Nothing But the Truth
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“Just get here?” she asked.
“Yes. Anything doing?”
“Not much. It’s been, in fact, rather slow. Mrs. Ralston says so herself. So I am at liberty to make the same remark. Of course we’ve done the usual things, but somehow there seems to be something lacking,” rattled on the lady. “Maybe we need a few more convivial souls to stir things up. Perhaps we’re waiting for some one, real good and lively, to appear upon the scene. Does the description chance to fit you, Mr. Bennett?” Archly.
“I think not,” said gloomy Bob.
“Well, that isn’t what Mrs. Ralston says about you, anyway,” observed the commodore’s spouse.
“What does she say?”
“‘When Bob Bennett’s around, things begin to hum.’ So you see you have a reputation to live up to.”
“I dare say. No doubt I’ll live up to it, all right.”
“It’s really up to you to stir things up.”
“I’ve begun.” Ominously.
“Have you? How lovely!”
This didn’t require an answer, for it wasn’t really a question. A white ball went by them, a very pretty snoop, and pretty soon another lady and a caddy loomed on their range of vision. The lady was thin and spirituelle and she walked by with a stride. You would have said she had taken lessons of a man. She looked neither to the right nor the left. At the moment, she, at any rate, was not sociably inclined. That walk meant business. She wasn’t one of those fussy beginners like the lady Bob was talking with.
“Isn’t that Mrs. Clarence Van Duzen?” asked Bob.
“Yes. She, too, poor dear, has had to desert hubby. Exactions of business! Clarence simply couldn’t get away. You see he’s director of so many things. And poor, dear old Dan! So busy! Every day at the office! So pressed with business.”
“Quite so,” said Bob absently. “I mean – ” He stopped. He knew Dan wasn’t pressed for business and Bob couldn’t utter even the suspicion of an untruth now. “Didn’t exactly mean that!” he mumbled.
The lady regarded him quickly. His manner was just in the least strange. But in a moment she thought no more about it.
“You didn’t happen to see Dan?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“At his office, I suppose?” Dan had written he hadn’t even had time for his club; that it had been just work – work all the time.
“No.”
“Where, then?”
“At the club and some other places.” Reluctantly.
“Other places?” Lightly. Of course she hadn’t really believed quite all Dan had written about that office confinement. “How dreadfully ambiguous!” With a laugh. “What other places?”
Bob began to get uneasy. “Well, we went to a cabaret or two.” No especial harm about that answer.
“Of course,” said the lady. “Why not?”
Bob felt relieved. He didn’t want to make trouble. He was too miserable himself. He trusted that would end the talk and now regarded the neglected ball suggestively.
“And then you went to still some other places?” went on the lady in that same light, unoffended tone.
“Ye-es,” Bob had to admit.
“One of those roof gardens, perhaps, where they have entertainments?” she suggested brightly.
Bob acknowledged they had gone to a roof garden. And again, and more suggestively, he eyed the little white ball. But Mrs. Dan seemed to have forgotten all about it.
“Roof gardens,” she said. “I adore roof gardens. They are such a boon to the people. I told dear Dan to be sure not to miss them. So nice to think of him enjoying himself instead of moping away in a stuffy old office.”
Bob gazed at her suspiciously. But she had such an open face! One of those faces one can’t help trusting. Mrs. Dan was just the homely, plain old-fashioned type. At least, so she seemed. Anyhow, it didn’t much matter so far as Bob was concerned. He had to tell the truth. He hadn’t sought this conversation. It was forced on him. He was only going the “even tenor of his way.” He was, however, rather pleased that Mrs. Dan did seem in some respects different from others of her sex. Bob didn’t, of course, really know much about the sex.
“So you went to the roof garden – just you and Dan,” purred Mrs. Dan.
Bob didn’t answer. He hoped she hadn’t really put that as a question.
“Or were you and Dan alone?” She made it a question now.
“No-a.”
“Who else were along?”
“Dickie – ”
“And – ?”
“Clarence.”
