Delphi Complete Works of Thorne Smith (Illustrated), page 236
There was no doubt that Fanny was deeply impressed. She looked first at Mrs. Bland’s head, then transferred her dark gaze to Mr. Bland’s throat. There was such a lot of Mr. Bland’s throat. Fanny was just as well pleased it was not slit. Fanny took care of the rugs.
“I’m sorry, madam,” she said respectfully. “Is there anything I can do?”
“Yes,” replied Madam bitterly. “You might get a gun and shoot me and get it over with.”
“Or,” suggested her husband, “you might ask the cook to step in for a moment with the carving knife and cut my throat for the edification of Mrs. Bland. I’ll endeavor to bleed in two separate pools, my dear, and place a failing foot in each.”
Mentally confronted by this ghastly picture, Fanny hurried from the room.
“Have you no pride?” asked Quintus Bland when the passionate maid had gone.
“None whatsoever,” his wife coolly replied. “In the presence of a stalking murderer there is no room for pride.”
Fanny returned with aspirin and water. Lorna took one tablet and washed it down with a small gulp.
“Will you have one?” she asked the stalking murderer.
“Thanks,” he replied. “Two.”
“Your headache is no worse than mine,” said his wife. “I’ll take three.”
“How petty,” remarked Mr. Bland, enjoying Lorna’s efforts to get the tablets down. “How, how petty.”
“You started it,” said his wife, passing him the box.
“Might as well finish them off,” he said, glancing at the contents. “There are only four left.”
Even for his long throat the swallowing of four aspirins presented some difficulty. Nevertheless he succeeded in flexing them down. With thwarted eyes his wife watched her husband’s neck until the last spasmodic ripple had subsided.
“You should have been a sword swallower,” she commented; then, turning to Fanny, “Are there any more aspirins in the house?”
“No, Mrs. Bland,” said Fanny. “Shall I send for some?”
“Do,” replied Mrs. Bland. “A large box.”
“How petty,” murmured Mr. Bland. “How very, very petty.”
“I hope your heart stops beating,” snapped his wife.
“Fanny,” said Mr. Bland, disregarding this hope, “where is my dog? A man must have some companionship.”
“If that dog shows his stupid face in here,” Mrs. Bland announced in a voice of cool determination, “I’ll pull his tail out by the roots.”
“I think you mean off,” corrected her husband.
“Off or out,” cried Lorna Bland, “it doesn’t matter which. If that dog comes in here he’ll leave the room with his tail in my hands.”
“So you would carry the warfare to dumb animals,” said Mr. Bland with a sneer in his voice.
“I started it with one,” Mrs. Bland replied with evident satisfaction.
At this moment the dog whose tail had been under discussion, and whose correct name was Busy, came on little bounces into the room. Busy was about a foot high, a trifle less than a foot wide, and a little more than a foot long. It was quite obvious the dog had made a brave attempt to make himself as nearly a cube as possible. He was all white and woolly. Two black eyes like washed grapes danced vividly in a large square head. Such was Busy. Both Quintus and Lorna Bland were always on the point of looking up in a book to find out just what sort of dog he was, but what with one thing and another they had never quite got round to it. Nominally Busy was the property of Mr. Bland, although his wife was equally fond of the dog. Now, however, it pleased her to consider the animal entirely his, realizing that the best way to attack her husband was through this odd-looking beast.
Therefore, the moment the blonde woman’s eyes fell upon the unsuspecting dog she swooped down upon him and began to tug lustily at his tail. Busy gave tongue to a sharp yelp of indignation. This was quite enough for Quintus Bland. He rushed across the room and seized his crouching wife by the hair.
“Let go of that dog’s tail,” he threatened, “or I’ll drag you about by the hair.”
“See,” said Lorna Bland triumphantly, as she went over backwards, dragging the dog with her. “What did I tell you, Fanny? The man’s a stalking murderer. This probably will be the end. Run for your life.”
