Mummers in Mufti/Chapter 13

OR three days the storm of bewilderment and of laughter raged over the city of Leicester, and then it ended as foolishly as it had begun. On Friday night in "The Advocate" the "Bellsmith story" was relegated to an inner page, and by Saturday morning some knotty problem of municipal politics, involving the paving of Grand Street, had arisen to drive it out of sight entirely.

blazed "The Courier" clear across its front page in letters even larger than those given to Bellsmith. It was apparently major tactics with "The Courier" to inveigle some prominent simpleton into making some preposterous statement, especially one involving large sums of money. Anyway, there was something else for "The Tribune and Press" to deny on Saturday night.

During those three days, however, Bellsmith remained in his own house strictly in seclusion, locked in the Vatican. That had been the 1870 method of acting in the face of disaster or disgrace, and no other course ever occurred to Bellsmith. Even pulling up stakes and running off to Atlantic City or Pinehurst would not have been the same thing—not at all the same thing. That would have lacked the essence of the grand gesture, of stoicism in the face of shame. One drew into one's shell, to be sure, but the shell must remain there, dignified, stony, never budging an inch, where all Main Street and all Leicester could see it if they chose, although it was better form not to look.

As one got used to the thing it was not so bad. Indeed, as the days went on and the tension relaxed it was almost jolly—rather like being bottled up in a siege or isolated in a country house during a snowstorm. After the telephone wires were disconnected and the plain-clothes policeman went on duty at the iron fence not a soul came near the door; not even from the Pilgrim Trust; and in the ensuing quiet a spirit of mild, chaste hilarity began to run through the house. The five inmates had never been so close to one another as they were in those days. At night, on the second day, William put candles and flowers on the table for dinner and turned off the electric bulbs. There was no birthday cake, but one felt that there ought to be. Just what the connection was it would be difficult to say, but the effect was undeniable.

The plain-clothes policeman, especially, kept up the sense of siege, of dramatic importance. Even Bellsmith used to take mild satisfaction in watching him out by the gate. Sometimes Keefe, in a spirit of gruff, diffident etiquette, would come around from the stables and lean beside him against the iron fence, but every half-hour or so the policeman would come in the front door to get warm, and then he became William's peculiar property. At regular intervals all day long in the silence of the great house, Bellsmith, from his room up-stairs, could hear William's bantering, unofficial tones as he opened the door for the man of the law and then the rumbling, non-committal tones of the latter replying.

For a long time, sitting idly in the hall above. Bellsmith kept wondering what was so strangely familiar about the officer's voice. Then suddenly he realized that the policeman talked in perfect musical "fourths," supremely bass. In his first two words of a sentence the policeman's abysmal tones invariably struck deepest E, then contra A then back to E—exactly the motif of a man tuning a bull fiddle.

Sometimes when he went to the door to admit their guardian. William would playfully keep the huge door partly closed on its big brass chain and cautiously hurl a mock challenge:

"Halt! Who goes there?"

To this the officer would answer (deepest E): "Frinds!" "Pass, frinds!" from William.

The chain would rattle out of its socket, and Bellsmith would hear the two pass down the hall to the servants' dining-room for a cup of tea on William's part and a cup of coffee on the part of the officer—"black and tan," they came to call it. That policeman left a strong impression on William's life. For months afterward, if any question of criminal law or police methods arose, he was always ready with a decisive and authoritative answer.

On Friday night the plain-clothes man appeared in the library, with his hat in his hand and his hair water-brushed, to say that there seemed to be no farther use for his services. On Saturday morning Bellsmith got a bill for his hire.

At intervals all day long Bellsmith rejoiced in that bill. It was such a novel idea—"By one policeman, so much; by one detective, so much more." And policemen came so surprisingly cheap, too. Why would n't it be fun to keep one all the time? He wondered how much a fireman would cost.

The newspapers, night and morning, added the other principal excitement of the day. Bellsmith had intended firmly not even to look at these, but he would have broken William's heart if he had n't. As early as three o'clock in the afternoon William would begin to get nervous, and at half-past three he would creep out to a little drug-store on a parallel avenue behind the house where he could get the evening papers as soon as the bundle was thrown off the street-car. It was probably the only case in the history of the world where a bundle of papers, in a manila wrapping, was daily carried into a drug-store by an English butler in good standing.

