Delphi Complete Works of Thorne Smith (Illustrated), page 53
As the car rounded a well-planned curve such as is to be found on the right side of the tracks, Hebe’s eyes marked and dwelt on a figure she considered rather unusual. It was a little russet man, as she always afterwards remembered him. A small creature, this person was, appareled in an ancient habit of russet hue. Even the umbrella which he carried with some show of elaboration was of the same color. From the rear, his short plump figure gave one the impression of good living and well being. It was a jolly sort of figure, the embodiment of jocund autumn. Hebe thought of chestnuts and burning leaves, of trees turning and hearths aglow. He was a surprising little man, well poised and suggesting a certain dignity in spite of his odd appearance.
The little man was more surprising still as the car drew near him, for he suddenly stopped, turned deliberately in his tracks and brandished his russet umbrella in a most determined and imperative manner. There was no mistaking the meaning. He desired the car to stop. And Hebe obediently stopped. She noticed the little man’s face was also of a russet hue. It was a jolly face, in which sparkled a pair of merry, unfathomable eyes.
“May I try it?” he asked abruptly.
His voice was as clear as a bell. It carried a quality of humorous briskness. Hebe was nonplused.
“You mean—” she began.
“Exactly, my dear,” supplied the little russet man as he fidgeted ineffectually with the handle of the rear door. “I mean just what I said: may I try it?”
“Let me help you,” offered Mr. Lamb, slightly dazed, as he turned to open the door from the inside. In doing so his eyes encountered those of the little man, and an extraordinary sensation shot through him. He felt as if suddenly he had been discovered, and yet there was a haunting sense of having just failed to remember something he had forgotten so long ago that he doubted ever having known it. The spell was broken at the sound of the little man’s clear voice.
“Your servant, sir,” he said, and there seemed to be some hidden significance to his words. “Now I suppose one mounts?”
“Just so,” replied Mr. Lamb. “One mounts.”
After busily podging himself into the automobile, the little man sat down quite unhurriedly and arranged his umbrella in just a certain way. It was his way of arranging an umbrella.
“Now,” he said, looking about him cheerfully, “what happens next? Make it do things, my dear.”
Feeling much younger and less assured, Hebe put the car in motion as the little man observed her, his eyes alight with great expectations.
“You must understand,” he explained in a confidential voice, leaning over to Mr. Lamb, “in my other — er — I mean, in my younger days I had no experience at all with this method of locomotion. How could I?” he demanded severely. “How could I?”
The question required an answer.
“You just couldn’t,” agreed Mr. Lamb. “Impossible.”
“Exactly!” cried the little russet man on a note of triumph. “The method didn’t exist. Is it — er — er — quite as you would have it, my dear sir?”
“Not so good,” offered Lamb, not knowing himself exactly how he would have it.
“No,” reflected his small passenger judicially. “It is, as you so laconically put it, not so good.”
“Some nerve,” remarked Hebe in a smothered voice.
“The expression, my dear, is modern,” said the little man good-humoredly, “yet its meaning is quite clear. I was merely agreeing with your father, for I presume he is your father, but perhaps I am in error on that slight point. It’s possible you are his wife, or even better, his mistress. It is of no importance. As I was just now saying, I prefer to walk. I seem to taste things through the soles of my feet.”
“You must run across some rare dishes,” Hebe threw back jauntily.
The little man eyed the girl with approval.
“Your daughter, sir,” he said, “for now I am sure she is your daughter, appears to possess an unusually healthy strain of vulgarity. I like it. I myself am vulgar beyond compare. In my other — er — I mean to say, in my younger days even strong men were forced to leave the room. I once remember Rabelais’s fainting — the master vulgarian of them all. That was an achievement. My highest. Now I am somewhat refined. Not that I fail to appreciate things.”
Mr. Lamb did some vague casting back in his memory, then became slightly shocked. This strange passenger must indeed be extremely old, almost too old to exist at all.
“Did I understand you to say, Rabelais?” he asked in his most polished manner.
