddered. That crafty Venetian plotting to kill, trifling wickedly with
the inlaid dagger; the brutal Roman, ruling by fear, cutting off heads!
And the blind poet! He would rather be Napoleon than a blind poet, if
you came down to that. But the king, wise, humane, handsome, masterly,
with a princess of rare beauty from Mesopotamia to be the mother of his
three lovely children. That was a dazzling vision to behold, a life sane
and proper, abounding in majesty both moral and material.

He sought to live over his long and peaceful but brilliant reign. Then
he dwelt on his death and burial. They had made a mummy of him, of
course. Somewhere that very night, at that very instant, his lifeless
form reposed beneath the desert sands. Perhaps the face had changed but
little during the centuries. He, Bunker Bean, lay there in royal robes,
hands folded upon his breast, as lamenting subjects had left him.

And what did it mean to him now? He thought he saw. As King Ram-tah he
had been _too_ peaceful. For all his stern and kingly bearing might he
not have been a little timid--afraid of people now and then? And the
Karmic law had swept him on and on into lives that demanded violence,
the Roman warrior, the Venetian plotter, the Corsican usurper!

He saw that he must have completed one of those vast Karmic cycles. What
he had supposed to be timidity was a natural reaction from Napoleonic
bravado. Now he had finished the circle and was ready to become again
his kingly self, his Ram-tah self--able, reliant, fearless.

He expanded his chest, erected his shoulders and studied himself in the
glass: there was undoubted majesty in the glance. He vibrated with some
fresh, strange power.

Yes; but what about to-morrow--out in the world? in daylight, passing
the policeman on the corner, down at the office? Would he remain a king
in the presence of Breede, even in the lesser presence of Bulger, or of
old Metzeger from whom he purposed to borrow seventeen dollars and
seventy-nine cents? All right about being a king, but how were other
people to know it? Well, he would have to make them feel it. He must
know it himself, first; then impress it upon them.

But a sense of unreality was creeping back. It was almost better to
remember the Napoleon past. There were books about that. He pictured
again the dead Ram-tah in trappings of royalty. If he could only _see_
himself, and be sure. But that was out of the question. It was no good
wishing. After all, he was Bunker Bean, a poor thing who had to fly when
Breede growled "Wantcha." He sat at his table, staring moodily into
vacancy. He idly speculated about Breede's ragged moustache; he thought
it had been blasted and killed by the words Breede spoke. A moment later
he was conscious that he stared at an unopened letter on the table
before him.

He took it up without interest, perceiving that it came from his Aunt
Clara in Chicago. She would ask if he had yet joined the Y.M.C.A., and
warn him to be careful about changing his flannels.

"Dear Bunker" [it began], "my own dear husband passed to his final rest
last Thursday at 5 p.m. He was cheerful to the last and did not seem to
suffer much. The funeral was on Saturday and was very beautiful and
impressive. I did not notify you at the time as I was afraid the shock
would affect you injuriously and that you might be tempted to make the
long trip here to be with me. Now that you know it is all over, you can
take it peacefully, as I am already doing. The life-insurance people
were very nice about it and paid the claim promptly. I enclose the money
which wipes out all but--"

He opened the double sheet. There were many more of the closely written
lines, but he read no farther, for a check was folded there. His
trembling fingers pulled the ends apart and his astounded eyes rested on
its ornate face.

It was for ten thousand dollars.

       *       *       *       *       *

At six minutes after eight the following evening the Countess Casanova,
moved from her professional calm, hurriedly closed the sliding doors
between the two rooms of her apartment and sprang to the telephone where
she frantically demanded a number. The delay seemed interminable to her,
but at last she began to speak.

"That you, Ed? F'r God's sake, beat it over here quick. That boob las'
night is back here an' _he's got it_. I dunno--but something _big_, I
tell you. He's actin' like a crazy man. Listen here! He wants t' know
can you _locate_ it--see it lyin' there underground. Why, the mummy;
yes. M-u-m-m-i-e. Yes, sure! He's afraid mebbe they already dug him up
an' got him in a musée somewheres, but if it's still there he wants it.
Yes, sure thing, dontchu un'stand? _Wants_ it! How in--how can I tell?
That's up to you. Git here! Sure--fifty-fifty!"

Bean glanced up feverishly as the Countess reappeared. She was smoothing
her hair and readjusting the set of the scarlet wrapper. Her own
excitement was apparent.

"It's all right. I think he'll come, but it was a close call. He was
jes' packin' his grip f'r Wash'n'ton. Got a telegraph from the Pres'dent
to-day t' come at once. Of course he'll miss a big fee. The Pres'dent
don't care f'r money when it's a question of gittin' th' right advice--"

"Oh, money!" murmured Bean, and waved a contemptuous hand.

His manner was not lost upon his hearer.

"Lots of money made in a hurry, these days," she suggested, "or got hold
of some way--gits left to parties--thousand dollars, mebbe--two, three,
four thousand?"

Again he performed the pushing gesture, as if he were discommoded by
money. He scarcely heard her voice.

The Countess did not venture another effort to appraise his wealth.

She fell silent, watching him. Bean gazed at a clean square on the
wall-paper where a picture had once hung. Then the authoritative tread
was again heard on the stairway, and again the Countess Casanova
welcomed Professor Balthasar to her apartment. She expressed a polite
regret for having annoyed him.

Professor Balthasar bestowed his shiny hat upon her, enveloped his
equally shiny skull with the silken cap and assured her that his mission
was to serve. Bean had not risen. He still stared at the wall.

"I'll jes' leave you alone with our friend here," said the Countess
charmingly. The professor questioned her with a glance and she shook her
head in response, yet her gesture as she vanished through the curtains
was one of large encouragement.

The professor faced Bean and coughed slightly. Bean diverted his stare
to the professor and seemed about to speak, but the other silenced him
with a commanding forefinger.

"Not a word! I see it all. You impose your tremendous will upon me."

He took the chair facing Bean and began swiftly:

"I see the path over the desert. I stop beside a temple. Sand is all
about. Beneath that temple is a stone sarcophagus. Within it lies the
body of King Tam-rah--"

"Ram-tah!" corrected Bean gently.

"Did I not say Ram-tah?" pursued the seer. "There it has lain sealed for
centuries, while all about it the tombs of other kings have been
despoiled by curiosity hunters looking for objects of interest to place
in their cabinets. But Ram-tah, last king of the pre-dynastic period,
though others will tell you differently, but that's because he never got
into history much, by reason of his uniformly gentlemanly conduct. He
rests there to-day precisely as he was put. I see it all; I penetrate
the heaped sands. At this moment the moon shines upon the spot, and a
night bird is calling to its mate in the mulberry tree near the
northeast corner of the temple. I see it all. I am there! What is this?
What is this I get from you, my young friend?"

The professor seemed to cock a psychic ear toward Bean.