She gazed toward Mrs. Clarence, while a shade of anxiety appeared on Bob’s face. In the distance Mrs. Clarence had paused to contemplate the result of an unusually satisfactory display of skill. Mrs. Dan next glanced sidewise at her caddy, but that young man seemed to have relapsed into a condition of innocuous vacancy. He looked capable of falling asleep standing. Certainly he wasn’t trying to overhear.
“Just you four men!” Mrs. Dan resumed her purring. “Or were you all alone? No ladies along?”
While expecting, of course, the negative direct, she was studying Bob and gleaning what she could, surreptitiously, or by inference. He had an eloquent face which might tell her something his lips refused to reveal. His answer almost took her breath away.
“Ye-es.”
He was sorry, but he had to say it. No way out of it! Mrs. Dan’s jaw fell. What she might have said can only be conjectured, for at this moment, luckily for Bob, there came an interruption.
“Tête-à-têting, instead of teeing!” broke in a jocular voice. The speaker wore ecclesiastical garments; his imposing calves were encased in episcopal gaiters. Mrs. Ralston always liked to dignify her house-parties with a religious touch, and this particular bishop was very popular with her. Bob inwardly blessed the good man for his opportune appearance. He was a ponderous wag.
“Forgive interruption,” he went on, just as if Mrs. Dan who was non-amatory had been engaged in a furious flirtation. “I’ll be hurrying on.”
“Do,” said Mrs. Dan, matching his tone, and concealing any inward exasperation that she might have felt.
“It’s I who will be hurrying on,” interposed Bob quickly. “You see, I’m expected to arrive at the house,” he laughed.
“Looked as if you were having an interesting conversation,” persisted the bishop waggishly.
“And so we were,” assented Mrs. Dan. She could have stamped with vexation, but instead, she forced a smile. The dear tiresome bishop had to be borne.
“Confess you find me de trop?” he went on, shaking a finger at Bob.
“On the contrary,” said Bob.
“Has to say that,” laughed the good man. He did love to poke fun (or what he conceived “fun”) at “fair, fat and forty.” “I suppose you were positively dee-lighted to be interrupted?”
“I was,” returned Bob truthfully.
“Ha! ha!” laughed the bishop.
Bob looked at him. The bishop thought he was joking, just as the hackman had. Of course, no one could say such a thing as that seriously and in the presence of the lady herself. People always didn’t believe truth when they heard it. They thought telling the truth a form of crude humor, and a spark of hope-a very small one – shot through Bob’s brain. Perhaps they would continue to look upon him in the light of a joker. He would be the little joker in the pack of cards and he might yet pull off that “three weeks” without pulling down the house. Only – would Miss Gerald look upon him as a joker? Intuition promptly told him she would not. His thoughts reverted to that last meeting. Think of having told her he didn’t want – His offense grew more awful unto himself every moment. He ceased to remember Mrs. Dan, and saying something, he hardly knew what, Bob walked on.
Miss Gwendoline Gerald was on the big veranda when he reached the house. He would have thanked her humbly and with immense contrition for having transferred his bag and clubs hither, but as he went by, that gracious, stately young lady seemed not to see him. It was as if he had suddenly become invisible. Her face didn’t even change; the proud contour expressed neither contempt nor disdain; the perfectly formed lips didn’t take a more pronounced curve or grow hard.
Bob felt himself shrink. He was like that man in the story book who becomes invisible at times. The fiction man, however, attained this convenient consummation through his own volition. Bob didn’t. She was the magician and he wasn’t even a joker.
He managed to reach the front door without stumbling. A wild desire to attract her attention by asking her if his luggage had arrived safely, he dismissed quickly. It wouldn’t do at all. It might imply a fear she had dumped it out, en route. And if she hadn’t, such an inquiry would only emphasize the fact that she had acted as expressman – or woman – and for him!
He would go to his room at once, he told the footman. He didn’t mind a few moments’ solitude. If so much could happen before his house-party had begun – before he even got into the house – what might he not expect later? In one of the upper halls he encountered the man with the monocle.
“I say!” said this person. “What a jolly coincidence!”
“Think so?” said Bob. He didn’t find anything “jolly” about it. On another occasion, he might have noticed that the eye behind the “window-pane” was rather twinkling, but his perceptions were not particularly keen at the present time.
