Chapter VI: Part 6

“What is that which it is that we make to do this evening?” inquired the gob, as they emerged from the War Camp Community Service Club on Twenty-seventh Street.

Having taken the cantonment course in Uncle Sam’s French Idioms for the Idiotic, the others comprehended at once.

“Would a bus ride be a good start?” suggested the sike.

“Take a walk and get the kinks out of us,” amended the flit who still suffered from transport cramp.

“What-ho about a roof-show?” queried the gob.

Madison Square Garden loomed flatly beside them while they were still debating it by the ambulant method. A shaft of light from a side exit fell across their path. The flit blinked into the aperture and withdrew his tongue from his most peevish tooth for the purpose of remarking: “Whoa, Dobbin!”

“It’s a tank,” observed the sike, following his gaze. “What does the sign say?” He pointed to a placard, pendent from the creature’s neck.

“‘To be returned,’” read the gob.

“To return it, you first got to take it out,” argued the flit. “It spoke just in time. Maudie, I’m your little return ticket.”

“You!” said the gob incredulously. “Where do you come in? Can you run that thing?”

“I can run anything that drinks gasoline.”

“It looks like Providence by special arrangement,” observed the gob. “What do _you_ say, Buddy?”

“I told you I was for a bus ride,” returned the sike under the influence of the third cup of tea.

“D’you reckon this reptile’s got a keeper?” asked the flit. He entered the passageway and looked about, but found no one. “Or a mouth?” he proceeded. “We’ve got to persuade it to swallow us. Hey, gob; you’re tender and juicy. Tackle its whiskers.”

“Those aren’t whiskers. Those are machine guns. Hi! Eureka! Here’s the door with ‘welcome’ on the mat.” At his touch a panel at the front slowly unfolded outward, displaying a lighted interior.

“Who’ll join me in the Jonah Club?” invited the flit, plunging down the wide gullet. “It’s my idea we’d better get moving before our little whale gets to whinnying and raises its master. All aboard that’s going aboard. Public Library, Eagle Hotel, Soldier’s Monument and way stations to the Guard-House!”

The others clambered into the monster’s interior. Its mouth closed after them.

“Now, I hope the dum thing responds to gentle treatment,” the flit said. “I see how she starts, but I gotta take a chance on how she steers. Are you ready? Grab and stick; she may buck. Go!”

He did something intricate and skilled to some levers. With a noise as of a boiler-shop attacked by convulsions, the tank moved majestically forth and, after a moment of doubt, which nearly cost a taxi its life, turned to the left and the bright lights. The voyage had begun.

Here, for the benefit of those who have been living, since the war began, a retired life in Tierra del Fuego or Spitzbergen, it may be well to explain the terms of the fellowship. A sike is a private of the Psychological Division of the Army Medical Corps. Morale is his special concern; he is the man who keeps things stirring in camp when it has rained for three solid weeks and the mail has gone wrong and war is all that Sherman said of it and more. He is usually a college professor who has seen a great light. This one was, and had. His name is Follansbee James. A flit is a flying and prying person who snoops about in an airplane of low elevation and manners, poking his nose into matters which it is undesirable that he should know. Such is the shamelessness of our Government that our flit, Frederick Slayter by name, had actually been decorated for his ill-bred performances. A gob is, of course--though nobody knows why--an able seaman. Mr. “Chaw” Veeder was unusually able. He had other names, but they had vanished owing to his propensity for conserving a plug of tobacco unobtrusively in his cheek. There is a deal of hidden vice in our Navy. Having thus satisfied, I trust, inquiring minds of a scientific and philological bent, I will now return to the deliberate and uproarious conveyance wherein I have left the trio.

Bhoong - barrang - whroo - oo - oom - prrrrawng - bomp - clink - whang - oomble - gawmmle-_BOOM_! The tank proceeded westward on Twenty-seventh Street at a breakneck pace of three miles an hour. Windows flew up. Pajama-clad figures, and others more frilly, appeared therein, making somnolent and wrathful gestures. Scandalized inhabitants rushed out of doorways and rushed in again, for the tank was steering wildly. The gob funneled his hands toward the flit.

“Where you going?” he bellowed above the riot.

The answer came back faint and fragmentary, “Don’t--how--’amthing--steers.”

In a spirit of misplaced helpfulness, the gob seized a lever and pulled it. Straightway the tank paused, turned on its heel, executed a couple of airy pirouettes and with a metallic roar rushed up on the sidewalk and totally obliterated three garbage-cans which had been playing the extrahazardous rôle of innocent bystanders. It then cut obliquely across the corner, gently but firmly removed an electric-light pole which sought to stay its pace, debouched into Fifth Avenue, and pointing its nose up-town, resumed its sedate progress.

“Don’t--excite--agin,” bawled the flit at the wheel reprovingly to the gob. “Flighty--little--whiffet. Letter--own--way.”

Ensconced at a peep-hole the sike now delivered tidings in a strained yell, “Cavalry attack.”

The flit threw off the power so suddenly that his two companions came and sat on his neck. Amidst the ensuing peace the night roar of Fifth Avenue was as the splash of ripples upon a gently sloping beach.

“Get off me!” protested the engineer. “I’m going to chin with the law.”

He opened the door and a policeman’s head appeared. At the same moment the sike retired and was dimly seen behind a stanchion busily writing what the gob surmised to be a long farewell to home and loved ones. The cop opened a mouth upon which lurked the suspicion of a grin.

“Where are you boys trundling your little alarm-clock on wheels?” he inquired.

“Back to quarters,” replied the flit glibly.

The officer’s glance fell upon the spread wings of the flit’s service. “Looka-here,” he observed. “You belong to the flying, don’t you? You’re in the wrong kind of bus.”

“I’m goin’ to fly this,” asserted the operator blandly, “as soon as we come to a good take-off.”

“Sure!” agreed the cop. “I’d like to go up with you. Just the same, I’ll take a look at your papers. Hand ’em out.”

The flit’s hand started to his head to scratch for ideas, when it was arrested midway by another hand pressing into it a sheet of paper. A whisper from the sike did the rest. The document was duly presented to the representative of the civil law who read therein, under the insignium of the War Camp Community Service, which looks very official and authoritative, if not too closely scrutinized, that Corporal F. Slayter of the Aero Service, Able Seaman Veeder, and Private James of the Sanitary Corps, U. S. A., were specially detailed to operate Tractor Tank No. 13 in such highways of New York City as they might select for demonstration purposes.