"You want--ah, yes, I see what you want, but that, of course, humanly,
would be impossible. Oh, quite impossible, quite, quite!"

"_Why_, if you're sure it's there?"

"My dear sir, you descend to the material world. I will talk to you now
as one practical man to another. Simply because it would take more money
than you can afford. The thing is practicable but too expensive."

"How do you know?"

"It is true, I do not know. My control warned me when I came here that
your circumstances had been suddenly bettered. I withdraw the words. I
do not know, but--you will pardon the bluntness--_can_ you afford it?"

"What'd it cost? That's what I want to know."

"Hum!" said the professor. He was unable to achieve more for a little
time. He hum'd again.

"There's the labour and the risk," he ventured at last. "Of course my
agents at Cairo--I have secret agents in every city on the globe--could
proceed to the spot from my carefully worded directions. They could do
the work of excavating. So far, so good! But they would have to work
quietly and would be punished if discovered. Of course here and there
they could bribe. Naturally, they would have to bribe, and that, as you
are doubtless aware, requires money. Again, entering this port the
custom-house officials would have to be bribed, and they've gone up in
price the last few years. My control tells me that this mummy is one
they've been looking hard for. It's about the only one they haven't
found. The loss will be discovered and my men might be traced. It
requires an enormous sum. Now, for instance, a thousand dollars"--he
regarded Bean closely and was reassured--"a thousand dollars wouldn't
any more than start the work. Two thousand"--his eyes were steadily upon
Bean now--"would further it some. Three thousand might see it pretty
well advanced. Four thousand, of course, would help still farther and
five thousand"--he had seen the shadow of dismay creep over the face of
his sitter--"five thousand, I _think_, might put the thing through."

Bean drew a long breath. The professor had correctly read the change in
his face at "five thousand," but it had been a sudden fear that his
whole ten thousand was not going to suffice for this prodigious
operation.

"I can afford that," said Bean shortly. He hardly dared trust himself to
say more. His emotion threatened to overcome him.

The professor suffered from the same danger. He, too, dared trust
himself to say no more than the few necessary words.

"There must be a payment down," he said with forced coldness.

"How much?"

"A thousand wouldn't be any too much."

"Enough?"

"Well, perhaps not enough," the professor nerved himself to admit.

"I'll give you two, now. Give you the rest when you get--when you get It
here."

"You move me, I confess," conceded the professor. "I will undertake it."

"How long will it be, do you think?"

"I shall give orders by cable. A month, possibly, if all goes well."

"I'll give you check." He gulped at that. It was the first time he had
ever used the words.

The Countess parted the curtains. Curiously enough she carried a pen and
ink, though no one remarked upon the circumstance.

Bean had that morning left a carefully written signature at the bank
where his draft had been deposited. He later wondered how the scrawl he
achieved now could ever be identified as by the same hand.

And he was conscious, even as he wrote, that the Countess Casanova and
Professor Balthasar were labouring under an excitement equal to his own.
It _was_ a big feat to attempt.

As before, they waited until he had closed the lower door.

"Oh, Ed!" breathed the Countess emotionally.

"Anything loose in the house?" asked the professor.

"They's a couple bottles beer in the icebox, but _Oh, Ed_!"




VI


Again we chant pregnant phrases from the Bard of Dress: "It is cut to
give the wearer the appearance of perfect physical development. And the
effect produced so improves his form that he unconsciously strives to
attain the appearance which the garment gives him; he expands his chest,
draws in his waist, and stands erect."

A psychologist, that Bard! acutely divining a basic law of this absurd
human nature. In a beggar's rags few men could be more than beggars. In
kingly robes, most men could be kings; could achieve the finished and
fearless behaviour that is said to distinguish royalty.

Bunker Bean, the divinely credulous, now daily arrayed himself in royal
vestures, set a well-fashioned crown upon the brow of him and strode
forth, sceptre in hand. Invisible were these trappings, to be sure; he
was still no marked man in a city street. But at least they were there
to his own truth-lit eyes, and he most truly did "expand his chest, draw
in his waist, and stand erect." Yea, in the full gaze of inhumanly large
policemen would he do these things.

This, indeed, was one of the first prerogatives his royalty claimed. He
discovered that it was not necessary for any but criminals to fear
policemen. It might still be true that an honest man of moderate
physique and tender sensibilities could not pass one without slight
tremors of self-consciousness; but by such they were--a most prodigious
thought--to be regarded as one's paid employees; within the law one
might even greet them pleasantly in passing, and be answered civilly.
Bean was now equal to approaching one and saying, "Good evening,
Officer!" He would sometimes cross a street merely to perform this
apparently barren rite. It stiffened his spine. It helped him to realize
that he had indeed been a king and the sire of kings; that kingly stuff
was in him.

So marked an advance in his spirit was not made in a day, however. It
came only after long dwelling in thought upon his splendid past. And,
too, after he had envisioned the circumstance that he was now a man of
means. The latter was not less difficult of realization than his
kingship. He had thought little about money, save at destitute moments;
had dreamed of riches as a vague, rather pleasant and not important
possibility. But kings were rich; no sooner had his kingship been
proclaimed than money was in his hand. And, of course, more money would
come to him, as it had once come on the banks of the Nile. He did not
question how nor whence. He only knew.

It was three days before he bethought himself to finish the reading of
Aunt Clara's letter, suspended at sight of the astounding enclosure. He
had begun that letter a harried and trivial unit of the toiling masses.
He came to finish it a complacent and lordly figure!

     "--I enclose the check which wipes out all but $7,000 of that
     money from your dear mother with which dearest Edward so rashly
     speculated years ago, in the hope of making you a wealthy man.
     I am happy to say that $5,000 of this I can pay at once out of
     the money I have saved. I have been investing for years, as I
     could spare it, in the stock of the Federal Express Company,
     and now have fifty shares, which I will transfer to you at par,
     though they are quoted a little above that, if you are willing
     to accept them. The balance I will pay when I have sold the
     house and furnishings, as with my dearest husband gone I no
     longer have any incentive to keep on working. I am tired. It is
     a good safe stock paying 4-1/2 per cent. and I would advise you
     to keep it and also put the Ins. money into the same stock. A
     very nice man in the Life Ins. office said it ought to pay more
     if the business was better managed. If you turned your talents
     to the express business you might learn to manage it yourself
     because you always had a fine head for such things, and by
     owning a lot of their stock you could get the other
     stockholders to elect you to be one of their directors, which
     would be a fine occupation for you, not too hard work and
     plenty of time to read good books which I hope you find same
     now of evenings in place of frittering away your time with
     associations of a questionable character, and ruining your
     health by late hours and other dissipation though I know you
     were always of good habits.

     "Affectionately,

     "Aunt Clara.

     "P.S.--It has rained hard for two days."