In the room to which he had been assigned, Bob cast off a few garments. Then he stopped with his shirt partly off. He wondered how Miss Gerald would look the next time he saw her? Like a frozen Hebe, perhaps! Bob removed the shirt and cast it viciously somewhere. Then he selected another shirt – the first that came along, for why should he exercise care to select? It matters little what an invisible man wears. She wouldn’t see the extra stripe or the bigger dot. Stripes couldn’t rescue him from insubstantiability. Colors, too, would make no difference. Pea-green, yellow, or lavender – it was all one. Any old shirt would do. And any old tie!
When he had finished dressing, he didn’t find any further excuse for remaining in his room. He couldn’t consult his desires as to that. He wasn’t asked there to be a hermit. He couldn’t imitate Timon of Athens, Diogenes or any other of those wise old fellows who did the glorious solitude act. Diogenes told the truth, mostly, but he could live in a tub. He didn’t have to participate in house-parties. Whoever invented house-parties, anyhow? They were such uncomfortable “social functions” they must have been invented by the English. Why do people want to get together? Bob could sympathize with Diogenes. Also, he could envy Timon his howling wilderness! But personally he couldn’t even be a Robinson Crusoe. Would there were no other company than clawless crabs and a goat and a parrot! He would not be afraid to tell them the truth.
He had to go down and he did. Nemesis lurked for him below. Had Bob realized what was going to happen he would have skipped back to his room. But, as it was, he assumed a bold front. He even said to himself, “Cheer up; the worst is yet to come.” It was.
CHAPTER V – TRIVIALITIES
Luncheon came and went, but nothing actually tragic happened at it. Bob didn’t make more than a dozen remarks that failed to add to his popularity. He tried to be agreeable, because that was his nature. That “even-tenor-of-his-way” condition made it incumbent on him – yes, made it his sacred duty to be bright and amiable. So it was “Hence, loathed Melancholy!” and a brave endeavor to be as jocund as the poet’s lines! Only those little unfortunate moments – airy preludes to larger misfortunes – had to occur, and just when he would flatter himself he was not doing so badly.
For example, when Mrs. Augustus Ossenreich Vanderpool said: “Don’t you adore dogs, Mr. Bennett?”
“No. I like them.” It became necessary to qualify that. “That is – not the little kind.”
The lady stiffened. Her beribboned and perfumed five-thousand-dollar toy-dogs were the idolized darlings of her heart. The children might be relegated to the nursery but the canines had the run of the boudoir. They rode with her when she went out in state while the French bonne took the children for an airing. “And why are the ‘little kind’ excluded from the realm of your approbation?” observed Mrs. Vanderpool coldly.
It was quite a contract to answer that. Bob wanted to be truthful; not to say too much or too little; only just as much as he was in honor bound to say. “I think people make too much fuss over them,” he answered at last. That reply seemed quite adequate and he trusted the lady would change the subject. But people had a way of not doing what he wanted them to, lately.
“What do you call ‘too much fuss’?” pursued the lady persistently.
Bob explained as best he could. It was rather a thankless task and he floundered a good deal as he went about it. He wasn’t going to be a bit more disagreeable than he could help, only he couldn’t help being as disagreeable as he had to be. The fact that Miss Gwendoline Gerald’s starry eyes were on him with cold curiosity did not improve the lucidity of his explanation. In the midst of it, she to whom he was talking, seemed somehow to detach herself from him, gradually, not pointedly, for he hardly knew just when or how she got away. She seemed just to float off and to attach herself somewhere else – to the bishop or to a certain judge Mrs. Ralston always asked to her house-parties that they might have a judicial as well as an ecclesiastical touch – and Bob’s explanation died on the thin air. He let it die. He didn’t have to speak truth to vacancy.
Then he tangoed, but not with Miss Gwendoline Gerald. He positively dared not approach that young lady. He didn’t tango because he wanted to, but because some one set a big music-box going and he knew he was expected to tango. He did it beautifully and the young lady was charmed. She was a little dark thing, of the clinging variety, and Dickie had gone with her some. Her father owned properties that would go well with Dickie’s – there’d been some talk of consolidation, but it had never come off. Papa was inclined to be stand-offish. Then Dickie began to get attentive to the little dark thing, though nothing had yet come of that either. Bob didn’t own any properties but the little dark thing didn’t mind that. At tangoing, he was a dream. Properties can’t tango.
