Delphi Complete Works of Thorne Smith (Illustrated), page 63
“Hello!” exclaimed the judge in some surprise. “Where the devil did you spring from?”
Mr. Lamb presented his card and explained his presence in the court. Having learned indirectly about the escapade of these young people and being the father of one of them and an old friend of the parents of the other two, he had hastened to help the judge to show them the error of their ways.
“You are just in time to see the last of them, Mr. Lamb,” Judge Gibson informed him. “And by the way, how did you manage to get that noose about your neck?”
Mr. Lamb’s hand flew to the rope. For a moment he appeared to be crushed. His companion of the night gazed at him with dismayed eyes. How could he lie himself out of this? Then a bland smile touched Mr. Lamb’s lips as he looked up at the judge.
“I just found it lying there on the floor,” said Mr. Lamb, “and I thought I’d try it on.”
“Are you in the habit of trying on nooses?” asked the judge.
Sandra was leaning against Mr. Lamb. Her face was crimson, and a handkerchief was crammed in her mouth.
“That’s the most deflated lie I’ve ever attended,” breathed Hebe.
“No,” replied Mr. Lamb in reply to the judge’s question. “It is not one of my hobbies.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” the judge remarked. “One of the nooses might stay put sometime.”
Mr. Lamb laughed politely.
“Donovan,” continued the judge, “where has that kangaroo gotten himself to? Is he still sleeping or what’s he think he’s doing?”
When the judge’s eye gathered in Donovan, he imagined the officer was giving every appearance of shell shock. Donovan was staring at Mr. Lamb with frightened bewildered eyes.
“Why, that gentleman’s the kangaroo!” he faltered. “The rope ain’t never been out of my hand, your honor.”
“No, Donovan,” replied the judge. “Mr. Lamb is not a kangaroo in spite of his eccentric conduct. You’ve tried to convince me of many strange, unbelievable stories in the course of our relations, but I refuse to be convinced that this gentleman is a kangaroo.”
A hard light came into the judge’s eyes, and he leaned far over his desk again.
“Now, Donovan,” he rasped. “You go out and find me that kangaroo. Take some of your fellow incompetents with you. Bring that animal back to me. I want him to teach me that song.”
“I beg your pardon, Judge Gibson,” Mr. Lamb put in, “but I think I can help the officer out. As I was coming in a kangaroo burst from between two excited women who were evidently being put out. The creature almost knocked me over in his eagerness to go somewhere. He turned to the left and jumped into a passing van heading away from the city. That’s the last I saw of him.”
“Search for that van, Donovan,” said the judge. “And don’t forget to beat every bush. He likes bushes. So far it seems you’ve made a mess of the case. There’s not a witness here in court to support a number of your charges. I don’t even see a plaintiff.”
Donovan left with one last fascinated look at Mr. Lamb, who immediately after retired with the judge to his private chamber. When he returned he smiled encouragingly at the delinquents. The judge brushing his lips with a handkerchief also smiled upon them.
“What your various parents are going to do to you will be plenty,” he said happily. “You will come to wish I had put you in prison forever. I’ve just had Mr. Long on the wire, young man, and he actually pleaded with me to sentence you for life. He said something about being able to prove yourself in jail. In view of the approaching unpleasantness I am letting you off with a suspended sentence. Get them out of my sight, Mr. Lamb. They’ve taken up my entire morning — they and that kangaroo.”
Back in the automobile Lamb collapsed. Sandra nestled against him.
“I hope this will teach us all a lesson,” he said piously. “It will all come out in the papers.”
“ ’Twill make erotic reading for Sapho,” replied Hebe. “I think we had better go away somewhere.”
“I know I had,” said Long moodily. “There’ll be no living at home. I’ve proved myself conclusively at last.”
“Ruination?” suggested Hebe.
“We’re ruinated enough as it is,” said Long.
Sandra’s hand crept in to Mr. Lamb’s.
“You’re such a nice, long, lovely liar,” she murmured.
Mr. Lamb was looking at her ear.
“That thing,” he said, pinching it slightly, “was the start of all my troubles.”