There it was! Money _came_ to you. Federal Express was only a name to
him; he had written it sometimes at Breede's dictation. But his Aunt
Clara was old enough to know about such things, and he would follow her
advice, though being a director of an express company seemed as
unexciting as it was doubtless respectable: what he had at times been
wild enough to dream was that he should be the principal owner of a
major-league baseball club, and travel with the club--see every game! If
he should, temporarily, become the director of an express company, he
would have it plainly understood that he might resign at any moment.

Night and morning he surveyed himself in the glass. Not in the way of
ordinary human conceit; he was clear sighted enough as to the
pulchritude of his present encasement; but with the eyes of the young
who see visions. Raptly scrutinizing his meagre form he chanted a line
of verse that seemed apposite:

    "_Build thou more stately mansions, O my soul!_"

He was already persuaded that his next incarnation would enrich the
world with something far more stately than the mansion that he at
present occupied; something on the Gordon Dane order, he suspected. And
it was not too soon to begin laying those unseen foundations--to think
the thought that must come before the thing. He was veritably a king,
yet for a time must he masquerade as a wage-slave, a serf to Breede, and
an inferior of Bulger's, considered as a mere spectacle.

He began to word long conversations with these two; noiseless
conversations, be it understood, in which the snappy dialogue went
unuttered. His sarcasm to Bulger in the matter of that ten-dollar loan
was biting, ruthless, witty, invariably leaving the debtor in direst
confusion with nothing to retort. Bean always had the last word, both
with Bulger and Breede, turning from them with easy contempt.

He was less hard on Breede than on Bulger, because of the ball game. A
man who could behave like that in the presence of baseball must have
good in him. Nevertheless, in this silent way, he curtly apprised Breede
of his intentions about working beyond stipulated hours, and when Breede
was rash enough to adopt a tone of bluster, Bean silenced him with a
magnificent "I can imagine nothing of less consequence!"

He carried this silent warfare into public conveyances and when stout
aggressive men glared at him because he had a seat he quickly and
wittily reduced them to such absurdity in the public eye that they had
to flee in impotent rage. The once modest street row with a bully twice
his size was enlarged in cast. There were now, as befitted a king, two
bullies, who writhed in pain, each with a broken arm, while the slight
but muscular youth with a knowledge of jiu-jitsu walked coolly off,
flecking dust from one of his capable shoulders. Sometimes he paused
long enough to explain the affair, in a few dignified words, to an
admiring policeman who found it difficult to believe that this stripling
had vanquished two such powerful brutes. Sometimes another act was
staged in which he conferred his card upon the amazed policeman and
later explained the finesse of his science to him, thereby winning his
deathless gratitude. He became quite chummy with this officer and was
never to be afraid of anything any more.

He glowed from this new exercise. He became more witty, more masterful,
while the repartee of his adversaries sank to wretched piffle. He met
disaster only once. That was when his conscience began to hurt him after
a particularly bitter assault on Bulger in which the latter had been
more than usually contemptible in the matter of the overdue debt. He
felt that he had really been too hard on the fellow. And Bulger, who
must have been psychically gifted himself, came over from his typewriter
at that moment and borrowed an additional five without difficulty. In
later justification, Bean reflected that he would almost certainly have
refused this second loan had it not been for his softened mood of the
moment. Still he was glad that, with his instinctive secrecy he had kept
from Bulger any knowledge of his new fortune. With Bulger aware that he
had thousands of dollars in the bank, something told him that
distressing complications would have ensued.

He debated several days about this money. He resolved, at length, that a
thousand dollars should be devoted to the worthy purpose of living up to
his new condition. A thousand dollars would, for the present, give him
an adequate sensation of wealth. Three thousand more must be paid to
Professor Balthasar when his secret agents brought It from Its
long-hidden resting-place. Suppose the professor pleaded unexpected
outlays, officials not too easily bribed or something, and demanded a
further sum? At once, in a crowded street, he brought about a heated
interview with the professor, in which the seer was told that a bargain
was a bargain, and that if he had thought Bean was a man to stand
nonsense of any sort he was indeed wildly mistaken. Bean was going to
hold him to the exact sum, and his parting sting was that the professor
had better get a new lot of controls if his old ones hadn't been able to
tell him this. After he had cooled a little he reflected that if there
were really any small sums the professor would be out of pocket, he
would of course not be mean.

This left him four thousand dollars with which to buy his way into the
directorate of that express company, as suggested by Aunt Clara. He had
learned a great deal about buying stocks. He knew there was a method
called "buying on a margin" which was greatly superior to buying the
shares outright: you received a great many more shares for a given sum.
Therefore he would buy thus, and the sooner be a director. He liked to
think of that position in his moments of lesser exaltation. He recalled
his child-self sitting beside his father on the seat of an express
wagon. It was queer how life turned out--sometimes you couldn't get away
from a thing. Maybe he would always be a director; still he could go
into baseball, too.

He did his business with the broker without a twinge of his old
timidity. Indeed, he was rather bored by the affair. The broker took his
money and later in the day he learned that he controlled a very large
number of the shares of the Federal Express Company. He forgot how many,
but he knew it was a number befitting his new dignity. Having done this
much he thought the directorship could wait. Let them come to him if
they wanted him. He had other affairs on.

There was the new dog.

It was not the least of many great days in Bean's life, that golden
afternoon when he sped to the bird-and-animal store and paid the last
installment of Napoleon's ransom. The creature greeted him joyously as
of yore through the wall of glass, frantically essaying to lick the hand
that was so close and yet so unaccountably withheld.

The money passed, and one dream, at least, had been made to come true.
For the first time he was in actual contact with the wonderful animal.

"He knows me," said Bean, as the dog hurled itself delightedly upon him.
"We've been friends a long time. I think he got so he expected me every
afternoon."

Napoleon barked emphatically in confirmation of this. He seemed to be
saying: "Hurry! Let's get out of here before he puts me back in that
window!"

The old man confessed that he would miss the little fellow. He advised
Bean to call him "Nap." "Napoleon" was no right name for a dog of any
character.

"You know what that fellow been if he been here now," he volunteered at
parting. "I dell you, you bed your life! He been a gompanion unt partner
in full with that great American train-robber, Chessie Chames. Sure he
would. My grantmutter she seen him like she could maybe reach out a
finger unt touch him!"

"I'll call him Nap," promised Bean. He had ceased to feel blamable for
the shortcomings of Napoleon I, but it was just as well not to have the
name used too freely.

When he issued to the street, the excited dog on a leash, he was prouder
than most kings have ever had occasion to be.

Now, he went to inspect flats. He would at last have "apartments," and
in a neighbourhood suitable for a growing dog. He bestowed little
attention on the premises submitted to his view, occupying himself
chiefly with observing the effect of his dog on the various janitors.
Some were frankly hostile; some covertly so. Some didn't mind dogs--but
there was rules. And some defeated themselves by a display of
over-enthusiasm that manifestly veiled indifference, or perhaps
downright dislike.