“You do it so well,” said the little dark thing breathlessly.
“Do I?” murmured Bob, thinking of a stately young goddess, now tangoing with another fellow.
“Don’t you adore it?” went on the little dark thing, nestling as close as was conventional and proper.
“I might,” observed Bob. That was almost as bad as the dog question. He trusted the matter would end there.
She giggled happily. “Maybe you disapprove of modern dancing, Mr. Bennett?”
“That depends,” said Bob gloomily. He meant it depended upon who was “doing the modern” with the object of your fondest affections. If you yourself were engaged in the arduous pastime with said object, you would, naturally harbor no particular objections against said modern tendencies, but if you weren’t? —
Bob tangoed more swiftly. His thoughts were so bitter he wanted to run away from them. The irony of gliding rhythmically and poetically in seeming joyous abandon of movement when his heart weighed a ton! If that heaviness of heart were communicated to his legs, they would in reality be as heavy as those of a deep-sea diver, weighted down for a ten-fathom plunge.
And in thus trying to run away from his thoughts Bob whirled the little dark thing quite madly. He couldn’t dance ungracefully if he tried and the little dark thing had a soul for rhythm. It was as if he were trying to run away with her. He fairly took away her breath. She was a panting little dark thing on his broad breast now, but she didn’t ask him to stop. The music-box ceased to be musical and that brought them to a stop. The eyes of the little dark thing – her name was Dolly – sparkled, and she gazed up at Bob with the respect one of her tender and impressionable years has for a masculine whirlwind.
“You quite sweep one off one’s feet, Mr. Bennett,” she managed to ejaculate.
At that moment Miss Gwendoline passed, a divine bud glowing on either proud cheek. She caught the remark and looked at the maker of it. She noted the sparkle in the eyes. The little dark thing was a wonder with the men. She seemed to possess the knack – only second to Miss Gwendoline, in that line – of converting them into “trailers.” Miss Gwendoline, though, never tried to attain this result. Men became her trailers without any effort on her part, while the little dark thing had to exert herself, but it was agreeable work. She made Bob a trailer now, temporarily. Miss Gwendoline turned her head slightly, with a gleam of surprise to watch him trail. She had noticed that Bob had danced with irresistible and almost pagan abandon. That argued enjoyment.
The little dark thing would “come in” ultimately for hundreds of belching chimneys and glowing furnaces and noisy factories – quite a snug if cacophonous legacy! – and Miss Gwendoline had only that day heard rumors that Bob’s governor had fallen down and hurt himself on the “street.” She, Miss Gwendoline, had not attached much importance to those rumors. People were always having little mishaps in the “street,” and then bobbing up richer than ever.
But now that rumor recurred to her more vividly in the light of Bob’s trailing performance and the mad abandon of his tangoing. Of course, all men are gamblers, or fortune-hunters, or something equally reprehensible, at heart! Tendency of a cynical, selfish and money-grabbing age! Miss Gwendoline was no moralist but she had lived in a wise set, where people keep their eyes open and weigh things for just what they are. Naturally a young man whose governor has gone on the rocks (though only temporarily, perhaps), might think that belching chimneys, though somewhat splotchy on the horizon and unpicturesque to the eye, might be acceptable, in a first-aid-to-the-injured sense. But Bob as a plain, ordinary fortune-hunter? – Somehow the role did not fit him.
Besides, a fortune-hunter would not bruskly and unceremoniously have refused her invitation to ride in the trap. And at the recollection of that affront, Miss Gwendoline’s violet eyes again gleamed, until for sparkles they out-matched those of the little dark thing. However, she held herself too high to be really resentful. It was impossible she should resent anything so incomprehensible, she told herself. That would lend dignity to the offense. Therefore she could only be mildly amused by it. This was, no doubt, a properly lofty attitude, but was it a genuine one? Was she not actually at heart, deeply resentful and dreadfully offended? Pride being one of her marked characteristics, she demanded a great deal and would not accept a little.