“That gets by with me,” announced the officer. “And I’ll pass the word up the Avenue. But look out for the side-streets. Some of the cops on duty there are mean, suspicious guys that wouldn’t be above spoiling a pleasant evening.”

“Jesse James,” observed the flit, turning admiringly to the sike, after the obstacle to progress had withdrawn, “as a psychologist you’re a high-class forger. That touch about ‘demonstration purposes’--that’s bad, I guess! We could swim the tank in Central Park Reservoir or shin it up the Obelisk on the strength of that.”

“And to think,” sighed the sike, “that next week I’ll be burbling about ethics in a stuffy classroom.”

“Maybe not,” returned the gob. “If Slayter does any more of his fancy evolutions, you may be in the hospital.”

“Oh, I’ve got her now,” asseverated the helmsman confidently, starting up the machinery. “--levers,” he yelled, “control-caterpillars. Pull--right--and--” He did so, and the tank, executing a right about face, chased a horrified limousine half-way up a flight of brownstone steps. “Come back!” vociferated the exasperated flit, and hauled the left lever with such telling effect that (so the gob and the sike solemnly declare) the Waldorf-Astoria leaped a foot from its foundations and then escaped annihilation only by a fraction of an inch.

“For Mike’s sake!” howled the gob. “Stick to the straight-and-narrow.”

They lurched back into the main current, with a noise as of cosmic dissolution, and the traffic broke and fled before their measured progress. As they went, there came from the rear of the interior a sound faint, faraway, and vague like the plaint of a discouraged cricket. It was the sike singing:

“We don’t know where we’re going
But we’re on--our--way.”

“That reminds me,” said the flit, shutting off. “Where _are_ we going?”

“Rubbernecking,” suggested the gob.

“I’ve got an idea,” offered the sike. “If the captain of this buoyant craft could steer around a corner--”

“I can steer around any number of corners,” asserted the flit with a shade of offense in his tone.

“Simultaneously,” added the gob.

“Looka-here, Chaw!” cried the operator hotly. “If you don’t like the way I run this bus--”

“Calm yourself, corporal,” adjured the sike, “and tell me, do you think you could negotiate the perilous straits that lead to the stage door of that sprightly ragtime operetta, taken from the French without opposition on their part and entitled ‘Cherchez la Chicken’? I have important business there.”

“Cutie in the chorus,” surmised the flit, looking pained and moral. “Oh, Perfessor! I bid for an introduction. We’re off!”

Cautiously manipulating the controls, the chauffeur contrived to achieve the turn into the side street with no incident or accident other than the conversion of a too torpid fruit-stand into a mixture of wood-pulp and citrus juices, the proprietor barely escaping with his life. The last act of “Cherchez la Chicken” had reached that point of delicate and original humor where the comedian, seated in a custard pie, sings a farewell to his mother-in-law while the chorus dances, when the side-alley which leads up to the stage burst into thunderous reverberations. There are numerous exits from the place--it is the one redeeming virtue of the show--and all of them promptly jammed. The comedian arose from the pie. The soprano fainted. The chorus dispersed. The management, wringing its already overringed hands, rushed out into the alley, now being patrolled by the tank, back and forth, amidst horrible echoes.

“Go away!” he shrieked. “What you want? Shut your noise.”

The monster fell silent. From the orifice which should have been its mouth, the serious face of the sike emerged.

“Sir,” said he, “last night I attended your performance.”

“Who are you?” demanded the manager. “You spoil my show!”

“Four days’ pay you mulcted me. And you seated me behind a pillar.”

“Tell your troubles to the box-office,” retorted the manager brutally. “I ain’t inter--”

“I willingly concede,” continued the sike calmly, “that the pillar was preferable, from any view-point, to the performance. But I want my four dollars back.”

“A fat chance!” retorted the manager.

“Half speed ahead, if you please,” requested the sike.

“Phsrang - bang - guzzoom - wurrong - kong-hong-whang!” clamored the monster, advancing upon the manager.

“Yi-yi-hi! Whoo-oo-ee-ee-ee!” sounded in piercing antiphony from within, where the soprano was having hysterics.

From the fourth rung of the fire-escape ladder the manager waved surrender with a roll of bills. “Blackmail!” he moaned as the sike selected a five and returned a dollar. “Please go away quietly.”

The sike, turning, was intercepted by a small, fattish gentleman in evening clothes.

“On behalf of self and friend,” said the man, “I thank you.”

“You are attending the performance?” inquired the sike politely.

“I am. Less fortunate than yourself I did not draw a pillar. As for my friend, whom I was seeking to distract from a depression of the soul, he insulted me and fled. He is now doubtless wandering about the city, a prey to unrelieved melancholy.”

“What’s biting your friend?” queried the flit, projecting an interested face into the dialogue.

The stranger accepted the interrogation in the spirit of metaphor in which it was offered. “Woman,” he stated succinctly. “If you should happen to encounter six-foot two of correctly attired manhood baying the moon on a street corner, that is him. Or, if not him, he. Be kind to him, address him as Reuben Renssalaer Watts, and play him your little anvil chorus. It might cheer him up. I return to my martyrdom.” He saluted and retired.

In deference to the manager’s entreaty, the tank backed out discreetly, making hardly more commotion than the average railway collision, and retired along Forty-fourth Street toward the Avenue. It roused a corpulent and fluffy dog, lolling richly in a waiting motor-car, who leaped out through the window with terrifying growls, and undertook to harry it, performing just in front of the left caterpillar that progressive three-legged canine dance familiar to all motorists. But a tank is not a motor-car. The fluffy dog conceived a misplaced contempt for its speed. He loitered on the way. There was a surprised and pained exclamation in the canine language, and the fluffy dog, ceasing to exist in the customary three dimensions, passed to the fourth, leaving as a souvenir only the first and second--to wit, length and breadth--upon the asphalt. He that so lately had been a beribboned and pampered darling was now as the shadow of a dream, a breath upon glass, a highly impressionistic silhouette limned against the unsympathetic pavement, above which a fat blond lady tore her costly hair, uttering tragic and vengeful cries. Hastily checking the juggernaut, the flit descended, and was promptly addressed as a murderer by the blond lady. The gob came to the rescue, and learned something to his disadvantage and that of his parentage. Then the sike tactlessly offered his hard-wrung four dollars in reparation. Him she smote upon the ear with violence, and after one ineffectual attempt to scrape Pettie from the bosom of Mother Earth retired, wailing, to her car, where she ordered the chauffeur to take her to her lawyer.

