Part 11

“Yes, I felt that only a king full of blue blood could possibly knight a fellow properly. However, on the night before the ceremony I drank a magnum of champagne, and then made the strategic error of adding a few glasses of 1812 brandy. Alcohol is no respecter of royalty. In the morning I perceived that if I tried to knight the fellow I’d probably decapitate him. Here was a pretty kettle of whitebait. I was at my wit’s end when Lord Crockinghorse, my secretary, bobbed up with an idea. He’d had it on ice for some time, it appeared. He produced a whiskery blighter who opened oysters in a fried-fish shop; the fellow smelled most evilly of shellfish, but he looked exactly like me. In my condition at that time I could hardly tell him from myself. Crockinghorse coolly proposed that the whiskery oysterman should take my place. I was shocked inexpressibly. An oysterman substituting for a king! What a devastating and yet absurd thought! I felt just as you do now, Ernie.”

The king blew a smoke ring and continued:

“Well, Crockinghorse won his point, and we dressed up the whiskery blighter in my most garish uniform, told him if he said a syllable more than ‘yes’ or ‘no’ we’d murder him, and taught him a speech which went:

“‘My loyal subjects [pause for cheers] I am overcome by this reception. [Pause.] I can only say thank you, thank you, thank you.’ We packed him off in my pea-green uniform and next day the papers all said, ‘His Majesty performed his part in the ceremony with exceptional grace and dignity.’”

The prince in his bed moaned; the king, with a shrug, continued:

“Oh, I was all cut up for days! Felt deucedly unnecessary. But at last light dawned and the more I thought of the whole affair the more it entertained me. I ended by hiring the whiskery blighter at twenty-five goobecs a week, gave him a room in the palace near the kitchen and a lot of oysters to amuse himself with and whenever I got tired of kinging I trotted to Paris or somewhere incog and left the corner stone laying to my oyster friend. He became rather better at it than I. Oh, I had to do it, Ernie! If I hadn’t had a genuine vacation now and then I should have got squirrels in the cupola, absolutely.”

The prince had aged perceptibly during this recital. His voice quavered as he asked, “And where is the fellow now?”

“Oh, I still use him,” answered the king. “Only last week I sent him down to Wizzelborough to lay the corner stone of the new cathedral. You were there, Ernie. Didn’t you notice anything peculiar?”

The prince’s reply was faint-voiced.

“I did notice that the cathedral smelled uncommonly oystery,” he said. He drew in his breath; his manner was that of a drowning man making a last desperate effort to save himself.

“Father,” he said, “I am crushed by what you tell me. I can’t believe that what you say is true of all royal persons. Something in here”—the prince laid a manicured hand on the spot on the bosom of his lavender pajamas where he believed his heart to be—“tells me that there are still kings who respect the traditions of royalty, who are themselves and nothing else. I appeal to Your Zabonian Serenity to reassure me about this, to give me back my faith in myself and my position. They wouldn’t do a thing like this in Zabonia! Oh, tell me they wouldn’t!”

The Emperor of Zabonia tossed away his scented cigaret.

“You gentlemen,” he said in his slow, thick voice, “have confided in me. I’m going to return the compliment. I am not the Emperor of Zabonia. I’m just an old actor from the Imperial Stock Company who happens to look like the emperor. He is usually too tight to go to public functions or pay royal visits, so he sends me.”

* * * * *

In the morning the young prince pulled a velvet bell cord and his valet entered.

“Thursday,” said the prince, “I’m supposed to ride through the city and be pelted with flowers. It’s an old tradition or some such rot. Will you please take that dummy there in the corner, dress him in my uniform as Honorary Rear Admiral of the Royal Submarine Fleet, seat him in the royal carriage and drive him around in my place?”

The valet bowed. The prince picked up the morning newspaper and turned to the sporting page.

THE BATTLE OF WASHINGTON SQUARE

HE wore no collar. If he had, it would have been size 13½. He didn’t, because collars cost twenty cents. Twenty cents paid his overhead expenses for a day: two meals of stew and coffee at Emil’s Busy Bee Lunchery—music by the Elevated trains—and enough tobacco to make fifty cigarets.

