Part 8

“Kees me hagain, kees me hagain, Kees me hagain, and hagain. Kees me hagain, kees me hagain, Kees me hagain and hagain, Kees me hagain, kees me hagain, Kees me, kees me, hagain!”

When he had finished, Velvet Pants bowed deeply first to Janey, then to the rest. There was a slight, dubious ripple of applause that was checked suddenly. Pete High had strode up to Velvet Pants and was facing him.

“Just a minute there,” said Pete. “You and me has got a little bone to pick. Wadda you mean by singing a song like that to Miss Crosby?”

The small man looked puzzled.

“It ees only song American I know,” he said.

“Yeah? Well, I’m goin’ to teach you to sing it out of the other side of your mouth. Come outside with me.”

“Pete High,” broke in Janey, “don’t you go fighting with him. He didn’t mean any harm; he probably doesn’t know what the words mean.”

“I told him never to say anything to you whether he understood it or not,” stormed Pete. “Come on, you.”

Velvet Pants made an attempt to steal away, but Pete blocked his path.

“You’re going out on the lawn with me,” said Pete.

“And seeng?” asked the little man, who seemed somewhat dazed by what was happening.

“No; fight.”

“Fight?”

“Yes; fight.”

“But I do not hate you, Meester Pete.”

“Well, I hate you. Come on.”

“But how we fight?” inquired the small man; he was pale beneath his tan, and trembling. For answer Pete thrust a clenched fist under the man’s nose. The man drew his head back and shivered.

“No!” he said, shaking his head; “no! no! no! no! no!”

“You won’t fight?”

“No.”

“You’re a coward,” declared Pete.

Velvet Pants shrugged his shoulders.

“Not know hand-fights,” he said.

Pete slapped him across the face with his open hand.

“Now will you fight?”

“Not know hand-fights,” said the man, drawing away. Pete, contempt on his face, gave him a push into the night. They heard the sound of feet on the path; Velvet Pants was running.

“Not know hand-fights,” Pete mimicked. “Did you ever in your life see such a rat?”

Next day excitement swept Crosby Corners. Defender Monarch had gone crazy, and when that news spread, they forgot all about the conduct of Velvet Pants on the night before. As for him, he went about his work with a puzzled and hurt look on his brown face; he seemed still uncertain why the others did not respond to his smiles and attempts at friendliness.

Defender Monarch was the pride, and the terror, of the county. His owner, Ben Crosby, had raised him from a gawky calf, wobbly on his legs, into a massive ton-and-a-half bull, with a chest like a haystack, a voice of thunder, and the temper of a gouty demon. Ben Crosby had not dehorned him, because in cattle shows a good pair of horns is considered a point of merit in judging bulls, and the giant bull had won many blue ribbons. On this day Ben Crosby wished most earnestly that he had foregone the blue ribbons and taken off those horns. A savage bull without horns is bad enough, but a savage bull with a pair of sharp, wicked horns is just about the most dangerous animal that walks.

Perhaps on that morning Defender Monarch had realized that he had reached the end of his usefulness, and that before very long he was doomed to end a proud career, ingloriously, as steak, roast, and stew. He stood in his pasture, roaring a challenge to the world that he would die fighting. By blind luck Ben Crosby was able to trick him into entering the big pen, but in the process Defender Monarch had given a sample of his viciousness by ripping Johnny Nelson’s arm from elbow to shoulder and had failed by a hair’s-breadth in a sincere attempt to crush the life out of Ben Crosby himself. Once confined in the pen, Defender Monarch’s rage knew no bounds. He hurled himself against the thick board sides so furiously that they creaked and trembled, and the crowd that had gathered to see him darted back to places of greater safety.

Luckily, the pen was a stoutly built affair; it was not really a pen at all, but a small corral, perhaps fifty feet square. About it moved Defender Monarch, his small eyes blazing, alert. And, perched on boxes and ladders, Crosby Corners, fascinated as all men are by dangerous things, watched the mad king of the herd.

“Isn’t he just too terrible,” said Janey Crosby to Pete High.

“Oh, I don’t know,” answered Pete, airily. “I’ve worked round him often.”

“But not since he went crazy, Pete.”

“No,” admitted Pete, “mebbe not. I’m used to cattle of all kinds, but I never saw one that acted this way. Just plain bulls I’m none too fond of fooling with, but a crazy one! Excuse me.”