“A thousand pardons,” the little russet man hastened to explain. “Rabelais! Certainly not. It must have been a more recent vulgarian. Old fellows like myself are prone to confuse both people and periods. Many years ago, though, I once met you, Mr. Lamb.”
“Me,” ejaculated Lamb, now thoroughly aroused. “At what time? In what place may I ask?”
“Before you were, in a loose manner of speaking, born,” came the quiet reply. “The place does not matter. You would not recall it.”
Lamb and his daughter swiftly sought each other’s eyes and found therein no helpful revelation. They seemed to be driving on in a dim, wandering silence, almost somnolent.
“From the outset you were destined to conflict,” drifted a small, clear, yet distant voice from the rear seat. “It can be rectified. It should be. If I can be of any service—”
Silence. Hebe was driving as those who drive in a dream — automatically, instinctively. Her father seemed to have fallen into some deep quagmire of meditation from which he would probably never be able to extricate himself. Silence still. Higher mounted the road. Had they been driving thus through eternity? Where was the station? Where was the house? And what, exactly, did they matter? Absently Hebe began to sing softly a melody from Tosca. Her low voice was surprisingly sweet, yet for some inexplicable reason an echo voice seemed to be following her today, a stronger voice filled with passion and bitterness, a knowledge and love of life. Lamb kept passing from one brown study to another, each growing browner until the last one threatened to become black. Yet even in his aloofness he listened to the singing and wondered. Something within him responded to it. As Hebe quite naturally slowed down and stopped at the gates to the house before taking the car to another entrance, a clear note rang out and lingered for a moment in the car around them — only them. They started and gazed at each other with bewildered eyes.
“Give over whooping,” said Lamb. “What will our passenger think, not to mention the entire neighborhood?”
Hebe glanced back at the rear seat.
“He doesn’t seem to be there,” she announced unsurely.
“Where the devil did we put the beggar off?” demanded her father.
“Don’t know. He’s off. That’s just all there is to it,” replied Hebe. “Perhaps the lunatic slipped out when we slowed down somewhere. I think he is an escaped one — honestly.”
“Without the slightest possibility of a doubt,” agreed Mr. Lamb. “But do you remember, the devil knew my name?”
“Yes — yes — so he did,” said Hebe. “I remember now. Rum, ain’t it?”
“No end,” replied Lamb with a grin. “This is our show, Hebe, understand?”
“It is. It is,” said the girl.
And just as he was leaving the car he asked her as diffidently as he could, “Listen, Hebe, does your friend — what’s her name — Sand—”
“Sandra Rush,” supplied Hebe helpfully.
“Name doesn’t matter anyway,” went on her father hurriedly. “Does she always act like that?”
“That’s for you to find out,” said Hebe.
“Certainly not. No interest,” declared Mr. Lamb. “And is it true that she parades in underwear?”
“That’s a fact,” the girl replied. “An absolute fact. I’ll take you to see her sometime.”
“God forbid,” muttered Lamb, turning up the extensive driveway. “I wash my hands of it all.”
Chapter V. A Horse in Bed
MR. LAMB RETURNED home to find his wife in another man’s arms. The scene would have annoyed if not irritated the majority of God-fearing husbands. Not so Mr. Lamb. It left him cold. To heighten the color of the situation, Mrs. Lamb was clad in what is generally considered an intimate costume — arrangements usually associated with the bed, yet not necessarily with sleep. The costume in which the man rejoiced seemed a bit vague to Lamb. All he could think of was Mardi-Gras, class reunion, and revelry in general. He was not particularly interested.
The couple lay à la Cupid and Psyche upon the floor. At Lamb’s entrance Cupid released Psyche with such alacrity that there was the unromantic sound of a thud, Psyche being in the neighborhood of ten stone.
“Ah!” cried Mr. Leonard Gray with a wild wave of his hand and a smile of an uncertain nature. “Crœsus home from his mints. How stands the market today?”
Mr. Lamb saw no occasion to reply to this piece of flamboyancy.
“Well, old money-grubber,” said Mrs. Lamb, heaving into a more graceful position, “I suppose your hands reek with greenbacks. You’re late tonight.”