“And to think,” murmured the sike, tenderly caressing the spot where the assault had taken place, “that next month I’ll be instilling moral precepts into the minds of the rising generation. Such is life!”

“This is where we oil up,” announced the flit, and, having herded his passengers in, went at it.

The delay was untimely. Hardly had the tank, refreshed and lubricated, resumed its way, when above the uproar was heard a sharp “ping!” It was twice repeated.

“Somebody applying for admittance,” surmised the sike, in a well-attuned howl.

The gob applied his eye to a rear peep-hole. “It’s one of those side-street cops; the bad ones our friend down the Avenue told us about. He’s shooting at us.”

“A hold-up,” observed the flit. He stopped the engine, just as a fourth bullet, deflected from the upper armor, crashed through a brightly illuminated second-story window. There was the sound of a meeting adjourning _sine die_, and an oratorically-garbed gentleman, thrusting his head out of an upper window, sounded the alarum, “Bolshe_vee_ki! Bolshe_vee_ki!” in a melancholy and monotonous shriek.

The pursuing policeman rushed around to the front of the tank. “Lady says you killed her dog,” he announced. “Open up.”

The flit obligingly opened the door to explain. Straightway the officer’s gun was brought to bear upon his head. “Now, you stay put,” came the grim order. The flit stayed.

But not for long. Acting, apparently, quite on its own initiative, the machine gun of the forward turret deliberately and noiselessly swung about until it pointed accurately at the third button, counting upward, of the policeman’s tunic. It is very disconcerting to have a machine gun aim itself at the pit of one’s stomach, particularly when there is no evidence as to whether it is loaded or not. And a machine gun always looks loaded.

The cop blinked and wavered. A solemn voice emerged from the hollow interior:

“‘Who touches a hair of yon red head
Dies like a dog! March on!’ he said.”

“Whaddye mean, ‘red head’?” indignantly demanded the flit, who was sensitive on the subject; and he ducked inside seeking explanation.

The gob immediately pulled-to the steel door. “We will now parley,” he announced.

The officer took off his helmet and fanned a wrinkled brow. “You gotta keep off this street,” he said, but without conviction.

“Why?” demanded the gob.

“You’re a truck,” said the cop.

“You’re another,” retorted the flit hotly. “We’re a pleasure-car; that’s what we are!”

“Well, you’re a heavy traffic, anyway,” argued the cop. “You got no right here.”

“Lightest tank in the service,” declared the gob. “Less than six tons on the hoof. Stripped down for speed, in light marching accouterment with one day’s ammunition and a marked-down meal ticket, we’re only--”

“For Gawd’s sake!” broke in the harassed officer; “git off my beat before I report yer, if I can think of somethin’ to report that the Cap would believe.”

Thus delivered from the Philistines, the equipage proceeded, amid the wonder and consternation of an ear-smitten public. But there was one who paid no tribute of notice to its thunderous progress. He stood on the corner of Fifth Avenue, and gazed into vacancy. The gleam of his candid shirt-front attracted the eye of the gob, who was acting as lookout.

“Lighthouse off the port bow,” he informed the chauffeur. “Seems to be deserted. Run alongside; I fain would hail it.”

The tank, after a preliminary wobble, drew up, facing the abstracted individual. He deigned to droop an uninterested eye at it, and straightway resumed his contemplation of nothingness. The gob semi-emerging from the tank’s door, addressed him.

“Cab, sir?”

“Eh? What?” said the other vaguely.

“Taxi, sir? Fine night for a ride,” said the gob persuasively.

“Certainly,” assented the bystander with the air of one who welcomes any diversion, however slight. He stepped inside.

“Where to, sir?”

The fare considered. “Eight-seventy-seven Park Avenue,” he said at length.

“What for?” interposed the flit with suspicion.

“To make a polite and formal call on a young lady.”

“Look at the time,” protested the flit. “Won’t she be asleep?”

“Not after little Pussyfoot enters the block,” said the fare with conviction. “Besides that--have I hired this hack or haven’t I?”

“You sure have,” confirmed the gob. “Montmorency, behave!” he admonished the flit. “We are about to go into Society. I can tell it by the address. By the left wheel, _hrrumph_!”

“One moment,” said the passenger. “It is my duty to tell you that Bingle Foxley will be coming down the Avenue drunk and chiefly on the wrong side, about this hour.”

“Who’s he?” demanded the chauffeur.

“The Demon Motorist. Traffic rules are a red rag to him. As a cousin of the Big Chief he’s immune from arrest, and gets a clear path.”

“What’s the big idea?” demanded the flit.

“Just so that you can slide out the way when you hear his siren,” returned the fare, with apparent innocence.

The flit grinned. “Ick hobby dick, Steefen, as we say in Coblenz,” he observed. “We’re off.”

* * * * *

The Fifth Avenue traffic obligingly made way again. After essaying several polite and casual observations in a stentorian tone, with the effect of a microbe’s whisper, the passenger gathered together his vocal powers, and stuck his voice into the gob’s ear.

“I want to explain. I’m going to LET YOU INTO A LITTLE SECRET,” he bellowed into a suddenly developed stillness, consequent upon the flit’s shutting off power at a crowded corner.

“One little tone louder,” suggested the gob, “and you’ll let in South Norwalk and the Oranges.”

“Let me explain to you all,” said the passenger while the gathering crowd outside passed the word that the tank was conveying a violently mad German spy to the asylum. “I’m very much interested in--”

“Not me!” expostulated the flit. “The last guy in a dress suit that explained what he was very much interested in, got me very much interested too, and stung me four months’ pay for four cents’ worth of phony stock.”