For a moment the situation remained static. Mr. Bland had his wife by the hair while she had his dog by the tail. Fanny could not recall ever having seen anything quite like it. Neither seemed willing to let go first, although Busy would have been only too happy to wash his hands of the whole affair. The ring of the doorbell broke the deadlock. Quintus Bland released his wife, who in turn released his dog. Struggling to her feet, she began to fluff out her hair. As Fanny with a backward glance hurried to the door, the master of the house assumed a dignified attitude while his consort fixed a smile of greeting on her lips.
“Will you help me to get through college,” hopefully inquired a voice, “by subscribing to one of these popular magazines?”
“Certainly not!” shouted Mr. Bland to the unseen aspirant.
“No!” passionately elaborated his wife. “Not if you remain ignorant to the end of your days, which I hope are numbered.”
Feeling definitely certain that this was a poor portal indeed through which to enter into the realms of higher education, the youth withdrew, and Fanny hurried back to the room, hoping to witness the resumption of hostilities. But for that day active hostilities were at an end. Mrs. Bland was busy with the telephone. Her husband was watching her with a pair of brooding eyes.
“Is that you, Phil?” said Lorna Bland after a short pause. “Yes, of course, it is. Certainly this is Blondie. I simply wanted to let you know that my husband has just attempted to dash my brains out, then drag me round by my hair. Pretty, isn’t it?”
“She brutally assaulted my dog,” thundered Quintus Bland over his wife’s shoulder, “and tried to pull his tail off.”
“That was the voice of the murderer,” said Lorna into the telephone. “No, no, not mine. He was referring to the dog’s. [Pause.] Listen, Phil, I want you to take me out to dinner. I’ll pick you up in the car. [Pause.] How sweet of you. Yes, yes, yes. [Another pause.] And after? Oh, I don’t care what happens after. Better that than death.”
She replaced the instrument and glanced significantly at her husband.
“Better that by far,” she said as if to herself.
“What do you mean by that?” he demanded.
“Don’t tell me you were born yesterday,” she retorted.
“So that’s how the crow flies,” said Mr. Bland, nastily.
“I don’t care whether the crow flies or crawls along on the flat of his belly,” was his wife’s indelicate rejoinder. “You look like a crow yourself. How do you fly?”
“If I fly into a rage,” said Quintus Bland, “you’ll be sorry you were ever born.”
“I’m sorry you ever were,” Mrs. Bland flung back at him as she rose to quit the room. “And if I could lay my hands on that turtle I’d wring his horrid neck off.”
“Animal baiter,” muttered Quintus.
“Fanny,” called Mrs. Bland from the stairway, “come up here and help me find my black underwear with the lace.”
A look of consternation took possession of Mr. Bland’s features. He gathered the assaulted dog in his arms and sat down with him on the sofa. In a surprisingly short time Lorna Bland was down again.
“Good-bye,” she said, looking in at the door. “I have it on, the black underwear with — —”
“I know,” Mr. Bland interrupted. “With the lace.”
For a moment the small blonde creature lingered undecidedly in the door. She was sorry she had said he looked like a crow. It was too close to home. And she had lied about the black underwear, what little there was of it. Phil Harkens was not worth black underwear, especially with lace. Sitting there in the shadows, her black long-legged husband did look for all the world like a dark bird of ill omen — an old crow huddled on a sofa with a square dog on his lap. Still, he might say something friendly. She wanted only a word or so to call the battle off. But no word was forthcoming. Feeling a little hollow inside, she closed the front door slowly behind her. Shortly after, the man on the sofa heard the expostulations of her motor. He listened until the spluttering had turned to an ingratiating purr which grew fainter and died away. So she really had taken herself off with her black underwear with the lace. Now he had the house to himself, and he did not want it. Damn her, anyway, and damn her black underwear. Damn the lace, too. He removed a strand of blonde hair from his vest. Yes, damn her blonde hair.
For a long time he sat there quite motionless with the square dog. The battle had left him deflated. Idly he examined the tail of Busy. It was an odd hook of a tail not unlike a jigsaw piece with hair on it. It seemed to have escaped injury. Its permanent hook was undamaged. Mr. Bland decided it would be difficult to pull off a tail as strongly affixed as Busy’s.