Nor to this remark did Mr. Lamb consider it essential to reply. He merely contemplated the pair at leisure.
“There are lounges,” he said at last. “It’s merely a suggestion, of course.”
“Oh, no, the floor’s the place,” protested Mr. Gray.
“Not the way I was taught,” said Mr. Lamb. “Tilly, where’d you get those funny breeches?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Lawrence,” Mrs. Lamb replied with an attempt at dignity. “They’re not breeches. They’re—”
“Go on, tell me they’re kilts,” interrupted her husband. “I’m ignorant. I revel in it.”
“You know perfectly well they’re your own best silk pajamas,” retorted his wife. “I put them on to get a certain effect.”
“You’ll get a tremendous effect unless you’ve put them on backwards,” Mr. Lamb observed. “I’ve always had to be careful with those pajamas myself.”
“Sapho,” put in Mr. Gray hastily, “I don’t think I can go on with it now. I can’t recapture the mood.”
“Try that strangle hold again, young man,” suggested Mr. Lamb. “It might do you a world of good.”
“Every man must play his part, Mr. Lamb,” replied Leonard Gray protestingly.
“But you appear to be playing my part,” said Lamb. “Playing it better than I could — far better.”
Mr. Gray was the local amateur hero, the focal point of the Woodbine Players. He had once tried to sell bonds in Mr. Lamb’s office. It had been a poor try. Even his manly good looks had failed to disturb the stenographers. So, accordingly, he had withdrawn, having failed in all departments. The flappers and married women who had nothing better to do welcomed him back to the fold of the idle, and found him quite a help. Of late he was much to be seen at the Lamb ménage where Sapho and he developed their art.
“Why persist in misunderstanding?” complained Mrs. Lamb. “Leonard and I are rehearsing for Sunday night.”
“Then I suppose I should stay away or visit friends?” her husband suggested.
“Don’t be vulgar,” Mrs. Lamb replied. “You know very well about the Vacation Fund affair.”
“When I was a boy,” said Mr. Lamb, “such scenes used to be barred in public, especially on Sunday. Why do they close the movies?”
At this point Hebe blew into the room and eyed the weirdly clad couple.
“At it again, I see,” she announced. “When will you two ever get tired?”
Mrs. Lamb sighed wearily and considered rising, then thought better of it.
“I’m sure I’ll be glad when it’s all over,” she said. “I’m tired out, and the part bores me to tears.”
“I wish I could take it for you,” Hebe’s voice was deep with unfelt sympathy.
“Child,” said her mother, “you’d never understand. It takes — oh, I don’t know what it takes.”
“It takes a hell of a lot of nerve, I’d say,” Mr. Lamb remarked. “Come on, Hebe, I want to desiphon a couple of drinks.”
When they had left the room Mrs. Lamb looked questioningly at her partner.
“You shouldn’t have dropped me like that,” she complained. “I felt so off poise.”
“Only thing to do under the circumstances,” replied Mr. Gray.
“Perhaps it was,” she answered as he helped her to her feet. Then in a lower voice, “I’m afraid we were rehearsing too well, Len. You’ll have to be a better boy.”
“More careful,” he said, equally low.
She nodded.
In the dining-room Lamb was actively caging drinks, being carefully provided for by Thomas and Hebe. Thomas knew Lamb better than Lamb knew himself. He had been in the family longer and was so old that he had grown used to it and was now apparently indifferent to the passage of time. Thomas seemed to feel that he had got so old he could hardly get any older. He had no more room for years. So he cheerfully kept on living and regarding Lamb and Hebe as his last responsibilities. He was far too old for Mrs. Lamb. She was eager to pension him off. Thomas knew this and failed to show the proper amount of gratitude.
Presently Brother Dug came in — Douglas Blumby, Lamb’s brother-in-law and pet aversion. Dug always sang the “dead-drunk” part in “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean,” and had never failed to find it amusing. He was about Lamb’s own age, forty, and should have been chloroformed some months before his first candle. During the war he had been a camp song-leader and general rouser-up, and ever since that time his one idea in life had been to make people sing. On gala occasions he donned his non-combatant song-leader’s uniform and recalled camp life in a loud voice. He did things about Boy Scouts, and they failed to see his point.