“See how he’s looking right at us with those mean little eyes of his,” said Janey. “It’s just as if he were saying, ‘If I only had you down here for a minute!’ I’m scared, Pete.”

“I’m here,” said Pete High, reassuringly. “Look, Janey, he’s getting another fit; he’s going to try to buck that opposite wall.”

Janey Crosby, to get a better view, climbed to the very top of the stepladder that leaned against the wall of the corral. There was a sharp crack as the top rail gave way, then horrified cries. She had fallen into the pen, and lay unconscious almost at the feet of the mad bull.

The women screamed, the men ran about aimlessly, wildly, shouting orders at one another.

“Help! Janey’s fallen into the pen!”

“Oh, he’ll kill her! he’ll kill her! he’ll kill her!”

“Get pitchforks!”

“Get a gun!”

“No use; we’ve only got bird-shot. It would just make him madder to hit him with that.”

“Someone will have to jump in.”

“Where are you running to, Pete High?”

“To get a rope or something.”

“You’ll be too late.”

Defender Monarch looked down at the girl, and his eyes were evil. Then he looked at the ring of white faces that lined the top of the corral. He seemed to understand the situation; he seemed to know that he had plenty of time, and he gloated. He turned away from Janey, trotted to the farther end of the corral, wheeled about, and surveyed the distance between himself and the girl’s body; then he lowered his head with his gleaming prongs, and gathered his body for a charge.

The aghast onlookers became aware that something was in the corral besides the girl and the bull. A figure had come through the gate of the inclosure, silently and swiftly. It was a small man in velvet trousers and he was strolling toward Defender Monarch as casually and placidly as if the bull were a rose-bush. On the brown face of Velvet Pants there was not the slightest trace of fear; indeed, he was smiling, a slight, amused smile. Otherwise he was as matter of fact as if he were about to sit down to his breakfast. A brown-paper cigaret hung limp from one corner of his lips; with the mincing strut they had noticed and made fun of, he walked slowly quite near to Defender Monarch. The animal, distracted, stood blinking at the little man. Within a few feet of the bull, Velvet Pants halted; with magnificent nonchalance he blew a cloud of smoke into the bull’s face, and then they saw a flash of something red. It was Ben Crosby’s red flannel undershirt that a few moments before had been drying on the line. The small man had flicked it across the bull’s face. Defender Monarch forgot for the moment his plan for smashing Janey Crosby; he saw the red, and he plunged toward it. The women turned their heads away, the men clenched their teeth. They saw Velvet Pants slip aside with the quickness of a jungle cat, and the bull, unable to check himself, jolt his head against one of the sides of the corral. Velvet Pants turned round, smiled pleasantly, and bowed very low to the spectators. They saw that he had in his right hand something long and bright that caught the rays of the sun; they realized that it was Grandpa Crosby’s old Civil-War sword that had hung in the dining-room. He was holding it as lightly and as easily as if it were a butter-knife.

Defender Monarch, recovering from his fruitless charge against the wall, spun about; once more the red shirt was deftly flapped before his bright, mad eyes. Once more, with a roar of wrath, he launched his bulk straight at Velvet Pants. Then something happened to Defender Monarch. It happened with such speed that all the onlookers saw was a flash; then they saw the huge frame of the bull totter, crumple, and sink down. Sticking from the left shoulder of the bull they saw the hilt of Grandpa Crosby’s sword; they saw the hilt only, for Velvet Pants had driven the point into Defender Monarch’s heart.

The people of Crosby Corners allege that Ben Crosby kissed the little tanned man on both cheeks, but this he denies; he admits, however, that he hugged him and patted him, and said many husky words of gratitude and admiration to Velvet Pants, who seemed abashed and quite unable to understand why everyone was making so much of a fuss about him.

“And I called you a coward,” Ben Crosby kept saying. “I called you a coward, and you went in and faced a mad bull without batting an eyelash.”

“It was nuzzing,” murmured the small brown man.

“Nothing to face a mad bull?”

Velvet Pants shrugged his shoulders.

“But I am a toreador,” he said. “In my country, Andalusia, I keel one, two, t’ree bull every Sunday for fun. Why should I fear bulls? I know bulls.”