“Kiss it,” urged Sandra in a low voice.
Mr. Lamb looked coldly at the girl.
Chapter XIV. Sapho Tries to Murder a Fish
MR. LAMB HAD spoken conservatively. The reporters got it. The papers printed it. Yards of it. In spite of the vast multiplicity of detail, in spite of the unscrupulous embellishments, the callous innuendoes, the gentlemen of the press were still heavily befogged as to the actual facts of the affair. Mr. Lamb appeared in print, but not in his true rôle of a converted kangaroo.
One story in particular disturbed the overtaxed equanimity of its central character. The author of the story in question had seen fit to treat his subject facetiously, which when one comes to consider its nature seems about the best way to treat it. One can hardly work up a spirit of profound indignation or grow morbidly melancholic over a humming kangaroo. A few morons exist who perhaps could, but these single-minded gentlemen were, as usual, too busy suppressing books, collecting unpleasantly reminiscent picture postcards or putting disturbing factors behind the bars to worry about Mr. Lamb and his companions.
Nevertheless, Mr. Lamb would have wrung this individual reporter’s neck quite cheerfully and thoroughly had the neck conveniently offered itself. However, the necks of reporters are not always the easiest things in the world to establish contact with, save through the medium of a bottle containing any fluid remotely alcoholic including varnish and rub-down preparations.
Sitting this evening in the quietude of his study with his old friend Kai Lung safely balanced on one long, thin knee, Mr. Lamb delayed for a moment the pleasure of having this engaging Oriental unroll his mat in order to peruse for the fifth time the far less engaging inventions of some obviously depraved occidental newspaper reporter.
These inventions were in part as follows:
THE STRANGE BEHAVIOR OF
MR. T. LAWRENCE LAMB
APPEARS IN COURT WITH A NOOSE
ROUND HIS NECK
JUDGE GIBSON REFUSES TO HANG HIM
Apparently anticipating the worst, Mr. T. Lawrence Lamb of Woodbine, N. Y., a well-known and, just previous to this writing, conservative investment banker, presented himself before Judge Gibson in general session today with a noose neatly arranged round his neck — this in addition to a tie of unusually lurid color.
In full justice to Mr. Lamb it must be stated that his appearance in court was due to no moral lapse of his own. One can only ascribe Mr. Lamb’s unconventional neck adornment to a desire to offer himself in vicarious atonement for the sins of his daughter, Miss Hebe Lamb, and her two accomplices, Miss Sandra Rush and Mr. Melville Long, all active members of Woodbine’s younger set.
That these young people were a little more than active on the evening of their arrest and subsequent incarceration is evidenced by the fact that no less than fourteen serious charges were lodged against them and that their trail of destruction extended from the dead center of New York’s night-club district to a spot some forty miles distant from the city.
Additional interest is added to the mad progress of these young people through the presence of a singing kangaroo, or, as Officer Patrick Donovan prefers to call it, kingaroo. Whether this convivial animal was a kangaroo or a kingaroo is difficult to establish at this moment, due to the unfortunate fact that whatever the creature was it successfully thwarted retention and is still at large. According to Judge Gibson it is probably in some bush. The judge never offers an opinion without some good reason.
An element of mystery is introduced here arising from the inexplicable coincidence that the noose so unsuccessfully used to restrain this night-club-loving animal was the identical one that so nattily adorned Mr. Lamb’s neck.
Mr. Lamb has stated that finding the noose on the floor he picked it up and slipped it on merely through lack of knowing anything better to do with it. To his way of thinking, a noose obviously required a neck, and not wishing to intrude upon the neck of some perfect stranger, he quite logically put it on his own.
In view of the gentleman’s social position and well-established conservative leanings, this is an explanation difficult to believe. It can only be assumed that Mr. Lamb’s mind suddenly broke down under the shock of his daughter’s conduct and that temporarily the man was not anyway near himself.
Evidently this was the charitable view that Judge Gibson took of the situation, having been somewhat shocked himself by the sudden appearance of an otherwise normal gentleman wearing a noose round his neck, and to all intents and purposes willing to pay the supreme penalty for his erring daughter and her no less erring friends.