But a janitor was finally encountered who met the test. In ten seconds
Bean knew that Cassidy would be a friend to any dog. He did not fawn
upon the animal nor explode with praise. He merely bestowed a glance or
two upon the distinguished head, and later rubbed the head expertly just
back of the erect ears; this, while he exposed to Bean the circumstances
under which one steam-heated apartment, suitable for light housekeeping,
chanced to be vacant. The parties, it appeared, was givin' a Dutch lunch
to a gang of their friends at 5 A.M. of a morning, and that was bad
enough in a place that was well kep' up; but in the sicin' place they
got scrappin', which had swiftly resulted in an ambulance call for the
host and lessee, and the patrol wagon for his friends that were not in
much better shape thimselves, praise Gawd. But the place was all cleaned
up again and would be a jool f'r anny young man that could take a drink,
or maybe two, and then stop.

Bean knew Cassidy by that time, and his inspection of the apartment was
perfunctory. Cassidy would be a buckler and shield to the dog, in his
absence. Cassidy would love him. The dog, on his spread forefeet,
touched his chest to the ground and with ears erect, eyes agleam, and
inciting soprano gurgles invited the world to a mad, mad, game.

Cassidy only said, "Aw, g'wan! _Would_ you, now!" But each word was a
caress. And Cassidy became Bean's janitor.

He moved the next day, bringing his effects in a cab. The cabman
professed never to have seen a dog as "classy" as Nap, and voiced the
cheerful prophecy that in any bench show he would make them all look
like mutts. He received a gratuity of fifty cents in addition to the
outrageous fee he demanded for coming so far north, although he had the
appearance of one who uses liquor to excess, and could probably not have
qualified as a judge of dogs.

Bean's installation, under the guidance of Cassidy, was effected without
delay. The apartment proved to be entirely suitable for a king in
abeyance. There was a bedroom, a parlour, an alcove off the latter that
Cassidy said was the libr'y an' a good place f'r a dawg t' sleep, and
beyond this was a feminine diminutive of a kitchen, prettily called a
"kitchenette."

Bean felt like an insect in such a labyrinth of a place. He forgot where
he put things, and then, overcome by the vastness and number of rooms,
forgot what he was looking for, losing himself in an abstracted and
fruitless survey of the walls. He must buy things to hang on the walls,
especially over certain stains on the wall of the parlour, or
throne-room, to which in the heat of battle, doubtless, certain items of
the late Dutch lunch had been misdirected.

But he knew what to buy. Etchings. In the magazine stories he read,
aside from the very rich characters who had galleries of old masters,
there were two classes: one without taste that littered its rooms with
expensive but ill-advised bric-a-brac; and one that wisely contented
itself with "a few good etchings." He bought a few good etchings at a
department store for $1.97 each, and felt irreproachable. And when he
had arranged his books--about Napoleon I and ancient Egypt--he was ready
to play the game of living. Mrs. Cassidy "did" his rooms, and Cassidy
already showed the devotion of an old and tried retainer. The Cassidys
made him feel feudal.

At night, while Nap fought a never-decided battle with a sofa-pillow, or
curled asleep on the couch with a half-inch of silly pink tongue
projecting from between his teeth, he read of Egypt, the black land,
where had been the first great people of the ancient world. He devoured
the fruit of the lotus, the tamarisk, the pomegranate, and held cats to
be sacred. (Funny, that feeling he had always had about cats--afraid of
them even in childhood--it had survived in his being!) There he had
lived and reigned in that flat valley of the Nile, between borders of
low mountains, until his name had been put down in the book of the dead,
and he had gone for a time to the hall of Osiris.

Or, perhaps, he read reports of psychical societies, signed by men with
any number of capital letters after their names: cool-headed scientists,
university professors, psychologists, grave students all, who were
constantly finding new and wonderful mediums, and achieving
communication with the disembodied. He could tell them a few things;
only, of course, he wouldn't make a fool of himself. He could _show_
them something, too, when the secret agents of Professor Balthasar came
bringing It.

Or he looked into the opal depths of his shell, and saw visions of his
greatness to come, while Nap, unregarded, wrenched away one of his
slippers and pretended to find it something alive and formidable, to be
growled at and shaken and savagely macerated.

       *       *       *       *       *

There came, on a certain fair morning, a summons from Breede, who was
detained at his country place by the same malady that Bulger had once so
crudely diagnosed. Bean was to bring out the mail and do his work there.
The car waited below.

At another time the expedition might have attracted him. He had studied
pictures of that country place in the Sunday papers. Now it meant a
separation from his dog, who was already betraying for the Cassidys a
greater fondness than the circumstances justified; and it meant an
absence from town at the very time when the secret agents might happen
along with It. Of course he could refuse to go, but that would cost him
his job, and he was not yet even the director of an express company.
Dejectedly he prepared for the journey.

"Better take some things along," suggested Tully, who had conveyed the
order to him. "He may keep you three or four days."

Bulger followed him to the hall.

"Look out for Grandma, the Demon!" warned Bulger. "'F I was the old man
I'd slip something in her tea."

"Who--who is she?" demanded Bean.

"Just his dear, sweet old mother, that's all! Talk you to
death--suffergette! Oh! say!"

Reaching the street, his gloom was not at all lightened by the discovery
of the flapper in the waiting car. She gave him the little double-nod
and regarded him with that peculiar steely kindness he so well
remembered. It was undoubtedly kind, that look, yet there was an
implacable something in its quality that dismayed him. He wondered what
she exactly meant by it.

"Get in," commanded the flapper, and Bean got in.

"Tell him where to go for your things."

Bean told him.

"I'm glad it's on our way. Pops is in an awful state. He swore right out
at his own mother this morning, and he wants you there in a hurry. Maybe
we'll be arrested for speeding."

Bean earnestly hoped they would. Pops in health was ordeal enough. But
he remained silent, trusting to the vigilance of an excellent
constabulary. The car reached the steam-heated apartment without
adventure, however, and he quickly secured his suit-case and consigned
the dog for an uncertain period to a Cassidy, who was brazenly taking
more than a friendly interest in him. Cassidy talked bluntly of how "we"
ought to feed him, as if he were already a part owner of the animal.

The car flew on, increasing a speed that had been unlawful almost from
the start. He wondered what the police were about. He might write a
sharp letter to the newspapers, signed, "Indignant Pedestrian," only it
would be too late. He was being volleyed at the rate of thirty-five
miles an hour into the presence of a man who had that morning sworn at
his mother. He wished he could, say for one day, have Breede back there
on the banks of the Nile--set him to work building a pyramid, or weeding
the lotus patch, foot or _no_ foot! He'd show him!