“This is a young lady,” said the other, with dignity. “She objects to me because she says I am too proper and conventional to be really human.”

“Are you?” inquired the sike with interest.

“Before the war, possibly. I admit it.”

“And the war cured you?”

“Judge for yourself. The third day of the Argonne debate I nearly got court-martialed for biting a chunk out of my captain’s ear. It was dark, and I thought when we came together after the charge and he tried to gouge my left eye out, that he was a Fritzie. Now I put it to you as pals, _is_ that overrefined and finicky?”

“Pals is right,” stated the flit heartily, “if you was at Argonne Woods. And as man to man and one having experience, I’d advise you to handle her likewise. Not bite her ear off, you get me? But join the tanks and treat ’em rough.”

“Precisely why I hired this cab.”

“So woman is your trouble,” observed the sike. “I salute you, Mr. Reuben Renssalaer Watts.”

“The devil you do!” retorted that gentleman. “When did you graduate into the Intelligence Department? Or have I met you in a previous existence?”

“Neither. It is quite simple,” began the sike, when a swelling, soaring, blare from up the Avenue cut him short.

“Mr. Foxley requests the courtesy of a clear path,” said Mr. Watts.

“Sure,” remarked the flit between his teeth. “Sic ’em, Maudie!”

Gathering speed, the tank proceeded to weave and writhe across the roadway in a manner suggestive of a beetle with the stomach-ache. Hoots, rude, imperative and monitory, sounded from ahead. A huge green car manned by a huge red youth came rushing down upon them. At sight of the tank, the car emitted a sublimated yawp of surprise and horror followed by penetrating shrieks as the brakes bit in, the youth uttered a whoop of desperation, the outfit hit the unmoved tank slantwise, skimmed across the sidewalk on two wheels and sought cover in a window placarded “Special Bargains in Lingerie” whence presently emerged the almost total ruin of Mr. Foxley draped pinkly in a chemise. It beat the air with frenzied hands, yelled feebly, and disappeared around the corner in the direction of its club. Revivified later (though not by the usual agencies, which he resolutely refused, to the alarm of his fellows), Mr. Foxley related how, while driving quietly down the Avenue he had been beset by a mud-turtle in armor. A very large, ferocious, prehistoric mud-turtle, waving an American flag, which without provocation had attacked his unoffending car, bitten off its two front wheels and chased it through a plate-glass window. And as for him, he wouldn’t care if July first came to-morrow! He was off it!

“Where do they come from and why did they let ’em out?” demanded Mr. Foxley passionately.

The maligned tank, passing upon its sentimental quest, was now spreading the echoes of Bedlam through peaceful Park Avenue. At number eight-seventy-seven, the equipage stopped. The clamor didn’t. A surprised and extremely attractive face beneath the cap of the National League for Woman’s Service Motor Corps appeared at a third-floor window.

“Shut off! Shut off!” yelled Reuben Renssalaer Watts. “I want to talk to her.”

“Can’t,” bellowed the flit. “She’s jammed.”

The face at the window became indignant. It made urgent gestures like a policeman.

“The lady wants us to move on,” the gob informed the perspiring Mr. Watts.

Out upon the sidewalk stepped the sike. He faced the lovely and indignant apparition overhead and squared his manly form. With his right hand he majestically indicated the zenith; his left he placed tenderly upon the pit of his stomach. Immediately he thrust his left north-northeast and started a pivot-blow with the other. He then boxed the compass in swift, successive two-arm movements. The ornament of the window nodded and disappeared.

“See here!” said Mr. Watts. “Do you _know_ that lady?”

“I do not,” returned the sike, “though I live in hopes.”

“Then why the convulsions?” demanded Mr. Watts severely.

“Semaphoring, my dear sir. I simply wigwagged the lady that if she would descend to Mother Earth, a communication of semi-official import having a vital bearing on her prospects in life would be made to her. _Or_ words to that effect,” said the sike. “The rest is up to you.”

The final observation might well have been addressed to the Mayor of New Rochelle, as, coincident with its utterance the chauffeur had stilled his engine. He joined the sidewalk group, followed by the gob. The girl emerged.

“Is it an ambulance job?” she asked professionally.

“No, madam,” answered the sike.

“Then why did you S. O. S. me?”

Mr. Reuben Renssalaer Watts stepped forward. “Renny!” she exclaimed and turned to a pink so delicate and bewitching that the gob hastily and surreptitiously extracted his beloved quid and tossed it under the iron monster.

“A social call,” said that gentleman. “Good evening, Carey.” He stepped forward and with nonchalance and promptitude kissed the newcomer fair and full upon the lips.

“Renny!” gasped the girl; and the pink deepened to a fiery red. “Wh-Wh-What--how--are you crazy?”

“I’ve joined the tanks,” exclaimed Mr. Watts urbanely. “‘Treat ’em rough’ is our motto. Come and have a joy-ride on me.”

The girl recovered herself. “Who are these gentlemen?”

“Hanged if I know. I hired the crew with the ship and they are now my fellow piratical voyagers on faerie seas forlorn. Fellows, this is Miss Carey Vail.”

“Pleased to meetcher,” said the flit, stepping forward courteously. “My name’s Mr. Slayter. The gob, here, is Chaw Veeder. He’s rough stuff from the gas-house, but with ladies present he’ll kindly soft-pedal. The other guy is a stuffed professor at home, at present considerable alive. Name, Perfessor James.” He turned to address Watts. “Now, where to, sir?”

“Where do you suggest?”

* * * * *

“If this is a ladies’ game,” responded the flit tentatively, “there’s a party named Miss Nora McSears who cashes at an all-night restaurant on East Fifty-eighth Street, very clean and respectable.”

“Right! Go to Fifty-eighth Street. Will you get in, Carey?”

Miss Carey Vail sniffed the air daintily and observed the tank with doubt. “Do you think your steed is safe?” she asked.

“He’s uncertain when hungry,” explained the gob; “but he’s just fed. He’s had one small dog, one large fruit-stand, three cans of garbage, a corner of the Waldorf-Astoria and a chew of the best plug. You could trust him to tow a baby-carriage down Peacock Alley.”

Miss Vail embarked. Her next observation, “Do behave yourself, Renny,” was inferred rather than heard, in the commotion of their turning. Nor was their converse thereafter, though earnest, of import to the others, who considerately concentrated their attention upon the outer world.