Darkness drifted into the room and piled up in the corners. Bland was too listless to switch on the lights. The far-away drumming of a scooting express train throbbed across the gloom. The sound made him think of the city. Lorna in her black underwear was spending the evening with that rotter, Phil Harkens. Why should not he, Quintus Bland, make a night of it also? The city was congested with good-looking women. His acquaintance among models was extensive.
“Busy,” said the man to the square dog, “I feel very much like hell. All washed out, you know. Should I or should I not go to the city?”
The dog was far above the battle. He slumbered heavily on his master’s lap and made gross noises about it.
Fanny’s dark eyes glittered in the doorway.
“I’m going out, Fanny,” said Quintus Bland from the sofa. “Pass the word to the kitchen. There will be no dinner.”
Fanny’s expression revealed the fact that she was sorry her master was going out. She had certain ideas of her own in which he was rather intimately involved. She wished she had the courage to tell him there was no need for him to stir farther afield in search of amorous diversion.
“Will you be back late, Mr. Bland?” she asked.
“If at all,” Mr. Bland replied.
He removed the dog from his knees and placed him gently on the sofa. The square animal snored peacefully through the transition. Accepting his hat and stick from a reluctant Fanny, he moved out into the dusk, quitting the comforts of his suburban home in favor of the city, where he later became a skeleton, which was even worse than wearing black underwear with lace on it.
CHAPTER TWO: BLAND IN THE BONE
QUINTUS Bland became a skeleton at exactly eleven forty-five that same evening. After the consumption of much bad alcohol he was endeavoring with the aid of a female companion to pull himself together in a private room of a popular speakeasy situated just off Washington Square.
In an adjoining room two other couples belonging to his party were carrying on in a manner which, to put it mildly, was not quite becoming. Having been deprived of amusement by the poor quality of the play they had attended earlier in the evening, they were now endeavoring to find diversion in various other questionable directions.
It will never be known definitely what chemical combination wrought the amazing change in Mr. Bland’s physical composition. Quite possibly the fumes of his strange concoction, together with an overdose of aspirin invigorated by the reaction of much raw liquor, were sufficient to create a fluoroscopic man instead of a fluoroscopic film. The explanation is really not important. Mr. Bland was far more concerned with the social aspects of his predicament than with the scientific ones. He regretted that like Mr. H. G. Wells’s Invisible Man he had not made a good job of it and disappeared entirely. There is no place in the social scale for an animated structure composed wholly of bones. No matter how convivial and responsive strong drink makes individuals, they still remain unreconciled to skeletons who carry on quite as if nothing untoward had occurred. And Quintus Bland became the most disconcerting sort of skeleton a man could become. He became a recurring or sporadic skeleton. He became a skeleton in fits and starts. One could never be sure where one had him. At one moment he would find himself devastatingly deprived of his flesh only to discover a few minutes later that he was once more a complete man down to the last detail. This fluctuating condition of being made any continuous line of conduct almost impossible. Even when he was completely himself, his friends could not refrain from regarding him with fear and suspicion. And there were some who looked upon him with loathing not unmixed with awe.
Lulu Summers, a luscious hose-and-underwear model whom Mr. Bland had occasionally employed as a subject for his camera, was the first to discover that her present partner was not all or even a part of what a perfect gentleman should be.
It was regrettable in the extreme that Lulu, in order to further her partner’s interests, had found it necessary to remove nearly all of a not overburdening attire. Being a model and at the same time thrifty might possibly be advanced as an excuse for her conduct by charitably minded persons, of whom there are too few.
She, together with a somewhat comatose Quintus, was reclining on a large divan when stark tragedy entered her young if not innocent life. In an attempt to ameliorate the discomfort of her occasional employer, she was stroking his long black hair when gradually it was borne in on her consciousness that, instead of ministering to a head with hair on it, her hand was caressing a smooth, round surface. Interested but not yet alarmed, she glanced at the head to discover the reason for the change. Luckily for the girl, Mr. Bland was lying with his face turned to the wall. At first glance Lulu’s eyes encountered what they mistook for an extremely bald head. That alone would have been enough to revolt the average beholder, but Lulu was made of ruggeder stuff.