He switched this resentment to the young female at his side. He wanted
her to quit looking at him that way. It made him nervous. But a muffled
glance or two at her disarmed this feeling. She was all right to look
at, he thought, had pretty hands and "all that"--she had stripped off
her gloves when they reached the open country--and she didn't talk,
which was what he most feared in her sex. He recalled that she had said
hardly a word since the start. He might have supposed himself forgotten
had it not been for that look of veiled determination which he
encountered as often as he dared.

A young dog dashed from a gateway ahead of them and threatened the car
furiously. They both applied imaginary brakes to the car with feet and
hands and taut nerves. The puppy escaping death by an inch, trotted back
to his saved home with an air that comes from duty well performed. They
looked from the dog to each other.

"I'd make them against the law," said Bean.

"How could you? The idea!"

"I mean motors, not dogs."

"Oh! Of course!"

They had been brought a little together.

"You go in for dogs?" asked the flapper.

He hesitated. "Going in" for dogs seemed to mean more. "I've got only
one just now," he confessed.

Wooded hills flew by them, the white road flickered forward to their
wheels.

"You interested in the movement?" demanded the flapper again.

"Yes," he said.

"Granny will be delighted to know that. So many young men aren't."

"What make is it?" he inquired, preparing to look enlightened when told
the name of the vehicle in which they rode.

"Oh, I mean the Movement--_the_ movement!"

"Oh, yes," he faltered. "Greatly interested!" He remembered the badge on
her jacket, and Bulger's warning about Grandma, the Demon.

"Granny and I marched in the parade this year, clear down to Washington
Square. If she wasn't so old we'd both run over to London and get
arrested in the Strand for breaking windows."

Bean shuddered.

"We're making our flag now for the next parade--big blue cloth with a
gold star for every state that has raised woman from her degradation by
giving her a vote."

He shuddered again. Although of legal years for the franchise, he had
never voted. If you tried to vote some ward-heeler would challenge you
and you'd like as not be hauled off to the lock-up. And what was the
good of it! The politicians got what they wanted. But this he kept to
himself.

"Granny'll put a badge on you," promised the flapper. "We have to take
advantage of every little means."

He was still puzzling over this when they turned through a gateway,
imposing with its tangle of wrought iron and gilt, and at a decorously
reduced speed crinkled up a wide drive to the vast pile of gray stone
that housed the un-filial Breede.

[Illustration: "Daughter!" said Breede, with half a glance at the
flapper]

A taller and, Bean thought, a prettier girl than the flapper stepped
aside for them, looking at Bean as they passed. One could read her look
as one could not read the flapper's. It was outrageously languishing.

"Flirts with every one, makes no difference _who_!" explained the
flapper with a venomous sniff.

Bean laughed uneasily.

"She's my own dear sister, and I love her, but she's a perfect cat!"

Bean made deprecating sounds with his lips.

"I suppose people have been wondering where I was," confessed the
flapper as they descended upon the granite steps. "I forgot to tell them
I was going. Better hurry to Pops or he'll be murdering some one."

A man took his bag and preceded him into the big hall.

"Engaged, too!" called the flapper bitterly.

He found Breede imprisoned in a large, light room that looked to the
west. Below the windows a green hill fell sheerly away to the bank of a
lordly river, and beyond rose other hills that shimmered in the haze. A
light breeze fluttered the gayly striped awnings. Breede, at a desk,
turned his back upon the fair scene and fumed.

"Take letter G.M. Watkins, Pres'den I 'n' N.C. Rai'way," began Breede
as Bean entered the room. "Dear sir repline yours of 23d instan' would
say Ouch! damn that foot don't take that regardin' traffic 'greement
now'n 'fect that 'casion may rise 'n near future to 'mend same in
'cordance with stip'lations inform'ly made at conf'rence held las'
Janwary will not'fy you 'n due time 'f change is made yours very truly
have some lunch brought here 'n a minute may haf' t' stay three four
days t'll this Whoo! damn foot gets well take letter H.J. Hobbs secon'
'sistant vice Pres'den' D. 'n' L.S. Rai'way New York, New York, dear
Hobbs mark it pers'nal repline yours even date stock purchases goin'
forward as rapidly's thought wise under circumstances it is held mos'ly
'n small lots an' too active a market might give rise t' silly notions
about it--"

The day's work was on, familiar enough, with the exception of Breede's
interjections; he spoke words many times that were not to be "taken
down." And yet Bean forebore to record his wonted criticisms of his
employer's dress. There was ground for them. Breede had never looked
less the advanced dresser. But Bean's mind was busy with that older
sister, she of the marvellously drooping eyes. He had recognized her at
once as the ideal person with whom to be wrecked on a desert island. A
flirt, and engaged, too, was she? No matter. He wrecked himself with
her, and they lived on mussels and edible roots and berries, and some
canned stuff from the ship, and he built a hut of "native thatch," and
found a deposit of rubies, gathering bushels of them, and he became her
affianced the very day the smoke of the rescuing steamer blackened the
horizon. And throughout an idyllic union they always thought rather
regretfully of that island; they had had such a beautiful time there.
And his oldest son, who was left-handed, pitched a ball that was the
despair of every batter in both leagues!

Such had been the devastation of that one drooping glance. This vision,
enjoyed while he ate of the luncheon brought to him, might have been
prolonged. He hadn't remembered a quarter of the delightful
contingencies that arise when the right man and woman are wrecked on an
island, but he looked up from his plate to find Breede regarding him and
his abundant food with a look of such stony malignance that he could eat
no more--Breede with his glass of diluted milk and one intensely
hygienic cracker!

But during pauses in the afternoon's work the island vision became
blurred by the singular energies of the flapper. What did she mean by
looking at him that way? There was something ominous about it. He had to
admit that in some occult way she benumbed his will power. He did not
believe he would dare be wrecked on a desert island with the other one,
if the flapper knew about it.

At last there was surcease of Breede.

"Have 'em ready in the morning," he directed, referring to the letters
he had dictated. "G'wout 'n' 'muse yourself when you get time," he added
hospitably. "Now I got to hobble to my room. If you see any women
outside, tell 'em g'wan downstairs if they don't want to hear me."

He stood balanced on one foot, a stout cane in either hand. Bean opened
the door, but the hall was vacant. Breede grunted and began his
progress. It was, perhaps, not more than reasonably vocal considering
his provocation.

Bean uncovered a typewriter and sat to it, his note-book before him. For
a moment he reverted to the island vision. They could be attacked by
savages from another island, and he would fight them off with the rifles
he had salvaged from the ship. _She_ would reload the weapons for him,
and bind up his head when he was wounded. He fought the last half of the
desperate battle with a stained bandage over his brow.

There was a sharp rap at the door and it opened
before he could call. The flapper entered.

"Don't let me disturb you," she said, and walked to the window, as if
she found the place only scenically interesting.

Bean murmured politely and began upon his letters. The flapper was
relentless. She sat in her father's chair and fastened the old look of
implacable kindness upon him. He beat the keys of the machine. The
flapper was disturbing him atrociously.