The Recherché Restaurant was doing a languid, ten-cent-to-a-quarter trade, when East Fifty-eighth Street burst into “The Anvil Chorus.” Its entire clientèle rushed to the door, followed by a tall, calm-eyed girl with the cash-register in her arms. The tank brought up with a lurch opposite her.

“Good evening, Miss Nora,” said the flit, emerging.

“Good evening, yourself, and who are _you_?” returned Miss McSears placidly.

The flit assumed an air of profound injury. “Did you or did you not, one year back, come St. Patrick’s Day, after the Club dance at camp, take my regimental pin to wear and say you’d never forget Private F. Slayter, now corporal?”

“Maybe I did,” admitted the girl. “But your face was clean then.”

“I’ve joined the tanks since,” said Corporal Slayter. “Treat ’em rough.” Selecting the nearest dimple in Miss McSears’s piquant face, he saluted it in form.

“Move on!” cried that young lady, helpless by reason of the cash-machine, but wrathful. “My father’s a policeman and I’ll be telephoning for him.”

“Ask him can I keep company with his daughter,” suggested the unperturbed flit. “We’ll move on when you move with us.”

“In _that_?” retorted the girl, bestowing a scornful look upon the monster. “I don’t believe it’s even respectable. Who’s in there?”

Responding to the flit’s unspoken appeal, the woman passenger stepped out. “I’m Carey Vail,” she began in her quiet, assured voice. “You may know--”

“Hello, Vail,” interrupted Miss McSears.

“Why, Mac! Bless your old heart! How are you?”

The two did not fall on each other’s neck. They shook hands in manly fashion. “This is one of our emergency volunteers for the ‘flu’ work,” explained the girl in uniform. “They don’t make them any better.”

“They don’t need to, as far’s I’m concerned,” murmured Mr. Slayter, relieving the bearer of the cash-register. “Are you on for our little party, Nora?”

“Wait till I telephone for a substitute,” said Miss McSears. “And do you behave yourself, you with your ‘Nora’!”

Upon her return, after some delay, there was heard issuing from the tank’s interior dolorous music, in the sike’s plaintive baritone:

“No one to pity him, none to cay-ress
No one to help _him_ in his sad dy-stress.”

“The Sweet Singer of Michigan has broken his parole,” observed the gob. “Hey, you inside, what’s on your bursting chest?”

“I’m lonely,” stated the sike. “All my lovely companions are faded and gone. Captive to the fair sex.

“Oh, bury me on the lone pray-_ree_!
Where the wild ki-yotes can’t pester me.”

“Goodness gracious! What’s that?” queried Miss McSears.

“I believe it’s some kind of a professor,” explained Miss Vail, as the flit obligingly turned an interior light upon the sike. Miss McSears viewed the exhibit with critical approval.

“It looks good to me,” she said. “Couldn’t we get somebody to take care of it for the evening and make this a real party? Any of your crowd on, Vail?”

“Eleven twenty-five,” said the corps-girl, examining a wrist-watch. “Dolly Barrett’ll just be coming off duty. She’d fit in.”

“Great!” assented Miss McSears, and the two girls retired to telephone.

“Did you get her?” chorused the crew of the tank, when they returned.

“Of course,” said Miss Vail. “We told her to meet us at eleven-fifty on the south side of Columbus Circle where Broadway comes in.”

“That’s a nice, retired spot for a tryst,” said Mr. Watts sardonically. “Did you tell her how we were coming?”

“No. I just said we’d pick her up in a car.”

“She’ll be surprised.”

“Surprise will do her good. She’s been overworked lately and needs livening up.”

Surprise was obviously the trysted one’s portion when, with the sound of earthquake and avalanche, battle, murder, and sudden death, the “cab” arrived. Nor was the initial surprise the only one. A perfect stranger with a long, lean, pleasant face stepped out and regarded her with appreciative and twinkling eyes. In the background she dimly apprehended Miss Vail and Miss McSears. On his part the sike contemplated a small, trim young person with very black hair, very gray eyes under black brows and lashes and a mouth that was an enticement to disorderly conduct. His bedazzled regard failed to note certain features of her costume. His once professorial spirit was in a turmoil, a reckless, desperate glow.

“Good evening,” he said rapidly. “We’ve come to take you riding. Let me help you in. My name is Follansbee James. I’ve joined the tanks. Treat ’em rough.” Smack! The disorderly conduct was committed.

“Attention!” snapped the enraged victim of the caress.

The sike fell into a rigor, a paralysis, intended for a salute. His horrified eyes were riveted on the newcomer’s nearest shoulder. A silver bar shone there.

“Lord help me! I’ve kissed my superior officer,” groaned the sike, and collapsed into the waiting arms of the gob.

The others immediately supplied a chorus of explanation and apology, greatly enjoyed and appreciated by the gathering crowd. “Let’s get out of here,” said Lieutenant Dolly Barrett, bewilderedly rubbing the corner of her chin (for the sike had been nervous and his marksmanship below par). “Go into the Park, where it’s quiet.”

Their progress spread a horrific stridor through the peace and decorum of the Park’s ordered avenues, and the squirrels awoke in the tree-tops, gibbering with terror, and the birds took wing and fled into the unknown, and the new hippopotamus of the Zoo, surmising that the day of judgment was upon him, repented of his sins in a wail that scarred the ear-drums of the sleeping neighborhood; and policemen, singly and in squads, rushed to the scene and retired before the sight of a moving fortress displaying the American flag, and Reuben Renssalaer Watts chose that time as propitious for a whirlwind advance, under cover of the riot, upon the heart of Miss Carey Vail. As he pleaded earnestly, and with vast expenditure of lung-power, which did not reach beyond the attentive ear of the girl, who was listening with an expression somewhere between happiness, panic, and surrender, the flit tactlessly and abruptly shut down the power to inquire his way, and Mr. Watts was heard (from the Battery on the south to the Bronx on the north) proclaiming the finale and climax of his wooing:

“--GOING TO MARRY ME THIS VERY NIGHT, AS IS!”