Apparently the sight of Mr. Lamb, together with the sincerity of his bearing, touched some hitherto successfully concealed spring of tenderness in the judge, who released the youthful offenders on a suspended sentence after what is believed to have been a pleasant conversation in his chambers with the sacrificial Mr. Lamb.
Miss Sandra Rush, an underwear model of no mean proportions, is often seen in one of the many Lamb automobiles. This is, of course, due solely to her close friendship with Mr. Lamb’s daughter. The singing kangaroo, it is believed, is still caroling his ribald songs in some secluded bush.
It was on this high note that the story came to an end. It was also as this note sounded that Mrs. Lamb entered her husband’s study. Once entered, she stood still and tragically awaited his acknowledgment of her presence. Fearing that the acknowledgment might be indefinitely delayed, she altered her pose at last and slanted an accusing finger at the newspaper now drooping from Mr. Lamb’s hands.
“What are you going to do about it?” dropped gloomily from her lips. “I suggest you resign from everything and live somewhere else under an assumed name.”
Mr. Lamb elevated his knees, skilfully retaining control of Kai Lung, and looked at his wife as if he were trying to place her in an extremely feeble memory. Presently he unlimbered, rose and vaguely offered her a chair which she in turn spurned, overacting the part in doing so.
“Ah yes!” murmured Mr. Lamb. “It’s Sapho — my Tilly. You were saying? . . .”
“I was saying,” Sapho put in, “that you should drop out of sight and live under another name.”
“Couldn’t I grow a beard?” Mr. Lamb asked mildly. “I might even dye my hair and continue to lurk here as one of your inspired friends or a conveniently acquired uncle from Australia. They say here in the paper that the kangaroo or kingaroo — I prefer the latter version — came from the bush. And to think that we both shared the same noose. This paper also says that he sang. I missed that part. Can’t have everything, I suppose. Do you believe he actually sang, that kangaroo?”
“You should go to your underwear model or to your own daughter for such information,” was Mrs. Lamb’s crushing retort. “The light attitude you are now assuming seems in the worst of taste to me. Once more I ask you, what are you going to do about it? I cannot afford to be associated with a laughing-stock. My life — what modest talent I possess — was never intended to be shackled to a personality so — so coarse and unsympathetic as yours . . . so utterly self-centered and lacking in the finer shades and vibrations of emotion. My life should be led with a larger, a higher vision. Everyone recognizes that fact.”
“The word that I have in mind,” said Mr. Lamb slowly, “the only one I consider a fitting reply to your bathetic remarks, is frequently applied to wives by less delicate husbands than I. It’s too honest a word for your ears, so I’ll let you exercise your limited imagination. Consider the word as said.”
He looked thoughtfully at some cigarette ashes that had fallen on his left knee, started to brush them off, then deciding the effort was too exhausting, gave it up.
“Still there is something in what you say,” he remarked at last. “That Vacation Fund affair, from what I heard of it, provided enough laughter to last this community for years. If both of us become laughing-stocks the general merriment might provoke an epidemic of hysteria.”
“I absolutely deny I was a laughing-stock,” said Mrs. Lamb. “A horse was responsible for all that . . . a low, vicious, yet strangely human horse in some of its more objectionable actions. In many ways that brute of a horse reminded me of you. Even now I shudder when I think of him.”
“Another point I share in common with this horse of yours.” Mr. Lamb grinned good-naturedly.
“I did not come here to discuss my emotional reactions to you,” Mrs. Lamb answered coldly. “I hoped that we might be able to arrive at some understanding — some civilized arrangement. Since the appearance of all this scandal in the papers my nerves have been uprooted. It will take years to get them anyway near back to their former condition. They’ll never get back entirely. You don’t know what a thing like that does to me.”
Mr. Lamb, still grinning, seemed to be considering things. His wife did not care for the grin. She recognized it. Also the light in his eyes. Something particularly disagreeable always followed these facial manifestations. She was not disappointed. Something unpleasant did — something surpassingly disagreeable, a real accomplishment for Mr. Lamb.