His collarlessness did not worry him; he gave it no more thought than he gave to the art of poetry, the influence of Confucius on China, or his country’s foreign policy, if any. How to get that daily twenty cents—that was what concerned him; that done, he let his brain rest, wrapped in a hazy blanket. Leaning against the wall of Hyde’s Stable in West Houston Street, outside in summer, inside in winter, he accepted the universe. Blue smoke, seeping from time to time from his nostrils, was the only sign that he had not mummified.

His name was Joey Pell. He was nineteen years old. As a baby he had had rickets, and as a result he was bowlegged and undersized. His complexion was imperfect. Of the six children born to his parents, he was the last and the only one to survive the hazards of infancy in a two-room flat on Hudson Street. His mother sometimes said that this was enough to drive a person to drink. Her husband, a truckman chronically on strike, would remark, by way of repartee, that it was quite unnecessary to drive her to drink. She would reply, in part, that his own record as a teetotaler was not unimpeachable. At this point in the conflict little Joey knew it to be an act of prudence to slip out of the room that served as kitchen, living room and his bedroom. He was a timid, easily frightened child, and had apparently inherited none of his parents’ bellicose corpuscles.

One day he went out and never came back, and his parents thereafter quarreled in peace, while he attached himself to the stable as an unofficial valet and general assistant.

He was afraid of horses, and he never conquered that fear entirely, but the stable was warm, and the men gave him dimes for helping with the harness, so he stayed there; his was not a soul for high adventure. They let him hang about the stable because he tried to be useful. There was only one sort of job he’d balk at—he would not go near mules. Of mules he stood in deathly fear, for when he was six he had seen a man trampled to death by an angry mule, and the look of fright that had come to Joey’s face on that occasion had never entirely left it. His haddock-like, watery blue-gray eyes were still slightly apprehensive; his lips always seemed on the verge of a quiver. When he approached a person he sidled. He seemed to expect to be kicked, and not infrequently he was. When someone kicked him Joey Pell did not kick back. He just melted away from the vicinity of the kicker, with a look, hurt, and yet resigned, as if a certain amount of kicking were his lot in life.

He harbored no grudges and hated no one.

For one thing, his memory was not good enough for him to be a good hater; and, besides, it took venom and energy to hate, and he had neither. His lack of pugnacity barred him from the society of the other boys of that part of the city, for they all aspired to be pugilists or, failing that, competent members of the Hudson Dusters, the Whyo Boys, the Gophers, or other gangs; their evenings were full of fisticuffs. Joey would have liked to be one of them, but, since they did not appear to want him, he accepted the fact.

Joey Pell had learned to read much later than the other boys, and reading was still somewhat of a labor for him. He rarely got beyond the comic strips in the newspapers; these he pored over with knit and sober brow.

What went on in the world outside his stable mattered little to him. Kings might be hurled into the dust, the dogs of war might growl and gnaw their leashes, black calamity might threaten the land—it was all one to Joey Pell. His stew, his coffee, his tobacco, his sleep—these filled his brain; it was not a large one, and he had room for little else. It may have been that the rumbling of events in the world reached his ear, but they never penetrated into his head.

The men in the stable had been growing more and more excited about something—a war of some sort, Joey concluded. It was much too remote an affair to concern him, anyhow.

Then, one day, something exciting happened to Joey Pell. He received a letter. It was the first letter he had ever received in his life, and he stood in front of the stable, fingering it gingerly with dirty hands. He was a little alarmed. Why should anyone write to him? Probably it was a mistake. He stared at the address again:

Joseph Pell c/o Hyde’s Stable W. Houston St. New York City

Himself beyond question. He wondered what he had done. He tore open the envelope and pored over the printed letter inside. He wondered why he should be called upon to present himself at a certain place and time. The letter confused him. So he took it to Phil Hyde, who owned the stable. Hyde glanced at it.

“Well, they got you,” Hyde said with a grin.

“Got me?”

“Yeah—you gotta fight.”

“Me fight? Fight who?”

“Say, stupid, don’t you know there’s a war on? This here means you’re drafted.”