Nevertheless the days were long, and as the silent hours began to beget a lonelier feeling, Bellsmith found his mind turning with greater frequency back to the Massapauk and Tommy Knight's birthday party—and the night clerk. It was a sentimental memory, one that he liked to recall, but, like most sentimental memories, this one had acquired its poisoned sting. Why must it always be so—turtle soup and then nausea? Why could n't those things be arranged separately! Why, for instance, could n't the sting come first, say before one was twenty?

The first afternoon was the worst, for reading then offered little consolation. Bellsmith was too nervous to sit still. From lunch-time until the winter shadows began to fall he sat moodily by the upper front windows, until the street outside became cold and drear, until the shoppers in steady procession began to turn up their coat collars and lean forward into the wind, until hard, white little lights, more depressing than the twilight itself, began to flash forth from shop-windows.

About five o'clock, as William began to whistle softly down in the dining-room and as Annie passed through the hall with taper and scepter to light the vestibule gas, Bellsmith found himself edging guiltily toward the telephone in the little room over the front door which had once been a governess-room. The wires were still disconnected, but it would do no harm to look up the number,

MASSAPAUK, Hotel, Priv. Exchg., Center ll00.

For several minutes in the twilight Bellsmith sat staring at that senseless line, and as he stared the letters seemed to assume a personal, individual appearance. He felt himself back in the hot, close air of the Massapauk dining-room, and there came to him a strong scent of violets. Curious, for Miss Marshall had not worn violets. But some one must have.

On that occasion that was as far as he got but, on the following evening, thoughts began to form themselves in his mind of writing a note. He began to word it in his imagination—simple, detached, avoiding all issues:

{{block center|max-width=600px|{{fine block| My dear Miss Marshall:

It is hardly necessary for me to tell you that I regret as much as you must the extremely unfortunate sequel{{bar|2}}}}

But there he was—plunging right into the midst of it.

If Arnold Bellsmith had grown, with years, into a state in which he could stand debating for hours whether to put on his right shoe or his left, whether to read Buskin or Chaucer, it is hardly strange that he was completely uncertain about the tremendous affair which had come on him now; that is, Miss Marshall's part in it; how he felt about her and especially why now he felt this stiffening reluctance to write to her or call her up. Naturally his was a mind to probe into every shade of his own emotions, to attempt to pin them all down and compare them, but he had not yet reached a stage of ruthlessness where such a self-examination could be of much use—not while he remained a Bellsmith.

One might as well, however, be honest, even if Bellsmith was not. Of course he had, very strongly, a feeling that he himself had dragged Miss Marshall into a disgraceful mess—one which the sensitiveness of her professional pride would make only more detestable. "Was seen dining that evening with two young ladies of the company." "The Courier" had put a sneer into those words "young ladies," and Jules, at least, besides the members of the company, knew who was meant. By now, of course, Miss Marshall must have a saner version of the story, from Tommy Knight or the curly-haired stage-manager, but, even at that, Bellsmith could hardly blame her if she was still bitterly angry at him, or contemptuous.

Bellsmith, in fact, almost wished that he could be sure that she was bitterly angry at him. That at least would take the matter out of his hands. The real truth was that he almost liked to believe that idea, put the whole issue on such an obvious plane; for Bellsmith could not wholly deceive himself by the idea that Miss Marshall's possible anger was what kept him away from her.

Try as he would to fight out the idea, and wholly unjust as he knew it to be, there still persisted within him that faint sense of unpleasantness in connection with the whole affair, that shrinking fastidiousness which, for want of a better symbol, he connected in his imagination with that dirty alley leading to the stage-door.

Even to think of Miss Marshall still excited him as the thought of no other human being on earth had ever excited him, but still, there it was! The dirt of the alley even clung to her innocent skirts. This was Bellsmith at his best and his worst, instinctively fine or instinctively contemptible. One can take one's choice. But something within him gripped his arm as in a vise of steel every time he sat down to write that letter or sat down to call on the telephone.

On both occasions, after the futile and frail little fight, he went to the grand piano in the old long drawing-room and played for an hour in the dusk, vaguely remembering snatches from "Eleanor" and building them up into elaborate improvisations. They were far better than the original score of "Eleanor" had ever been, for Bellsmith had not told half the truth to Dr. MacVickar. If he was nothing else he was a fine and profound musician.

After that, on the first evening and on the second, he sat in his library reading the evening paper which William had left there hours before, not reading his own vindication or accusation but furtively seeking out the odd columns of theatrical news. He saw nothing, not even a review of "Eleanor" at this mature date in the two-weeks' engagement, but he painfully read the stereotyped publicity items about little actresses of whom he had never heard and about actors whom he would have detested if he could ever have seen them.

And the evening paper trembled nervously in his hand.