Now he entered the room with a, “Whoopee, good people! Guzzle’s the word. How’s tricks, Larry?”
Larry choked so severely over his drink that both Thomas and Hebe sped to his assistance, the one taking the glass from his shaking hand, the other thumping him violently upon the back. When the afflicted man had somewhat recovered he turned a pair of watery malevolent eyes on his brother-in-law.
“I’m not proud of Lawrence,” he said in a hoarse voice, “but by God if I’ll stand for Larry! Furthermore I don’t know any tricks.”
Hebe turned to brother Dug reproachfully.
“You’ve been cautioned enough not to call him Larry,” she told him.
Brother Dug was not at all cast down.
“All right, Larry,” he replied with a humorous smirk as he patted Mr. Lamb’s already flayed back. “I’ll not call you Larry.”
Thomas and Hebe seized Mr. Lamb’s arms and clung to them. For a moment he stood there rigid and straining like a statue of Prometheus chained, then he allowed himself to be placed in a chair and supplied with a fresh highball.
Meanwhile Douglas Blumby had drifted away on some merry quest. His booming voice could be heard in the hallway discussing with Gray and Sapho the part that he would play in the Vacation Fund affair.
“Why do you let him live here, father?” asked Hebe.
“God knows, young one,” he replied. “Perhaps it’s fear of your mother or my final loyalty to her. Another thing, I have a certain duty to society. Bad as I am I could never inflict that ninny on the world. We must keep our troubles in the family.”
It was hardly a propitious moment for the entrance of Mr. Melville Long, yet in that young gentleman came without a care in the world, assured of a warm, if not enthusiastic, reception. Mr. Lamb, gazing at him with lowering brows, recognized the youth he had so disastrously attempted to imitate.
“This is Mel Long,” said Hebe. “He wolfs with us tonight, major.”
“I know your father,” said Lamb, extending a limp hand. “He works.”
“A father’s privilege,” replied Mr. Long blithely. “I often thank God he does. If he didn’t I don’t know how we’d ever get along.”
“You rejoice in your non-productiveness, young man,” observed Lamb.
“I’m not so unproductive,” the youth replied. “This morning I helped a famous dipsomaniac to regain a part of his health by playing him eighteen holes of golf. This afternoon I made a sketch of mother that made the old dear feel fifteen years younger. I’ll get a new car for that. And tonight — well, here I am.”
“And I suppose you’re going to stay,” said Mr. Lamb rather cheerlessly.
“Until the crack o’ dawn,” Long replied with a happy smile. “Golfing makes one hungry.”
Mr. Lamb rose wearily from his chair, placed his half-empty glass on the buffet and walked to the door.
“Well,” he said, “if you’ve settled that, I suppose nothing I can say would induce you to alter your plans. At your age I didn’t drink — much.” He turned to his daughter and continued: “Hebe you do the strangest things. Don’t drop the decanter when pouring. And don’t wear it out.”
With that he left the room. After dinner he retired to his study, where he sat doing nothing, absolutely nothing. Once he walked out on his little private veranda and considered the world at large, after which he returned to his chair where he continued to do nothing.
The next day he broke an inflexible rule and journeyed to the city. It was Saturday. There was no sense to it, yet he went just the same.
As he made for a seat in the train, a slim figure almost tripped him up in its eagerness to crowd past him.
“We shall sit together,” breathed the figure. “You and I on a single seat — alone!”
“With the exception of five or six hundred human souls,” observed Mr. Lamb, “we are quite alone.”
“This is merely the beginning,” replied Sandra.
“It is a short trip and I usually read right up to the end of it. That has been my rule for years,” said Lamb.
“But now that you’ve come to know me so well,” the young lady continued, “you will have to make a new set of rules.”
Mr. Lamb regarded her with a pained expression.