A few moments later another rap sounded on the door, and again it opened
before he could call. A shrewd-looking, rather trim old lady with
carefully coiffed hair stood in the doorway.

"Don't let me disturb you," she said, and again Bean murmured.

"Mr. Bean, my grandmother," said the flapper.

"Keep right on with your work, young man," said the old lady in
commanding tones, when Bean had acknowledged the presentation. "I like
to watch it."

She sat in another chair, very straight in her lavender dress, and
joined with the flapper in her survey of the wage-slave. This was
undoubtedly Grandma, the Demon.

Bean continued his work, thinking as best he could above the words of
Breede, that she must be a pretty raw old party, going around, voting,
smashing windows, leading her innocent young grandchild into the same
reckless life. Nice thing, that! He was not surprised when he heard a
match lighted a moment later, and knew that Grandma was smoking a
cigarette. Expect anything of _that_ sort!

He had wished they would go before he finished the last letter, but they
sat on, and Grandma filled the room with smoke.

"Now he's through!" proclaimed the flapper.

"How old are you?" asked Grandma, as Bean arose nervously from the
machine.

He tried jauntily to make it appear that he must "count up."

"Let me see. I'm--twenty-three last Tuesday."

The old lady nodded approvingly, as if this were something to his
credit.

"Got any vicious habits?"

Bean weakly began an answer intended to be facetious, and yet leave much
to be inferred regarding his habits. But the Demon would have none of
this.

"Smoke?"

"No!"

"Drink?"

"No!" He desperately wondered if she would know where to stop.

"How's your health? Ever been sick much?"

"I can't remember. I had lumbago when I was seven."

"Humph! Gamble, play cards, bet on races, go around raising cain with a
lot of young devils at night?"

"No, I don't," said Bean, with a hint of sullen defiance. He wanted to
add: "And I don't go round voting and breaking windows, either," but he
was not equal to this.

"Well, I don't know--" She deliberated, adjusting one of her many puffs
of gray hair, and gazing dreamily at a thread of smoke that ascended
from her cigarette. She seemed to be wondering whether or not she ought
to let him off this time. "Well, I don't know. It looks to me as if you
were too good to be true."

She rose and tossed her cigarette out of the window. He thought he was
freed, but at the door she turned suddenly upon him once more.

"What in time _have_ you done? Haven't you ever had any fun?"

But she waited for no answer.

"I knew she'd admire you," said the flapper. "Isn't she a perfectly old
dear?"

"Oh, yes!" gasped Bean. "Yes, yes, yes, indeed! She is _that_!"




VII


Bean had once attended a magician's entertainment and there suffered
vicariously the agony endured by one of his volunteer assistants.
Suavely the entertainer begged the help of "some kind gentleman from the
audience." He was insistent, exerting upon the reluctant ones the
pressure of his best platform manner.

When the pause had grown embarrassing, a shamed looking man slouched
forward from an aisle seat amid hearty cheers. He ascended the carpeted
runway from aisle to stage, stumbled over footlights and dropped his
hat. Then the magician harried him to the malicious glee of the
audience. He removed playing-cards, white rabbits and articles of
feminine apparel from beneath the coat of his victim. He seated him in a
chair that collapsed. He gave him a box to hold and shocked him
electrically. He missed his watch and discovered it in the abused man's
pocket. And when the ordeal was over the recovered hat was found to
contain guinea-pigs. The kind gentleman from the audience had been shown
to be transcendently awkward, brainless, and to have a mania for petty
thievery. With burning face and falling glance, he had stumbled back to
his seat, where a lady who had before exhibited the public manner of
wife to husband toward him, now pretended that he was an utter and
offensive stranger.

Bean, I say, had once suffered vicariously with this altruistic dolt.
His suffering now was not vicarious. For three days he endured on the
raw of his own soul tortures even more ingeniously harrowing.

To be shut up for three hours a day with Breede was bad enough, but
custom had a little dulled his sensitiveness to this. And he could look
Breede over and write down in beautiful shorthand what he thought of
him.

But the other Breedes!

Mrs. Breede, a member of one of the very oldest families in Omaha, he
learned, terrified him exceedingly. She was an advanced dresser--he had
to admit that--but she was no longer beautiful. She was a plucked rose
that had been too long kept; the petals were rusting, crumpling at the
edges. He wondered if Breede had ever wished to be wrecked on a desert
island with her. She surveyed Bean through a glass-and-gold weapon with
a long handle, and on the two subsequent occasions when she addressed
him called him Mr. Brown. Once meeting him in the hall, she seemed to
believe that he had been sent to fix the telephone.

And the flapper's taller sister of the languishing glance--how quickly
had she awakened him from that golden dream of the low-lying atoll and
the wrecked ship in a far sea. She _did_ flirt with "any one," no doubt
about that. She adroitly revealed to Bean an unshakable conviction that
he was desperately enamoured of her, and that it served him right for a
presumptuous nobody. She talked to him, preened herself in his gaze, and
maddened him with a manner of deadly roguishness. Then she flew to exert
the same charm upon any one of the resplendent young men who were
constantly riding over or tooting over in big black motor-cars. They
were young men who apparently had nothing to do but "go in" for
things--riding, tennis, polo, golf. To all of them she was the
self-confident charmer; just the kind of a girl to make a fool of you
and tell about it.

Twenty-four hours after her first assault upon him he was still wrecking
the ship at the entrance to that lagoon, but now he watched the big
sister go down for the third time while he placidly rescued a stoker to
share his romantic isolation.

The flapper and Grandma, the Demon, were even more objectionable, and,
what was worse, they alarmed him. Puzzled as to their purpose, he knew
not what defence to make. He was swept on some secret and sinister
current to an end he could not divine.

The flapper lay in wait for him at all hours when he might appear. Did
he open a door, she lurked in the corridor; did he seek refuge in the
gloom of the library, she arose to confront him from its dimmest nook;
did he plan a masterly escape by a rear stairway, she burst upon him
from the ambush of some exotic shrub to demand which way he had thought
of going. He had never thought of a way that did not prove to have been
her own. The creature was a leech! If she had only talked, he believed
that he could have thrown her off. But she would not talk. She merely
walked beside him insatiably. Sometimes he thought he could detect a
faint anxiety in the look she kept upon him, but, mostly, it was the
look of something calm, secure, ruthless. Something! It unnerved him.

It was usually probable that Grandma, the Demon, would join them, the
silver cigarette case dangling at her girdle. Then was he sorely beset.
They would perhaps talk about him over his head, discuss his points as
if he were some new beast from the stables.

"I tell you, he's over an inch taller than I am," announced the flapper.

"U-u-mm!" replied Grandma, measuring Bean's stature with narrowed eye.
"U-u-mm!"

"You show her!" commanded flapper, in a louder voice, as if she believed
him deaf. She grasped his arm and whirled him about to stand with his
back to hers.