* * * * *

Joey liked camp. For the first week he was in a daze; the officers who examined him seemed blurred and enormous. He was lanced by a fear that he must immediately shed blood, or have his own shed. It seemed a poor choice to Joey Pell. When he found that the day he must engage in actual combat was remote he began to enjoy the military life. Never before had he been so well fed, had he had such a clean, warm place to sleep, had he had such trim new clothes. He realized this, and he did what he was told to do, whole-heartedly; he was afraid that he might be put out of the Army.

The regular life suited him. It was pleasant to have someone else do all the thinking. He liked to do things by the numbers—one, two, three, four. He liked to march along, hep, hep, hep, hep, in step, shoulder to shoulder with the other soldiers. He belonged with them; they were his gang; it was a fine new feeling. They accepted him as one of them. He began to take trouble about his hair and finger nails, to take an interest in baths. His chest grew an inch, his biceps grew firmer.

Joey Pell learned many things at camp. One of them was bayonet fighting. At first it made him tremble and turn sick inside; but he got over that.

“Hey, you, with the pasty face!” the sergeant barked. “Put some life into it. It’ll make a man of you.”

Joey tried to do so. But he found it hard to be enthusiastic about stabbing even a dummy.

“Get mad!” roared the sergeant. “Hate ’em! Drive it into their guts! Curse ’em as you thrust. Give it to ’em—one, two, three!”

Joey was a good soldier; he was told to hate; he hated. He learned to drive the keen point of his bayonet into the straw intestines of the dummies; as he did so he gritted his teeth and sharply cursed. He came to hate each of the dummies with a personal hate.

The other soldiers in his squad did not talk much about the war. Mostly they talked of girls, and baseball, and prize fighting, and the bartenders they knew, and of what the lieutenant said to them and their own daring retorts to him. Sometimes, in sentimental moments, they showed one another pictures of wives, sweethearts or babies. When they did talk of the war they cursed the men they were to fight against, and told stories of their savagery.

As Joey listened he felt inside very much as he had felt that day when he saw the mule trampling the life from a man. His fear bred hate. These people were devils; it was a virtue to hate them, a good deed to kill them.

Grim monsters peopled his dreams. They were in gray, and were twice the size of ordinary men, and fiendish of face. In his dreams he fought them. As they bore down on him he drove his bayonet into their throats. The sergeant had no occasion to criticize his bayonet drill now.

Joey Pell was a one-idea man. Once his mind had been filled to capacity with the problem of keeping alive; now that problem was happily solved for him; so he had space for another idea. That idea was to be a good soldier, and, it followed, a sincere hater of the enemy. This became Joey’s obsession. He won an approving grunt from the sergeant by the ferocity of his attack in the bayonet drill.

Another fine new feeling came to Joey Pell on his first leave of absence in New York City. He realized that he was a hero. He saw that he was a person of importance. His had been a life without color, a humble life. Back in the stable he was less important than one of the horses; not the faintest beam of limelight had ever fallen on his small figure in that manure-scented obscurity. Men had treated him curtly; no woman had ever smiled at him. He had been unwanted. But now it was different. He was a soldier.

He had taken the three days’ leave of absence because his turn had come, not because he wanted it; he’d no idea what use he could make of it.

He was trudging along Fifth Avenue, bound for his stable below Washington Square, when he heard a voice calling, “Oh, soldier boy! Oh, soldier boy!”

He looked about; there was no other soldier in sight; so the lady in the limousine must be calling to him. Her car had come quite close to the curb; it was a magnificent car, huge and glittering with polished nickel. Inside, it was heavily upholstered, and so was the richly dressed lady who sat there, and who had called to Joey. She was smiling. Joey eyed her suspiciously.

“Can’t I take you where you are going?” she asked.

“Ain’t goin’ nowhere,” he mumbled. He felt suddenly hot, awkward, conscious of his complexion.

“Ah, then let me take you to the Home Trench,” said the lady. Joey looked dubious; he wondered what her game was. “Don’t you know about the Home Trench?” she asked. Her voice partly reassured him. “It’s for soldier boys like you. It’s in my own house on Fifth Avenue. I’m Mrs. J. Goodhue Wilmerding, you know. Come, get in.”