A dead, blank, dismayed silence supervened. The unintentional eavesdroppers stared at each other and away from the pair. Ten blocks distant the hippopotamus laughed raucously. Mr. Watts, justly indignant, turned upon the chauffeur.

“Keep her going, you fourth-rate, donkey-engine misfit!” he roared, in tones which proved that he didn’t care who heard him this time.

“What church?” inquired the flit promptly.

“Not any church,” cried Miss Carey Vail. “I want to go ho-o-ome.”

“Oh, be a sport, Vail,” adjured her superior officer. “He looks all right to me. Why not marry him and put him out of his misery?”

“Go on; do!” urged Miss McSears. “It’ll be so romantic.”

“Maybe it’d be catching,” hopefully suggested Corporal Slayter, who appeared to be holding Miss McSears’s hand.

“Happy thought!” contributed the sike. “Don’t spoil the evening’s fun just because of a weak prejudice about formality.”

“Oh, I think you’re all mad!” declared Miss Vail tremulously, and suddenly, despite her uniform, she looked very small and feminine and helpless. “You, most of all, Renny, I don’t know what’s come to you.”

“I’ve joined the tanks,” said Reuben Renssalaer Watts promptly, “And--”

“Don’t!” wailed Miss Vail, half a second too late to forestall the action which went with the statement. “I want to go ho-o-ome!” she faltered. But there was more bewilderment than conviction in her appeal.

“Directly after the ceremony,” promised the progressive wooer. “We’ll ride up in my special taxi and break the news to the family.”

“Look here, folkses,” broke in the gob. “I’m all for this Lohengrin-Mendelssohn stuff. But it’ll take some scheming. We’ve got the rest of the night, free of entanglements and engagements, except the one we’ve just been witness to, is it not?”

“It is,” responded a chorus, minus the voice of Miss Carey Vail who was temporarily speechless.

“All right, I’m going to blow to supper.”

“Not at twelve-fifteen, in this man’s burg,” corrected Mr. Watts. “It’s closed.”

“If you can give a wedding party, I guess I can give a supper party,” retorted the gob. “And I’m going to if I have to hold up somebody else’s. Corporal, conduct Airy Fairy Lillian up Mr. Fifth’s well-known avenue while I man the lookout, and be ready to stop on signal.”

The signal was given, opposite a house of modest size (for that part of the thoroughfare) with evidences of activity in the front rooms. The gob ran up the steps and was met by a flustered-looking person who made gestures of expostulation, which presently were mollified to gestures of deprecation.

“Come one, come all,” invited the gob, returning. “There’ll be a short wait while my friend in the shirt-sleeves--”

“Who _is_ this guy, Chaw?” demanded the flit.

“He’s the butler.”

“Whose butler?” queried Miss McSears.

“Don’t make any odds whose. He’s ours at present.”

“How did you get him?” questioned Watts.

“It’s a long story of my seamy past,” answered the gob. “He’s an ex-con, and I’ve got a strangle-hold on him. So he’s invited us to supper and when the family gets home from the country in the morning he can fix up his own explanation of the ice-box to suit himself and them. I’ve ordered fizz.”

“That’s all very well,” observed Miss McSears with firmness. “But I don’t go to midnight suppers in other folks’ houses, with a bunch of strangers--”

“Strangers once but lovers now,” stated the flit firmly, “speaking for self _and_ lady friend.”

“--and no chaperon,” pursued the spokeswoman of the proprieties, reddening but obstinate. “So you count--”

“Silence in the ranks!” ordered Dolly Barrett. “I’m an officer and a widow. Is that enough?”

“Plenty for me, and praise to Heaven for the good news,” said the sike, enthusiastically. “I don’t mean the officer part,” he added significantly, “but the other.”

Mr. Watts regarded him curiously. “There may be more in these Western universities than a Harvard man would suspect,” he murmured.

“And to think,” sighed the sike, “that a few weeks hence I shall be pouring pious platform platitudes into the happy ears of inattentive youth!”

“Forward in light foraging order!” commanded the gob.

* * * * *

The party entered the house, which was evidently being hastily cleaned for the return of the owners. A subdued noise as of servants in commotion could be heard in the rear. On a hall stand stood a collection of mail in three piles. The flit chancing to glance at it, stood petrified. Selecting a post-card he advanced upon the rear of the unheeding gob, turned up the bottom of the wide and floppy left trouser-leg, read from the sewn-in slip the name inscribed thereon, compared it with the address on the post-card, turned down the trouser-leg to one fold and with a sudden, sardonic inspiration not only left it so, but adjusted the other one to match it.

“Mr. Schuyler Tappan Veeder,” he observed with concentrated bitterness, straightening up.

“Here,” responded the gob, cheerfully. “What about it?”

“This is _your_ joint,” declared the flit in solemn accusation.

“Not while my fond parents enjoy their present health,” was the genial reply.

But the soul of Corporal Slayter was hot with suspicion. “What kinda con game you been workin’ on me?” he said, surlily. “Call yourself Chaw Veeder.”

“Barring the presence of ladies, you’re a liar,” retorted the gob promptly. “It’s my pals call me Chaw. Which reminds me.” Producing a rich-hued bar from his pocket, he bit off a generous chunk and expertly stowed it. The angry eyes of his pal flickered a little. But he was unconvinced.

“You’re phony,” he growled. “A masqueradin’ dude.” He pointed to the trousers which he had left “cuffed.” “That’s your style,” he asserted. “Me, I’m through. I’ll not be made a guy of. C’mon, Nora.”

* * * * *

The gob stretched forth an iron-muscled hand which he inserted forcibly and affectionately between the flit’s neck and his collar. “Pause a moment, Claude,” he besought. “Girls, will you kindly muffle your ears? Thanks. Now, Freddie, you lop-sided, cross-grained, bone-headed, swivel-eared, pizen-souled descendant of ten generations of mule-thieves, before I break your jaw in three places at once, listen while I tell you what you are.” And he told him. But of the telling there is no record, because after the preface, Mr. Watts retired for air and the sike ran out to seek a pencil and paper and returned too late for the exordium. The flit, spell-bound, relaxed his expression of disfavor. When it was over he bent down and readjusted the gob’s trouser-legs to the regulation straightness. Apology could go no further.

“You win, Chaw,” said he shamefacedly. “Speed up the wedding feast.”