A HOUSE IN THE COUNTRY

I MET him again in this way: The revolving door of the excessively fashionable St. Erdman Hotel was spinning around furiously—and yet no one came forth. My eye spied this phenomenon; and, ever curious, I paused on Fifth Avenue and watched. Round and round sped the door like the Ferris Wheel in a squirrel cage propelled by an athletic squirrel gone mad. So fast did the door revolve that with difficulty I made out a small figure in a brown suit in one of the compartments. It was he who was making a whirligig of the door. Then I saw another figure, very bulky and cholerically red in the face and wearing the purple-and-gold livery of the hotel, stop the buzzing door and with outraged thumb and forefinger pick up the little man in brown by the collar, pop him out of the door like a tiddleywink and send him bouncing across the sidewalk in my direction. The little man picked himself up, apparently not in the least angry, cast not a single malediction at the broad purple back of the doorman, but began to brush himself off thoughtfully. Then I saw that he was Hosmer Appleby, with whom I had had a casual acquaintance in college some five years before.

“Why hello, Appleby,” I greeted him. “Are you hurt?”

“I shall not have one,” was his reply. “I do not like them.”

I stared at Appleby, uncertain whether he was dazed by his recent experience, or was perhaps psychopathic, or had been drinking.

“You do not like what?” I queried.

“Revolving doors,” he said. “I’ve tried them in seven buildings now, and I don’t like any of them. No; I shan’t have one. That’s settled.”

He addressed me as if I were trying to compel him to have a revolving door, willy-nilly.

“There, there,” I said soothingly, convinced now that his mind was affected. “You need not have revolving doors if you don’t want them.”

“But what kind shall I have?” he demanded, looking at me anxiously. “What kind would you have?”

“Have? For what?”

“Why, for your house, of course,” he said.

“But I have no house, Appleby.”

I fancied that he looked at me pityingly.

“Neither have I,” he said; “but I am going to have one.”

“Are you? Where?”

“In the country.”

“Whereabouts in the country?”

“I don’t know yet.” Then, in a tone that was rapt, if not actually reverent, he said, “Yes, some day I’ll have a house in the country.”

“When?”

“I wish I knew,” Appleby said. “As soon as I save enough to build the house and to provide a small income for myself.”

“You’re married then?”

“Oh, no; no, indeed. Nothing like that,” he assured me hastily.

“Then what the dickens do you want with a house in the country?”

“I’ll tell you,” said Appleby. “Where can we go and talk?”

I suggested a certain coffee house, hidden away in a side street.

“The coffee,” I said, as we started there, “is the best Java in New York. It is raised for the exclusive use of a royal family in Europe; but now and then the royal steward sells a bag to this coffee house. It has to be smuggled in, bean by bean; the man said so.”

“Smuggled in, bean by bean,” repeated Appleby. “Do you think I could get a bag?”

“A whole bag? What for?”

“For my house, of course,” he said. “I could serve it at the housewarming.”

“Well,” I said, “it strikes me that a fellow who plans what sort of coffee he’ll serve at the housewarming of a house that isn’t even started yet must like to peer into the future.”

“I do,” said Appleby seriously.

As we neared the coffee house he suddenly darted from my side. With some apprehension I saw him, by a somewhat hazardous display of gymnastic ability, mount a window ledge that he might examine closely one of the old ship lanterns that served to light the sign of the coffee house.

He climbed down, shaking his head.

“It won’t do,” he said.

“It won’t do what?” I asked.

“It won’t do for my house,” he replied.

As we entered the vestibule he dropped to his knees and ran an appraising hand over the doormat.

“Too prickly,” he announced. “For me, at any rate.”

We took a table in the little back room, and while Appleby inquisitively fingered the curtain material and searched the bottom of the sugar bowl for the maker’s mark, I examined him. Save for the addition of a blond snippet of mustache, he was much the same as he had been in college. He wore the same sort of assiduously brushed brown suit, the same careful necktie, the same intent, intense air.

“Did you see the Yale game this year?” I asked.

“No; but let me tell you about my house,” he answered. “Just now it’s to be a rather simple affair of, say, ten rooms; a low, rambling house of the English type, with plaster walls showing the trowel marks; or I may have it of field stone, with a beamed ceiling in the living room and——”

“But why are you going to build it, Appleby?”

He looked solemn.

“Because of my philosophy of life,” he said.