“Here’s an idea,” he said quite seriously. “Suppose I should give you the use of my room over week-ends? What would you think of a clubby little scheme like that? Sort of ménage à trois, one member being absent. . . . I have a little pride.”
Mrs. Lamb did not express an opinion of her husband’s little scheme. She did not even deign to meet Mr. Lamb’s eyes. The mental process of this crude man was altogether too antiquated to deal with the complex sex impulses of a modern woman of genius. In bringing up that phase of the situation he was once again displaying execrable taste. She had come to his study to discuss his affairs, not hers. She was her own woman, but now since the newspapers had published such full reports of his actions in court, his affairs were public property.
“A long week-end,” she heard Mr. Lamb urging. “From Friday to Monday night. How about it, Tilly?”
She turned to the door, fully intending to go through it, when Mr. Lamb’s voice recalled her.
“I have one more suggestion to make,” he said. “Suppose I should retire from business and write a book entitled ‘Wild Animals I Have Been’?”
This suggestion was sufficiently arresting to move Mrs. Lamb to change her mind and to accept the once rejected chair. Arranging herself becomingly she regarded her husband with what she fondly believed to be a disarming smile.
“Then you have been animals,” she remarked conversationally. “How interesting! Tell me all about it. I knew you were that horse of course, and I suspected you of being the bird, although I never saw it, or rather you. Were you also the kangaroo?”
“Why this sudden interest in animals?” asked Mr. Lamb. “I never noticed it before save perhaps in the worn-out dishmop you occasionally defile our presence with — that snug harbor for jaded fleas. And suppose I should admit I turned into animals and things, I dare say you’d keep my guilty secret from the entire world with the possible exception of the law courts and a select multitude of your strolling players. You’d love to see me arrested as an escaped kangaroo. Your present mood of sweet confidence — wifely interest — amuses me.”
With a burst of determination Mr. Lamb brushed the ashes off his knee, spilled some more on his vest and continued.
“Well, strange as it may seem,” he said, “I’m going to tell you right here and now to your exceedingly false face that recently I have acquired the habit of turning into animals, both wild and domestic. At this very moment I might become some extremely deadly reptile and do you in with fangs filled with horrid poison. I wouldn’t squeeze you to death because even snakes have some self-respect. Frankly I’d like to fang you. I feel like doing it, but unfortunately the choice does not lie with me. I might become a panther instead of an anteater or a rat or a butterfly — God knows what I might become.”
Lamb paused and regarded his wife darkly. She was not a thing of beauty. Terror failed to improve the arrangement of her features. Standing in the doorway she returned his gaze with eyes of glass, so fixed and polished was the expression in them.
“I’m taking the trouble to tell you all this,” Mr. Lamb went on evenly, as he followed her into the dining-room, “because I don’t give one shrill hoot in hell how you spread the news. No one would believe you anyway. You’d only be making a bigger fool of yourself than you have already, if such an enormous achievement is possible — which I very much doubt.”
Mr. Lamb was thoroughly aroused now. For so many excellent reasons he found himself weary of this woman and all her false standards of life. He was standing by the goldfish aquarium looking down absently at its four occupants, three fish and one diminutive but aged turtle.
“Doesn’t that damned old turtle ever budge himself?” his subconscious mind was asking, while quite consciously he continued deliberately on with his wife.
“And here’s another thing to worry about,” he heard himself saying. “It’s highly possible for me to return home some morning in the early hours in the guise of a famished tiger, an undernourished wolf, a man-eating shark, a wild boar, a — a—” He paused to give himself time to think of some particularly disagreeable animal. “ — a crocodile,” he resumed triumphantly. “And if that frail lily of yours should chance to be in my bed I’d gnash him up like that and gladly pay for the subsequent nausea his presence in my belly would cause me. How’d you like to come vamping into my room in that decrepit way of yours to find all that remained of Mr. Gray was only a couple of corns dangling between my jaws? A pretty picture? But a possible one, and you’d be responsible for the death of the Woodbine Players’ worst actor just as sure as I’m standing here.”
