Mummers in Mufti/Chapter 12

O that was how "Nero" Bellsmith, also known in the clubs as "The Human Firebrand," came by his name and fame, a fame which was to last, possibly not as long as that of the original Nero, but certainly longer than that of any previous Bellsmith. Six silly words, spoken over a wire, had, as he was soon to find out, shaken the City of Leicester more deeply than all the ponderous speeches ever made in the national councils by his great-uncle, the congressman Bellsmith.

Long before Bellsmith was dressed the deluge broke. In fact, it would have broken at daylight if William had been in a state of mind to answer the down-stairs telephone, the only instrument in the house which was allowed to ring before Bellsmith rose in the morning. Then, in incessant stream, came calls at the door—from reporters; from an officer of the Pilgrim Trust Co., which managed the Bellsmith estate; from adjusters of the fire insurance companies; from the city fire-marshal himself; from agents selling extinguishers and new safety styles of heating systems; from hopeful contractors; from interior decorators specializing on the artistic rich; from a leering bootlegger scenting trade; from a junk-dealer ready to make a bid on the damaged pipe, the damaged furniture, or the whole damaged house, for that matter; and finally from a plain-clothes policeman sent at the instigation of the trust company to keep away all the others.

On the telephone came calls of a more hesitant nature but in such unbroken sequence that the receiver was hardly on its hook before the bell rang again. There were calls from middle-aged women, "old friends of the family" who pretended to be solicitous about the mere fire, as such, but who were really curious to see whether Bellsmith himself was in any condition to answer. There were calls from one or two younger women and one or two hearty little men—social climbers, in both cases,—who had only the most casual acquaintance with Bellsmith but now made an elaborate and effusive show of rallying around in this hour of trial ("You poor, dear chap," from the women; "Is there anything I can do for you old man?" from the men), expecting, of course, their own pay later in the social coin of a grateful and cemented friendship.

There were calls from older men of a heavier type and a solid position who rang him up from their offices in what even they themselves believed to be a sincere concern but what was really an unresisted temptation to let their offices know that they were on common, if not necessarily friendly, terms with this famous young Harry Dashwoood.

There were anonymous calls from pay-stations which began, "Do you know who this is?" then ended abruptly with suddenly timorous feminine giggles. There were calls from cranks, insane persons, and all that indescribable army of individuals who, for no apparent reason, rush to any spot where notoriety has, for the moment, pitched its tent, until, about noon, at William's suggestion, Keefe was called from the stables to disconnect the wires.

For three days, in fact, Bellsmith had all the disagreeable experiences of fame with none of its thrills, but even the waves that broke on his door-step were only the outer foam of a flood of bewilderment and laughter which was sweeping over the city.

On Bellsmith, in short, had descended a fame of that kind which most dearly tickles the human fancy, even the fancy of those whom it shocks—the kind of fame which seeps into every nook and cranny of municipal life. Old ladies whispered over him in their drawing-rooms, loafers argued over him in the cellars and stone-quarries which had succeeded bar-rooms. Men laughed over him at the clubs, across the counter, and through the cashier's window at banks and brokerage houses. Stenographers and girls at white-goods counters cudgeled their brains to see whether or not they could remember what he looked like. If Bellsmith had gone to the Lyceum Theater on the night following his infamous declaration of independence—and been recognized—the audience would almost have stood up and cheered.

For that was the strangest part of it all. Instead of arousing indignation, his profligate words had made him a sort of popular hero. For some ridiculous reason, even the cautious and conservative City of Leicester (than which no city on earth is more appreciative of insurance and property values) saw something magnificent in the picture of a wealthy young man, slightly tottering, consigning his ancestral home to the flames. Except of course the old ladies. Remembering his father, his grandfather, and especially his aunts, Miss Lucille Bellsmith and Miss Mary (the only two persons in Leicester permitted, in their day, to have a liveried footman in the box of their carriage without the stigma of bad taste)—remembering Miss Lucille and Miss Mary, the old ladies thought it all thoroughly frightful.

Of course the hundred-odd thousand persons in Leicester who did not know him assumed at once, as "The Courier" had intended that they should assume, that Bellsmith had been—well, at least decidedly merry on synthetic gin when he had spoken the famous words. The one or two in a thousand who really did know him or knew something of the family recalled that he had always been "queer" and wondered whether he had at last slipped over the edge. A few intuitive souls, a very few, maintained that there was "something behind this which has n't come out," and wondered very actively what it might be.

This latter view acquired what appeared to be a very substantial foundation from a most unfortunate sequel. As has been mentioned, the Pilgrim Trust Co., which managed the Bellsmith estate, on the morning after the fire sent a very suave and very high officer post-haste to the old Bellsmith mansion to make diplomatic inquiries, of Bellsmith himself if he should happen to be around, or, if not, of the family doctors whom the trust company fully expected to find in attendance.

Bellsmith received the caller courteously but with such nervousness and in such a spirit of obstinate evasion that the visitor became more alarmed than ever. In fact, from that interview the high, suave officer gained nothing except perplexity and chagrin. Bellsmith calmly admitted his words but flatly refused to give any explanation whatsoever, and the thoroughly shaken banker hastened back to an agitated conference at the Pilgrim Trust. The result of this conference was one of those regrettable instances of making a bad matter worse to which high, suave officers of conservative institutions are only too prone, when trying to cover up regrettable incidents.