She held open the limousine’s door invitingly. Joey stumbled in. He sat, uncomfortable, bolt upright on the edge of the fat seat. The roses in the silver vase overawed him; he associated flowers only with funerals. From the corner of his eye he watched the lady. Perhaps, he thought, she was a spy who would try by honeyed words to get important military information from him. He resolved to kick her roundly in the shins and leap from the car if she tried any funny business on him, Private Joseph Pell.

“It is just wonderful,” he heard her say, “of you boys to do what you are doing.”

“Yes’m,” said Joey Pell.

“Ah, if I were only a man”—she expelled a sigh—“but, since I’m not, I’m doing my bit as best I can. Last week at the Home Trench we entertained seven hundred and sixty-one soldier boys.”

“Yes’m,” said Joey Pell.

“I hope you’ll like the Home Trench,” she went on. “All the waitresses there are Junior League girls. They dance with the boys.” Then she added, “With all the boys. Isn’t it wonderful how this terrible war has brought us all closer together?”

“Yes’m,” said Joey Pell.

“I wonder,” she said, “if you know my son at your camp—Major Sears Wilmerding, on the general’s staff?”

“No’m,” said Joey Pell.

“You must introduce yourself to him when you go back.”

“Yes’m,” said Joey Pell, with mental reservations.

“You see, I consider all soldier boys my sons,” she said. “Ah, here we are—at the Home Trench.”

The motor car purred up to the curb before an opulent brownstone house on lower Fifth Avenue. Over the door was a sign, decorated with flags:

The Home Trench All Soldiers Welcome

Joey followed Mrs. Wilmerding into the house. Inside, a pretty girl pounced on Joey, asked his name, and pinned a tag on his coat bearing the words “I am Private Pell.”

Blinking, he stepped from the hallway into the large front room. It was filled with soldiers and girls. In one corner a phonograph was grinding out brassily “Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag, and Smile, Smile, Smile.” Some of the girls and soldiers were dancing—the soldiers for the most part stiff and self-conscious, the girls bright-eyed and putting much spirit into the task of making the soldiers enjoy themselves.

A little bobbed-haired girl captured Joey.

“I’m Peggy Sturgis,” she announced, taking his hand, which hung limply by his side, and shaking it violently. “You’re Private Pell, aren’t you?”

Joey gulped, and nodded.

“I know some Pells at Tuxedo Park,” she said. “Are you one of them?”

“No’m,” said Joey.

“Shall we dance?”

He was too overwhelmed by this entirely novel experience to refuse. She towed and hauled and steered him about the crowded room, while the phonograph did its best with “Over There.”

“I think,” she said, “it’s just wonderful of you boys to do what you are doing.” Joey flushed. “I wish,” she said wistfully, “that I were a man. I’d be in the cavalry. Don’t you just adore horses, Mr. Pell?”

Joey licked dry lips and nodded. He hated horses, as a matter of fact; but she had called him Mister, and that was another new and stimulating experience.

Other girls danced with Joey Pell that day. They told him, every one of them, how brave a thing he was doing. He drank a great deal of not very sweet lemonade, and only when the Home Trench closed for the day, at six o’clock, did he leave.

He was almost as much intoxicated as if the lemonade had been champagne, as he strode up the avenue, chin out, eyes narrowed sternly.

He wished earnestly that he might meet one of the enemy face to face at that moment. He felt capable of laying him low, barehanded. He saluted all officers with a sharp precise salute; he even saluted a passing letter carrier. His heart beat with unwonted vigor; he was a soldier; a somebody.

He surveyed suspiciously each passerby in the hope that he might discover a spy. He found no spy, but he did find an elderly gentleman who gave him a theater ticket, and a blessing. Joey took the ticket without embarrassment; he was getting used to gifts.

As he marched along he saw a sign:

Free Chow for the Lads in Khaki

He entered the big brick building and was greeted by an aroma of disinfectant, liniment and athletes, and by a plump enthusiastic man, who slapped Joey on the shoulder and cried jovially, “Howdy, buddy! Greetings! Come right in and get your chow. Afterwards we’re going to have a get-together and sing. You’ll stay, of course.” He patted Joey’s shoulder with a big-brother gesture. “You sure are lucky to be in the Army,” said the plump man. “It’s mighty fine, the spirit you boys are showing. I wish I could be in khaki, but these darn flat feet of mine——”

He waved an apologetic pink hand toward his feet.