It is recorded in the unwritten history of Fifth Avenue’s most costly and exclusive section, that there came, upon a midnight clear, a din as of ten thousand structural riveters in progressive action, giving place to sounds of revelry by early morning, which in turn was succeeded by the Anvil Chorus, above the surface of which soared a valiant barytone proclaiming, “The Voice that Breathed O’er Eden.” Mr. Chaw Veeder’s supper-party, back in the tank, was adjourning to night-court to seek a marrying magistrate. For, as in the old song, love (in the person of Mr. Reuben Renssalaer Watts) had found out the way, and the telephone, reaching a friendly judge, had arranged a special emergency license.

Many queer equipages with strange cargoes visit night-court on sundry errands; but the tank with its wedding-party broke the record.

Court adjourned informally, to rush out and ascertain who was bombing the locality and why. When the party entered, they beheld two policemen struggling to extricate the magistrate from the frantic embrace of Mr. Bingle Foxley, who was yelling:

“Save me! It’s coming after me. I hear it. Don’t let it get me, Judge!”

When at length his Honor was released, the sike greeted him with surprise.

“It’s you, is it?”

“It’s me,” agreed the magistrate. “Or if not me, I.” He was the bearded victim of “Cherchez la Chicken.”

“We found him,” remarked the sike, indicating Mr. Reuben Renssalaer Watts.

“So I perceive. It’s a small world.”

“Small like a Harlem flat,” confirmed Miss Nora McSears discontentedly. “You can’t turn around in it without rousing the family. _That_,” she pursued, pointing out to Corporal Slayter one of the policemen engaged in preventing Mr. Foxley from crawling into the commitment file, “is Pa.”

“Howdy, Pa!” said the flit.

“Whaddye mean, ‘Pa’?” demanded the thunderstruck officer.

“In-law,” explained Mr. Slayter. “To-be,” he added.

“Perhaps,” amended Miss McSears.

“Sure thing,” asseverated the flit blithely. “It’s in the air. You can’t dodge it.”

“Other things difficult to dodge are in the air,” observed the magistrate. “Reuben, as friend to friend and unofficially, how did you get these?”

“By the hour,” replied Mr. Watts. “I hired ’em.”

“Are you responsible for their actions?”

“Upon and after the hour of 11:05 P.M., I am.”

“You escape,” pronounced the magistrate. “At 11:02 P.M. I am informed, an armored tank filled with desperadoes, I. W. W. Bolshevists, anarchists, nihilists, prohibitionists and other enemies of the public welfare, invaded West Forty-fourth Street and did there and then interrupt an orderly meeting of the Society for the Abolition of Tobacco, Bridge, Dancing and other Hellish Habits, by felonious means, to wit: firing upon it with machine guns, gatlings, howitzers, hand-grenades, rifles, revolvers and sundry lethal weapons, against the ordinances duly made and provided for the maintenance of the peace.”

“So help me God,” intoned a large, solemn, pulpy person, rising in his seat.

“That’s the guy,” cried the flit, “that called us ‘Bol-she-_vee_-ki!’ Lemme attim.”

“Then you admit that you are them,” said the magistrate. “Or, if not them, they.”

“We do,” said the gob; “with mitigating circumstances.”

“There is a warrant out against you.”

A blond and frescoed portent projected itself upward from a side bench. “Make it two, Judge. And make the second one for murder.”

“Saints preserve us!” groaned the sike. “The sorrowing protectress of the silhouetted pup!”

“It is a small world,” repeated the magistrate. “This gentleman (indicating the stricken Mr. Foxley) who originally came here for the purpose of taking the pledge, now prefers the charge that you instigated to attack him without provocation a prehistoric monster of the dragon or fire-spouting persuasion which, after destroying his automobile, chased him through a plate-glass window and totally wrecked his nerves. Comparing his description of the monster with my own impression of your vehicle, and remembering that the female of the species is more deadly than the male, I conclude that it is her. Or, if not her, it. What have you to say?”

“Just this,” answered Mr. Watts with annoyance, “I came here to be married, not prosecuted. Come now, Hartley, as friend to friend, can’t you fix this? It may be my last chance.”

“Your friend with the talent for blackmail seems to be a person of infinite resource,” said the magistrate, glancing toward the sike. “Has he any suggestions?”

“If I may be permitted,” said the sike, modestly rising, “I suggest, first, that Mr. Foxley is too good a sport to spoil a wedding, if assured that the groom will never again travel Fifth Avenue in a tank. (Mr. Foxley grunted.) As for the noble cause of Suppression of Tobacco _et cetera_, I propose a generous epithalamic contribution thereto by the happy bridegroom. We now come to the ill-fated canine, and its sorrowing owner. Though myself in a state of genteel poverty, I will gladly start a subscription to bury it, or if that prove impracticable, to have it pasted in a scrap-book, with appropriate honors.”

“Nothin’ doin’!” asserted the bereaved blonde in angry tones. “I wanta tell you--”

“One moment, please. Would it not soothe your injured feelings to be invited to the wedding and to sign as legal witness? There is a reporter present, and I assume that the nuptials of Mr. Reuben Renssalaer Watts with Miss Carey Vail will receive a meed of desirable publicity extending to all who participate.”

“Not _the_ Miss Carey Vail!” exclaimed the awe-struck blonde, who went into Society eagerly, though vicariously, through the medium of the daily press.

“The same,” declared Mr. Watts. “Positively last appearance in that rôle. That is,” he added anxiously, “if you accept our earnest invitation to come to the wedding.”

“Chawmed, I’m suah,” murmured the lady, and proceeded to powder her nose from an apparatus concealed in a dangling bag.

The sike felt a soft touch on his elbow. Lieutenant Dolly Barrett’s large gray eyes glowed warmly up into his.

“You ought to be running the Peace Conference,” she opined.

“And to think,” mourned the sike, “that next month I’ll be acting the melancholy mentor to a flock of corn-fed prairie-rubes.”

“Court will convene in my private room for matrimonial purposes at once,” proclaimed the magistrate.