"There!" said the flapper tensely, her eyes staring ahead. "There!"

"You're scrooching!" accused the Demon.

"Not a bit!--and see how square his shoulders are!" She turned to point
out this grace of the animal.

"Ever take any drugs? Ever get any habits like that?" queried the Demon.
Plainly Bean's confession to an unusual virtue had aroused her
suspicion. He might be a drug fiend!

He faltered wretchedly, wishing Breede would send for him.

"I--well, I used to be made to take sulphur and molasses every
spring ... but I never kept it up after I left home."

"Hum!" said the old lady, looking as if he could tell a lot more if he
chose.

She gripped one of his biceps. He was not ashamed of these. The night
and morning drill with that home exerciser had told, even though he was
not yet so impressive as the machine's inventor, who, in magazine
advertisements, looked down so fondly upon his own flexed arm.

"For goodness' sake!" exclaimed the Demon respectfully.

Bean thrilled at this, feeling like a primitive brute of the cave times,
accustomed to subduing women by force.

After that they seemed tacitly to agree that they would pretend to show
him over the "grounds." Bean hated the grounds, which were worried to
the last square inch into a chilling formality, and the big glass
conservatory was stifling, like an overcrowded, overheated auditorium.
And he knew they were "drawing him out." They looked meaningly at each
other whenever he spoke.

They questioned him about his early life, but learned only that his
father had been "engaged in the express business." He was ably reticent.

Did he believe that women ought to be classed legally with drunkards,
imbeciles and criminals? He did not, if you came down to that. Let them
vote if they wanted to. He had other things to think about, more
important. He didn't care much, either way. Voting didn't do any good.

He had taken the ideal attitude to enrage the woman suffragist. She will
respect opposition. Careless indifference she cannot brook. Grandma
opened upon him and battered him to a pulpy mass. Within the half hour
he was supinely promising to remind her to give him a badge before he
left; and there was further talk of his marching at the next parade as a
member of the Men's League for Woman's Suffrage, or, at the very least,
in the column of Men Sympathizers.

He wondered, wondered! Were they trying to assure themselves that he was
a fit man to be in the employ of old Breede? He could imagine it of
them; as soon as they thought about voting they began to interfere in a
man's business. Yet this suspicion slept when he was with the flapper
alone. Sometimes he was conscious of liking very much to be with her. He
decided that this was because she didn't talk.

The evening of his last day came. Breede, in a burst of garrulity, had
said: "Had enough this; go town to-morrow!" The flapper, and even the
Demon, had seemed to be stirred by the announcement. He resolved to be
more than ever on his guard. But they caught him fairly in the open.

"How do you like his hair parted that way in the middle?" demanded the
flapper, with the calculating eye of one who ponders changes in a
dwelling-house.

"U-u-mm!" considered the Demon gravely. "Not bad. Still, perhaps--!"

"Exactly what I was thinking!" said the flapper cordially. Then, to
Bean, her tone slightly raised:

"Which way?"

"Got to get off a bunch of telegrams," lied Bean.

"Oh, all right! We'll wait for you," said the flapper. "Right there,"
she added, pointing to the most expensive pergola on the place.

In the dusk of an hour later he slunk stealthily down a rear stairway
and made a cautious detour into the grounds. He earnestly meant to keep
far from that pergola. Wait for him, would they? Well, he'd show them!
Always spying on a man; _hounding_ him! What business was it of theirs
whether he had habits or not ... any kind of habits?

But he was to find himself under a spell such as is said to bring the
weak-willed bird to the serpent's maw. His traitorous feet dragged him
toward the trap. The odour of a cigarette drew his revolted nostrils. He
could hear the murmurous duet.

Talking about him! Of course! He would like to break in on them and for
a little while be a certain Corsican upstart in one of his most
objectionable moods. That would take them down a bit. But, instead, he
became something entirely different. With the stealth of the red Indian
he effaced himself against a background of well-groomed shrubbery and
crept toward the murmur. At last he could hear words above the beating
of his heart.

"How can you _know_?" the Demon was saying. "A child of your age?"

The flapper's tone was calm and confident as one who relates a
phenomenon that has become a commonplace.

"I knew it the very first second I ever saw him--something went over me
just like that--I can't tell how, but I knew."

"Well, how can you know about him?"

"Oh, him!" The words implied that the flapper had waved a deprecating
hand. "Why, I know about him in just the same way; you can't tell how.
It comes over you!"

The Demon: (A long-drawn) "U-u-mm!"

The flapper: "And he makes me perfectly furious sometimes, too!"

There was a stir as if they were leaving. Bean retreated a dozen feet
before he breathed again. So that was their game, was it? He'd see about
that!

He waited for them to emerge, but they had apparently settled to more of
this high-handed talk. Then, like an icy wave to engulf him, came a
name--"Tommy Hollins." It came in the Demon's voice, indistinguishable
words preceding it. And in the flapper's voice came "Tommy Hollins!"
gently, caressingly, it seemed. In truth, the flapper had sniffed before
uttering it, and the sniff had meant good-natured contempt but Bean had
lost the sniff.

Now he had it! Tommy Hollins! He identified the youth, a yellow-headed,
pink-faced lout in flannels who was always riding over, and who seemed
to "go in" for nearly everything. He had detected a romping intimacy
between the two. So it was Tommy Hollins. At once he felt a great
relief; he need worry no longer over the singular attentions of this
young woman. Let Tommy Hollins worry! He could admit, now, how grave had
been his alarm. And there was nothing in it. He could meet her without
being afraid. He was almost ready to approach them genially and pass an
hour in light conversation. He advanced a few steps with this intention,
but again came the voice of the flapper replying, apparently, to some
unheard admonition. It came, cold and terrible.

"I don't care. I've got the right to choose the father of my own
children!"

He blushed for this language, a blush he could feel mantling his very
toes. He fled from there. He saw that the moment was not for light
conversation. And even as he fled he caught the Demon's prolonged
"U-u-mmm!"

Yet when he left in the morning the flapper lurked for him as ever,
materializing from an apparently vacant corridor. He greeted her for the
first time without ulterior questioning. He thought he liked her pretty
well now. And she was undeniably good to look at in the white of her
tennis costume; the hair, like Nap's spots in its golden brown, was
filleted with a scarlet ribbon, and her eyes shone from her freshened
face with an unwonted sparkle--decision, certitude--what was it? He
deemed that he knew.

"Tommy Hollins coming to play," she vouchsafed in explanation of the
racquet she carried. "Are you glad to go?"

"Glad to see my dog again." He smiled as a man of the world. He was on
the verge of coquetry, now that he knew it to be safe.

"We'll bring him along too, next time."

"Oh, the next time!" He put it carelessly aside.

"You'll be out again, soon enough. I simply know Pops is going to have
another bad spell--in a week or so."

He could have sworn that the eyes of Breede's daughter gleamed with cold
anticipatory malice. He shuddered for Breede. And he wished Tommy
Hollins well of his bargain. Flirt, indeed! All alike!