In the dining-room Joey ate copiously of beans, cocoa and pie. He stayed a while for the singing, and even added a cracked and unpractised tenor to the chorus, which, led by the plump man with the unfortunate feet, sang “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” “K-K-Katy,” and “Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here.”

Joey slipped away and went to the theater. A war play was being given—a moving piece with blank cartridge battles and air raids offstage, and a whole corps of villains in the persons of enemy officers, cold sneering devils with spiked mustachios and evil habits.

Joey hissed them loudly. He was so carried away indeed, that at one critical juncture in the play he contemplated swarming over the footlights and doing violence to the chief villain, a fiend in human form if ever there was one.

He was diverted from this by an opportunity closer at hand. Between acts a speaker urged the audience to buy bonds to support the war. The speaker was eloquent, and he pointed dramatically at Joey, who sat in the fifth row.

“Boys like him,” said the speaker, “are giving their lives for you. Will you not give your dollars?”

Joey blushed with a happy pride; the eyes of the house were on him. Pretty girls passed subscription blanks. The man in front of Joey did not take one. He was a stumpy man with a round bristly head; Joey had had his suspicions of him.

“Don’t be a slacker,” the girl with the blanks said.

“I em nod a slecker,” returned the man.

His voice was guttural; the enemy officers on the stage talked in that same tone, Joey had observed.

To Joey his duty was plain.

He leaned forward and hissed into the man’s ear, “You buy one of dem, see.”

The man looked around; his face was purplish and obstinate. He glared at Joey.

“I vill nod,” he said.

Again Joey saw his simple duty; he punched the man squarely on his bulb of nose. The man punched back, but a dozen fists descended on him from all sides and he was hustled up the aisle by the ushers. As he passed, members of the audience took kicks at him. Joey was left in possession of the field. He glowed. On the way out, several men, strangers, shook hands with him; one man gave him a box of cigarets.

Joey Pell returned to camp in high spirits. The wandering, furtive, foggy look of his stable days was gone from his face; the droop was gone from his spine. He had found himself; he was a soldier, a person to be admired, respected, and even feared a little. In his dreams he, single-handed, held the breach against a prodigious number of the enemy. They charged upon him, but he, though bleeding from a dozen wounds, did not retreat. He held them back; with rifle, bombs, bayonet, even fists, he hurled them back until he was ringed round by piles of the slain. The enemy fell back at last before his fury. Then came the general, who pinned a large medal on Joey’s chest.

“You are a man,” said the general, “and a soldier. Give me your hand.”

Joey saluted, then fainted. In some dreams he never recovered; he was given a military funeral of considerable pomp. He even saw his tombstone, with the words carved on it:

_PRIVATE JOSEPH PELL_ _He Died for His Flag_

He saw Mrs. J. Goodhue Wilmerding, in black, sobbing. He saw Peggy Sturgis, inconsolable. He saw the pretty girls at the Home Trench in tears. He even saw the plump man with the traitorous feet turn his head away to hide his emotion.

In most of his dreams, however, he permitted himself to survive; badly wounded, of course. He saw himself nursed back to health by Peggy Sturgis, under the solicitous maternal eye of Mrs. Wilmerding. He saw himself given a good job by a grateful Government—something with a large salary and not much work.

He contrived to go to New York often. He invented sick sisters, dying mothers, important business of a private nature. He would step out into the rattling rush of the city with the tread of a conquerer. He liked the friendly, approving glances that were cast on him. His appetite for deference grew keen. It was an enormously fine feeling to swing with military step and carriage up Fifth Avenue on a crisp day, uniform pressed, shoes shined, and with campaign hat rakishly shading eyes that managed to look grim, warlike and noble all at the same time, and yet did not miss a single sign of interest or sympathy in a single passing face. It was a never-ending source of delight to Joey Pell that he could step to the curb and signal any of the handsome motor cars that were passing, and have the car stop for him, and be treated as an honored guest by the occupant and be driven wherever he wished to go. It was pleasant to know that he could not walk two blocks without having some well-dressed person stop his motor car and invite Joey to have a ride. He spent whole days being taken up Fifth Avenue and then back again. He got so that he accepted offers only from the most expensive cars.