The ceremony was brief and business-like. The witnesses were the sike and Mrs. Barrett, quite close together, the flit and Miss McSears (bracketed by the former), the gob, with rating and ship attached, Mr. Foxley in a shaken hand, and Mrs. Eudora Fotheringay in letters half an inch high and ninety degrees slant. The whole party attended by the court officials went out to see the pair off. The flit, saluting, stepped forward.

“Cab, sir?”

“Certainly,” assented the bridegroom.

“Certainly not,” amended the bride.

“Not?” queried the flit, crestfallen.

“Taxi,” said the new Mrs. Watts decisively, hailing one as it rounded the corner.

“Cab, lady?” coyly invited the flit, turning to Miss McSears, as the bridal couple were whirled away.

“Subway,” retorted Pa McSears emphatically, “speaking for self and daughter.”

“Cab, sir?” the operator solicited Mr. Bingle Foxley.

“Help!” responded that gentleman, making a leap for the nearest haven, which chanced to be Mrs. Fotheringay’s limousine, where he was hospitably received.

“Cab, Chaw?” cried the desperate flit, seeing his custom dropping away.

“Life is sweet,” observed the gob, and followed Mr. Foxley into his perfumed retirement.

“Cab, buddy?” almost wept Corporal Slayter, addressing himself in a seductive coo to Professor Follansbee James. “_And_ sister,” he added, noting the confidential juxtaposition of the two heads.

“We are walking, thank you so much,” said Lieutenant Barrett sweetly.

“Old Bird,” the sorrowing flit addressed the metallic accomplice of his crimes, “we are, as it were, dumped into Cupid’s ash-can. Cheer up! I will never desert you.” His eyes fell upon the legend, “To be returned.” “I’d forgotten about that,” he murmured, “Where to, I wonder?” He reversed the placard and was confronted by this warning in red and minatory letters:

Do Not Operate

Condemned as

DANGEROUS

The flit cast a pensive eye up the street where the dust of the bridal departure still hung, shifted it to the wake of the Fotheringay limousine bearing the gob and the reformed Foxley from the stricken field, glanced yearningly toward the corner where Miss Nora McSears, temporarily a parental captive, threw him a swift and comforting signal, and regarded with benignity two uniformed figures marching along the sidewalk side-by-side, in that sweet accord which apostles of the millennium prescribe not alone for the lion and the lamb, but also for the officer and the soldier in the ranks.

“Dangerous,” he repeated, as a grin, appreciative but tender, lighted up his rugged features. Then, with conviction, “_I’ll_ say it is!”

_McClure’s Magazine_

YOU’VE GOT TO BE SELFISH

BY

EDNA FERBER

YOU’VE GOT TO BE SELFISH[7]

By EDNA FERBER

When you try to do a story about three people like Sid Hahn and Mizzi Markis and Wallie Ascher you find yourself pawing around among the personalities, helplessly. For the three of them are what is known in newspaper parlance as national figures. One n. f. is enough for any short story. Three would swamp a book. It’s like one of those plays advertised as having an allstar cast. By the time each luminary has come on, and been greeted, and done his twinkling, the play has faded into the background. You can’t see the heavens for the stars.

Surely Sid Hahn, like the guest of honor at a dinner, needs no introduction. And just as surely will he be introduced. He has been described elsewhere and often; perhaps nowhere more concisely than on page 16, paragraph two, of a volume that shall be nameless, though quoted, thus:

“Sid Hahn, erstwhile usher, call-boy, press agent, advance man, had a genius for things theatrical. It was inborn. Dramatic, sensitive, artistic, intuitive, he was often rendered inarticulate by the very force and variety of his feelings. A little, rotund, ugly man, with the eyes of a dreamer, the wide, mobile mouth of a humorist, the ears of a comic ol’ clo’es man. His generosity was proverbial, and it amounted to a vice.”

Not that that covers him. No one paragraph could. You turn a fine diamond this way and that, and as its facets catch the light you say, “It’s scarlet! No--it’s blue! No--rose!--orange!--lilac!--no--”

That was Sid Hahn.

I suppose he never really sat for a photograph and yet you saw his likeness in all the magazines. He was snapped on the street, and in the theatre, and even up in his famous library-study-office on the sixth and top floor of the Thalia Theatre Building. Usually with a fat black cigar, unlighted, in one corner of his commodious mouth. Everyone interested in things theatrical (and whom does that not include?) knew all about Sid Hahn--and nothing. He had come, a boy, from one of those middle-western towns with a highfalutin Greek name. Parthenon, Ohio, or something incredible like that. No one knows how he first approached the profession which he was to dominate in America. There’s no record of his having asked for a job in a theatre, and received it. He oozed into it, indefinably, and moved with it, and became a part of it and finally controlled it. Satellites, fur-collared and pseudo-successful, trailing in his wake, used to talk loudly of I-knew-him-when. They all lied. It had been Augustin Daly, dead these many years, who had first recognized in this boy the genius for discovering and directing genius. Daly was, at that time, at the zenith of his career--managing, writing, directing, producing. He fired the imagination of this stocky, gargoyle-faced boy with the luminous eyes and the humorous mouth. I don’t know that Sid Hahn, hanging about the theatre in every kind of menial capacity, ever said to himself in so many words:

“I’m going to be what he is. I’m going to concentrate on it. I won’t let anything or anybody interfere with it. Nobody knows what I’m going to be. But I know.... And you’ve got to be selfish. You’ve got to be selfish.”

Of course no one ever really made a speech like that to himself, even in the Horatio Alger books. But if the great ambition and determination running through the whole fibre of his being could have been crystallized into spoken words they would have sounded like that.

By the time he was forty-five he had discovered more stars than Copernicus. They were not all first magnitude twinklers. Some of them even glowed so feebly that you could see their light only when he stood behind them, the steady radiance of his genius shining through. But taken as a whole they made a brilliant constellation, furnishing much of the illumination for the brightest thoroughfare in the world.

He had never married. There are those who say that he had had an early love affair, but that he had sworn not to marry until he had achieved what he called success. And by that time it had been too late. It was as though the hot flame of ambition had burned out all his other passions. Later they say he was responsible for more happy marriages contracted by people who did not know that he was responsible for them, than a popular East Side shadchen. He grew a little tired, perhaps, of playing with make-believe stage characters, and directing them, so he began to play with real ones, like God. But always kind.