The Pilgrim Trust Co., in short, took it on itself to insert in the evening paper, "The Leicester Tribune and Press" (on which the Pilgrim Trust Co. held a large mortgage), a guarded statement "from a friend close to Mr. Bellsmith," which hinted that Mr. Bellsmith had been wholly misquoted and that his remarks had been cheaply distorted by the sensation-loving "Courier."

This statement implied guardedly that Mr. Bellsmith, so far from being "a man of pleasure," was really a nervous invalid whose strength had never allowed him to enter active life, either business or social. It pointed out that for years the Bellsmith family had been accustomed to maintain apartments at the hotel in question to which they retired periodically for rest and seclusion from household cares. It suggested that the only foundation for the ridiculous story was that Mr. Bellsmith, having been for some time in a state verging on "nervous collapse," being naturally upset (it did n't say hysterical) at the news of the fire and impatient to get to the scene, had had "little patience or time to waste on a series of ridiculous and impertinent questions put to him at such an inopportune moment."

Ah! this is all very well, thought Leicester, on reading what "The Tribune and Press" had to say about the affair. All Leicester knew as well as "The Tribune and Press" that "The Courier" was owned by "outside money" and would never spare a good citizen to spoil a good story, but just the same where there was all that smoke there must be some fire, not all of it caused by that "defective smoke pipe."

The honor and veracity of "The Courier" now being openly challenged, it hotly sent a reporter directly to Bellsmith, who certainly liked this new picture of himself no better than the one presented by "The Courier." Bellsmith coldly scorned the loop-hole offered him by the Pilgrim Trust through "The Tribune and Press." He obstinately affirmed to friend and enemy alike that he had been correctly quoted by "The Courier," which vindication was printed exultantly on its first page by "The Courier" on the following morning.

Beyond that statement, however, Bellsmith flatly refused to give one word of explanation to "The Courier" or any one else, at which "The Leicester Advocate," a moribund sheet which only employed two reporters and rarely got a chance at a live new story, saw its own opportunity for a little "desk work" and raised the academic question whether, in the circumstances, the Bellsmith estate could collect a cent of insurance.

To pad this inquiry into the proportions of a first-page story, "The Advocate" got interviews with half the prominent lawyers and insurance men in the city, most of whom were forced to admit, between chuckles, that, unless it could be proved in open court that Leicester's own Nero had actually set, instigated, incited, fanned, aided, abetted, or been otherwise cognizant of the origin of the fire, or unless it could be proved by competent witnesses that he had deliberately and wilfully hampered efforts to check it, the insurance companies would have to take their medicine. Judge Harmon, for instance, who loved his little legal joke as only an old-school lawyer can, even went so far as to cite precedents—"Mass. Reports"; Vol. . XXXVIII, Phœnix Insurance Co. of Liverpool, England vs. Reed, and also Federal Reports"; Vol. CIX, State of Connecticut vs. Delaney.

While the newspapers, with a lively appreciation of the news value both of profligate wealth and of "local interest," were waging this legal and hypothetical battle, current gossip at luncheons, in offices, in pool-rooms and in clubs was building up a fictitious history of poor Bellsmith that would have amazed him. It was, moreover, "The Courier's" conception of Bellsmith and not the Pilgrim Trust Co.'s which was accepted by popular acclaim. The public mind had pictured him in a certain character and was rigidly determined that he should live up to it.

The very seclusion in which the Bellsmith family had always lived, the very mystery which had always hung over the gloomy old house on Main Street, only made Bellsmith a more likely subject. In the case of a rich man about whom nobody knew very much, anything might be possible—and probably was. One harmless collision which his touring-car had had with a bridge on an icy evening ten years before was now raked up from the memory of some policeman and was even guardedly mentioned in "The Courier" as a wild midnight exploit. To this conception, the personality of Keefe, the chauffeur, "formerly well known as a daredevil race driver and now a prominent figure in local prize-ring circles," lent itself magnificently. One got the idea that Keefe could tell many a tale about furtive road-houses and chorus ladies if his natural loyalty to his dashing master had not sealed his lips. Incidentally Keefe himself did nothing to dispel this illusion.

The simple fact that Bellsmith had ridden daily in the parks for a year or two in English riding-clothes, and that he was almost the only man in Leicester to ride at all, made him equally, for journalistic purposes, a "well-known horseman." His perfunctory membership in the clubs also made him a "club-man," the most deadly suggestive word in the newspaper vernacular. By skillfully putting such words together, "The Courier," to which Bellsmith's sin had now become a matter of personal honor, did not actually say that he wore check suits and drove four-in-hand to the races, but that was certainly the picture left in the mind of the casual reader.

To know Bellsmith at all, which few men in Leicester did, came to give one a sort of vicarious glamour. These few genuine intimates, and many who were not really intimates in any sense of the word, were besieged with questions as to "What kind of a chap is he really?" Hence, lacking facts, imagination set to work without any one's really knowing that it was imagination. Old stories of which other men had actually been the heroes were attributed to Bellsmith. His college days were ransacked for picturesque incidents, and some of those old perennial campus fables which are tacked upon one famous graduate after another were tacked upon Bellsmith by men who, at college, had barely known him by sight, to the bewildered disgust of the few men in Leicester who actually did remember him as the quietest man who had ever entered Yale University. Even these, in the end, had to appease their own uncertainty with the aphorism, "You never can tell. When they do start, the quiet chaps are always the worst."

"There's another man who never drank a drop in his life before prohibition," was probably the commonest way of putting it.