"Chubbins!" called the unconscious father from afar.

"Yes, Pops!" She gripped his hand with a well-muscled fervour. "Oh,
he'll have another in a little while, don't you worry!" And she was off,
with this evil in her heart, to a father but now convalescent.

Marvelling, he walked on to the Demon's ambuscade. She pounced upon him
from behind a half-opened door.

"I want to say one word, young man. Oh, you needn't think I don't see
the way things are going. I'm not blind if I am seventy-six! If you're
the tender and innocent thing you say you are, you look out for
yourself. I know you all! If you don't break out one time you do
another. I'd a good deal rather you'd had it over before now and put it
all behind you--don't interrupt--but you're sound and clean as far as I
can see, and you've got a good situation. I don't say it couldn't be
worse. But if you are--well, you see that you _stay_ that way. Don't try
to tell me. I've seen enough of men in my time--"

He broke away from her at Breede's call. The flapper jerked her head
twice at him, very neatly, as the car passed the tennis court. She was
beginning a practise volley with Tommy Hollins, who was disporting
himself like a young colt.

"Chubbins!" he thought. Not a bad name for her, though it had come
queerly from Breede. For the first time he was pricked with the needle
of suspicion that Hollins might not be the right man for the flapper.
Hearing her called "Chubbins" somehow made it seem different. Maybe
Hollins, who seemed all of twenty, wouldn't "make her happy." He thought
it was something that the family ought to consider very seriously. He
was conscious of a willingness to consider it himself, as a friend of
the family and a well-wisher of Chubbins.

       *       *       *       *       *

He was back in the apartment and in the presence of a document that
swept his mind of all Breedes. Never had he in fancy ceased to be king
Ram-tah, cheated of historic mention because of his wisdom and goodness.
He had looked commiseratingly upon Breede's country-house, thinking of
his own palace on the banks of the slow-moving Nile. "--probably made
this place look like a shack!" he had exultantly thought. And the benign
monarch had ended his reign in peace, to be laid magnificently away, to
repose undisturbed while the sands drifted over him--until--

The hour had come. "My men have succeeded, after incredible hardships,"
wrote Professor Balthasar. "The _goods_ will be delivered to you
Thursday night, the tenth. I trust the final payment will be ready, as,
relying on your honour, I have advanced--"

The rest did not matter. His honour was surely to be relied upon. The
money had been richly earned. An able man, this Balthasar! He had
achieved the thing with admirable secrecy. Bean had feared the hounds of
the daily press. They might discover who It was, to whom It was going;
discover the true identity of Bunker Bean. The whole thing might come
out in the papers! But Balthasar had known how. He approved the caution
that had led him to speak of "the _goods_"; there was something almost
witty about it.

He leaned far out a window, listening, straining his eyes up and down
the lighted avenue. There was confusion in his mind as to how It could
most fittingly be brought to him. The sable vision of a hearse drawn by
four lordly black horses at first possessed his mind. But this was
dismissed; there was no death! And the spectacle would excite comment.
The idea of an ambulance, which he next considered, seemed equally
impracticable. It would have to be done quietly; Balthasar would know.
Trust Balthasar!

He heard the rhythmic clump-clump of a horse's hoofs on the asphalt
pavement. This was presently accompanied by the sounds of wheels. An
express wagon came under the street-lights. Balthasar rode beside the
driver, his frock coat and glossy tall hat having been relinquished for
the garb of an ordinary citizen. Back of them in the wagon he could
distinguish the lines of an Object. It had come to him in a common
express wagon, in a common crate, and the driver did not even wear a
black mask. Balthasar had cunningly eluded detection by pretending there
was nothing to conceal.

He drew back from the window and with fast beating heart went to open
the door. They were already on the stairway. Balthasar was coming first.
With sublime effrontery he had impressed Cassidy to help carry It, and
Cassidy was warning the expressman to look out for that turn an' not
tear inta th' plashter.

It was lowered to the floor in the throne-room. Cassidy and the
expressman puffed freely and looked at the thing as if wondering how two
men had ever been equal to it.

"'Twould be brickybac," said Cassidy genially.

"That there hall's choked with dust," said the expressman with seeming
irrelevance.

"I noticed it meself," said Cassidy.

"Clogged me throat up fur fair," continued the expressman huskily.

"Pay the men liberally and let them be on their way," said Balthasar.
Bean pressed money upon both and they departed.

"You couldn't get me to do it again for twice the money," said
Balthasar; "the nervous strain I've been under. A custom-house detective
was on our trail, but one of my men took care of him--at a dark corner."

Bean shuddered.

"They didn't--"

"Oh, nothing serious. He'll be as well as ever in a few days. Got a
hatchet." He gestured significantly toward the crate.


But this was too precipitate for Bean. He could not disinter himself--it
seemed like that--under the eyes of Balthasar.

"Not now! Not now! You've done your part--here!" He passed Balthasar the
check he had written earlier in the evening.

"I'll leave you, then," said the professor. "But one thing, don't handle
it much. It might disintegrate. I bid you farewell, my young friend."

Bean, at the door, listened to his descending steps. The professor was
whistling. He recognized the air, "Call Me Up Some Rainy Afternoon." It
was a lively air and the professor rendered it ably but quite softly.

The door locked, he was back staring at the crate that concealed his
dead self. He was helpless before it. The fleshly tenement of a great
king who had later flashed upon the world as Napoleon I, and was now
Bunker Bean! Could he bear to look? He trembled and knew himself weak.
Yet it would be done, some time.

There was a vigorous knock at the door. All was discovered!

The crime of assault at the dark corner had been traced to his door.
Balthasar had betrayed him. The Egyptian authorities had discovered
their loss. The thing was there. He was caught red-handed.

He reached the door and cautiously opened it an inch. Cassidy stood
there, armed with a hatchet. They would use violence!

"Hatchet!" said Cassidy, genially extending the weapon. He wiped his
mouth with the back of his hand. The aroma of beer stole into the room.

"F'r brox brickybac!" insinuated Cassidy.

"Thanks!" said Bean, accepting the tool.

"We kem frum th' sem county, Mayo, him an' me," volunteered Cassidy.
"G'night!"

Once more Bean faced the crate. It must be done at once. Discovery was
too probable. Gingerly he forced the blade under one of the boards and
pried. The nails screeched horribly as they were withdrawn. The task was
simple enough; the crate was a flimsy affair to have withstood so
difficult a journey. But after each board was removed he peered to the
street from behind the closed blind, half expecting to find policemen
drawn to the spot.

A smoothly packed layer of excelsior greeted his eyes. It was rather
reassuring. He felt that he might be unpacking any casual object.
Exposed at last was the wooden case that enveloped him!

Awestruck, he looked down at it for a long time. He recognized the
workmanship, having seen a doz

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