“Quinnie,” she said in a reproachful voice, “why didn’t you tell me you wore a wig? I’ve been rubbing your head for ages.”
“Don’t call me Quinnie,” grumbled Mr. Bland, happily unaware of the change that had come over him. “I don’t like it at all. What’s that you said about a wig?”
“You’re as bald as a bat,” the lady replied. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Your wig has fallen off.”
“What!” exclaimed Quintus Bland, placing a fleshless hand on his skull. “My God, you’re right! No hair at all. What’s happened to my head?”
Nervously his fingers drummed upon the bony surface, producing a hollow tapping sound most unpleasant to the ear.
“What’s that?” he asked with increasing alarm. “Am I making that noise?”
The shriek that greeted this question made him turn suddenly round on the divan. In the middle of the room Lulu was trembling in all of her beautiful limbs. Upon looking at his face the shriek was automatically repeated. Resting a bony hand on what used to be a cheek, he gazed at the girl in astonishment.
“For heaven’s sake, stop that screaming,” he commanded. “People will think I’m murdering you.”
“You are,” declared the girl. “You’re doing worse than that. You’re scaring me to death. Please don’t be like that. It’s not at all funny.”
“Like what?” asked Mr. Bland, his mystification increasing.
“The way you are,” said the girl. “How can you bear to do it?”
Thoughtfully Quintus Bland stroked his face. The peculiar scraping sound accompanying this gesture was not reassuring. Once more Lulu gave a cry of distress. Mr. Bland glanced hastily at his long bony fingers, then looked at the rest of himself. He was unable to recognize anything familiar. As he snapped up in the divan, he, too, began to tremble, but his limbs were far from lovely.
“By God,” he said, “I’m a skeleton.”
“You certainly are,” fervently agreed Miss Summers. “And I’m clearing out. I might have my moments of weakness, but I draw the line at fleshless men.”
“Come on back,” called Mr. Bland as the girl made for the door to the adjoining room.
“Like fun,” said Lulu. “What for?”
“I might get my body back,” he suggested.
“Yeah?” she replied, skeptically. “While I lose my mind watching those bones turn to flesh? Nothing doing.”
Rising from the divan, Quintus Bland strode across the room. This was too much for Lulu. With a wild shriek she disappeared through the door. The man stopped in his tracks and glanced at himself in a long mirror; then, unleashing a shriek of his own, he, too, disappeared into the next room, where a chorus of shrieks greeted his arrival.
“Give me a drink,” he cried desperately. “Somebody give me a drink.”
“What would you do with it?” Chunk Walling managed to get out. “What you need is a coffin.”
“Or a closet,” put in Sam Crawford. “Isn’t that where skeletons belong?”
“Don’t ask me,” replied one of the young ladies, “but I wish to God he’d hide himself somewhere.”
“If you ask me,” faltered the other young lady, “a sight like that just doesn’t belong anywhere.”
“And to think that I was in bed with the thing,” Lulu Summers murmured.
“U-o-o,” breathed the first young lady, known in the trade as Elaine. “How disappointing!”
“If I wasn’t in such a shocking condition,” said the other girl, who operated under the name of Flora, “I’d be almost home by now. Look! It’s actually drinking.”
Mr. Quintus Bland removed the bottle from his lipless mouth.
“Don’t call me It,” he said reprovingly. “I am still Quintus Bland even if my flesh is gone.”
“If I were you I wouldn’t admit it, old chap,” Sam Crawford told him. “A performance like this isn’t going to do you a bit of good.”
“Do you imagine I’m doing it for fun?” asked the indignant Mr. Bland.
“Fun for who?” demanded the girl called Flora. “It’s certainly no fun for us. Why didn’t it splash all over your ribs?”