“I don’t see——”

“This is what I mean,” he explained: “I came out of college about as well prepared for life as a snake is prepared to ride a bicycle. I’d no idea what I wanted to do. First, I thought I’d like to be a painter; I lived on art and sausages for five months; then I ran out of paint and sausages. So I went to work in an advertising agency. I’m not just sure now why I did. I think I ran into some fellow who said advertising was a young giant still in its infancy and advised me to get in on the ground floor; I remember the metaphor, if not the fellow. I did get in on the ground floor and I stayed there for four months. Then I lost interest in the superlative merits of the hair restorer my company advertised, and left the young giant still in its infancy.”

The coffee came; he absent-mindedly, drank some.

“I entered finance,” he went on. “That is to say, I trekked all over town trying to find someone feeble-minded enough to buy a bond from me. Not finding anyone, I entered foreign trade; meaning, I sat at a desk and tried to sell dolls in gross lots to Peruvian importers. I did this for some endless months. One day I found myself looking out of my ninth-story window and wondering why I didn’t jump. ‘Why,’ I found myself asking myself, ‘do I continue to live? Do I care a snap about dolls in gross lots? I do not! Do I like Peruvians? Not at all! In fact, they both bore me. Life,’ I said to myself, ‘is as empty as a used cantaloupe.’ What had I to live for?”

Appleby sipped his coffee, and I said I didn’t know.

“Nothing,” he said; “nothing. What was my life? Same routine. Get up in the morning; miserable business, getting up. Shave myself; always painful; tender skin, you know. Breakfast; same old coffee, same old cereal, same old eggs. Jostle down to the office. Same dolls; same Peruvians. Lunch with earnest young exporters; same oatmeal crackers and milk; same talk about profits and markets. Back to the office; ‘Miss Gurry, take a letter: “Yours of the fourteenth received, and in reply would say in re shipment of 325 gross of best India-rubber dolls, style 7BB—squeaking—am shipping same f.o.b., Wappingers Falls, N. Y., at once.”’ Oh, you know the line. Home to my apartment, the size of a police patrol. Read the papers. Same old bunk. ‘Strike Situation Serious.’ ‘International Situation Serious.’ ‘Pugilistic Situation Serious.’ Everything serious, everybody serious. Dinner; that’s serious too. Same old question: What shall I do to kill the evening? Read a book? The usual bunk; either romance about people who are too happy, or realism about people who are not happy enough. Go to a show? The old plots, the old lines, the old girls. Same banalities; same strutting hams spouting moss-covered buckets of bunk. Call on a girl? Ghastly bore. Same old ‘Have you seen this or have you read that? Isn’t it shocking about the Warps getting a divorce, or nice about the Woofs getting married? Do you believe a man and a girl can really be friends in the strictest sense of the word, and how is your golf game getting on?’ Home to bed, wind the alarm clock; same old dreams, and then—br-r-ring—7:30 same thing all over again. I was slaving at work I hated, and what was I getting out of it? What was it all leading to?”

Again he sipped coffee; again I said I didn’t know; again he launched himself.

“Nothing,” he said; “nothing. There I was at twenty-four doing work I loathed in order to lead a life that bored me. The whole business seemed as pointless as an aquarium without fish. What could I do to make life worth living?”

“Well, what did you do?” I asked.

“First, I analyzed the situation. I always was analytic, you know. Then I decided what I must do. I must have some definite object to work for. I must set some goal for myself.”

He tossed off his coffee with a triumphant air; his eyes sparkled. I signaled for more coffee and looked at him interrogatorily.

“And the goal?” I questioned.

His voice was alive with excitement as he said, “To have a house in the country; to retire and live there and raise roses.”

“You’re pretty young to retire,” I remarked.

“Oh, I won’t be able to do that for years and years,” Appleby said. “I’ll not only have to earn enough for a house but enough to bring me in a modest income.”

“Well, you have your definite object.”

“I have,” said Appleby. “And you’ve no idea how it has bucked me up. I’ve gained ten pounds since I thought of it. And my whole outlook has changed; I’m as happy as a cat in a fish store these days. You see, I’m going to build a perfect house. I take all the building magazines. Every Sunday I go walking in the country looking for sites. And as for my job——”

“You like it now?”

“I do not. I’m still distinctly bored by dolls in gross lots, and Peruvians; but I take them seriously now. They’re pawns in my game, you see. Now, every time I sell a gross of dolls I say to myself, ‘Ah, 144 dolls means a commission to me of $4.77, or enough to pay for one electric outlet in my house.’ Or, if I sell ten gross I say to myself, ‘Good work, old boy! The commission will buy andirons, or bricks for the chimney, or so many gallons of paint.’ I’m three times as good a business man as I was. Indeed, I should be at my office this minute, but I got thinking about revolving doors and could not be easy in my mind till I tried some. I don’t think they’d be appropriate for a country house, do you?”

“Decidedly not.”

He looked relieved.

“Good! Glad you agree. I’ll cross them off.”

He took out a fat memorandum book and crossed words off a list.

“When do you expect to make this dream a reality?” I asked.

A wistful look came to his face.

“If I do it by the time I’m fifty I’ll be lucky,” he said. “There isn’t much money in dolls. It will take years. But”—and he brightened—“I have already set aside enough money to pay for one window with leaded glass, one foot scraper, three electric outlets and part of the coal bin. Have you any ideas about coal bins?”

Before I could give him the benefit of my thought on this subject he vanished from my sight. I perceived that he had dived under the table and was subjecting the floor to a microscopic scrutiny. Presently he looked up.

“Wanted to be sure whether the floor is painted or stained,” he explained. “I think I’ll have my floors painted.” There was pride in his voice as he accented the word “my.” He got to his feet.

“Well, I must rush along. Hope I can sell a few gross of dolls before the market closes. Glad I ran into you. By the way, if you hear of anybody who wants to buy dolls——”

He did not finish his sentence, for his attention was caught by the door-knob of the front door and he bent over to see how it worked.

Then he went out. I did not see Hosmer Appleby again for six years.

New York eats men. It ate Appleby. At least I did not encounter him. He may have ridden in the same cars or lived in the same block; but our paths did not cross until one afternoon at the art museum. It was, as I recall it, just six years after we drank coffee together and he told me about his aim in life. I was in one gallery of the museum looking at a new exhibition of etchings, when I heard a commotion in the next gallery. A bass voice was in somewhat violent controversy with a tenor voice.

“But you can’t lie in that there bed,” the bass voice protested loudly.

“Why can’t I?”

“That there bed,” declared the bass voice, “was slep’ in by Napoleon. It’s worth twenty thousand dollars. We can’t have people layin’ in it, now can we?”

“But I’m only trying it.”

“It’s against the rules of the museum,” stated the bass voice.

I entered the gallery at this moment and saw a fat and agitated museum attendant, owner of the bass voice, expostulating with a small man in a brown suit, the tenor, who was reclining on an enormous gilt, canopied, four-poster bed of florid design.

“Oh, very well,” said the man on the bed. “I don’t think much of it as a bed, anyhow. I wouldn’t have it in my house.”

Saying this, he rose from the bed and I saw that he was Hosmer Appleby.

“Oh, you wouldn’t, wouldn’t you?” said the attendant, loyal to his charge. “Well, it was good enough for Napoleon, that there bed was.”

“Steel beds are more sanitary,” said Appleby. Then turning to me, “Don’t you think so?”

He spoke as if I’d been with him all the time. He had the same absorbed expression, the same intent, intense look.

“How’s the house?” I asked. “Are you enjoying living in it?”

“Living in it? Why, I haven’t started to build it yet!” he told me as we strolled through the collection of Sheraton furniture, which he now and then stopped to poke.

“No,” he continued, “I haven’t found a site. Haven’t the money, anyhow. But I’m looking. I suppose I’ve looked at five hundred sites since I saw you, and have got forty earaches listening to real-estate agents. I’m in no great hurry. The perfect house on the perfect site—that’s my plan.”

He said it as if he were annunciating a religious principle.

“And the dolls?” I asked.

He made a wry face.

“Oh, I still sell the little beasts,” he replied. “I’m assistant sales manager now, you know.”

“Good work!”

“Beastly grind,” he said. “I detest dolls. But they’re going to build me a house in the country.”

“A doll house?” I suggested.

He did not smile; his look said that his house was too sacred a matter for facetiousness.

“How are you, anyhow? Married, or anything like that?” I inquired.

“The living room is going to be thirty-five by twenty,” he said.

I stopped to admire a Fuller landscape.

“Aren’t those shadows lovely?” I said.

“My living room is going to be very bright,” said Hosmer Appleby. “Splotches of brilliant color everywhere. Old Spanish.” He said this in a confidential whisper, as if he were imparting a secret. “And, do you know,” he concluded, “I’ve earned almost enough to furnish the living room.”