The sparkles died from the hard violet eyes. A more tentative expression replaced that other look as her glance now passed meditatively over the dark little thing. The latter had certainly a piquant bizarre attraction. She looked as if she could be very intense, though she was of that clinging-vine variety of young woman. She wore one of those tango gowns which was odd, outre and a bit daring. It went with her personality. At the same time her innocent expression seemed a mute, almost pathetic little appeal to you not to think it too daring.
As Miss Gerald studied the young lady, albeit without seeming to do so and holding her own in a sprightly tango kind of talk, another thought flashed into her mind. Bob might be genuinely and sentimentally smitten. Why not? Men frequently fell in love with the little dark thing, and afterward some of them said she had a “good deal of temperament.” Bob might be on a temperament-investigating quest. At any rate, it was all one to Miss Gerald. Life was a comedy. N’est-ce-pas? What was it Balzac called it? La Comedie Humaine.
Meanwhile, other eyes than Miss Gerald’s were bent upon luckless Bob. Mrs. Dan and Mrs. Clarence looked as if they would like to have a word with him. Mrs. Dan even maneuvered in his direction at the conclusion of the dance while Bob watched her with ill-concealed apprehension. He detected, also, an uncanny interest in Mrs. Clarence’s eyes as that masterful lady eyed him and Mrs. Dan from a distance. Mrs. Dan almost got him when – the saints be praised! – Mrs. Ralston, herself, tripped blithely up and annexed him. For the moment he was safe, but only for the moment.
A reckless desire to end it all surged through Bob’s inmost being. If only his hostess would say something demanding an answer that would incur such disapprobation on her part, he would feel impelled, in the natural order of events, to hasten his departure. Maybe then (and he thrilled at the thought), she might even intimate in her chilliest manner that his immediate departure would be the logical sequence of some truthful spasm she, herself, had forced from him? He couldn’t talk French to Mrs. Ralston now; he was in honor bound not to. He would have to speak right up in the King’s English – or Uncle Sam’s American.
Of course, such a consummation – Bob’s being practically forced to take his departure – was extremely unpleasant and awful to contemplate, yet worse things could happen than that – a whole string of them, one right after another!
However, he had no such luck as to be ordered forthwith off the premises. He didn’t offend Mrs. Ralston at all. That lady was very nice to him (or otherwise, from Bob’s present view-point) and did most of the talking herself. Perhaps she considered that compliment (?) Bob had bestowed upon her at the Waldorf sufficient to excuse him for a while from further undue efforts at flattery. At any rate, she didn’t seem to take it amiss that Bob didn’t say a lot more of equally nice things in that Chesterfieldian manner and with such a perfect French accent.
But he “got in bad” that afternoon with divers and sundry other guests of Mrs. Ralston. Mrs. Augustus O. Vanderpool and Miss Gerald weren’t the only ones who threw cold glances his way, for the faux pas he made – that he had to make – were something dreadful. For example, when some one asked him what he thought of Miss Schermerhorn’s voice, he had to say huskily what was in his mind:
“It is rather too strident, isn’t it?” No sugar-coating the truth! If he had said anything else he would have been compromising with veracity; he would not have spoken the thought born in his brain at the question. Of course, some one repeated what he said to Miss Schermerhorn, who came from one of the oldest families, was tall and angular, and cherished fond illusions, or delusions, that she was an amateur nightingale. The some one who repeated, had to repeat, because Miss Schermerhorn was her dearest friend and confidante. Then Miss Schermerhorn came right up to Bob and asked him if he had said it and he was obliged to answer that he had. What she said, or thought, need not be repeated. She left poor Bob feeling about as big as a caterpillar.
“How very tactful of Mr. Bennett!” was all Miss Gerald said, when Miss Dolly related to her the little incident.
“That’s just what I adore in him!” gushed the temperamental little thing. “He doesn’t seem to be afraid of saying anything to anybody. He’s so delightfully frank!”
“Frank, certainly!” answered Miss Gerald icily.
“Anyhow, he’s a regular tango-king!” murmured Miss Dolly dreamily.
“I’m so glad you approve of him, dear!” said Miss Gerald with an enigmatic smile. Perhaps she implied the temperamental little thing found herself in a class, all by herself, in this regard.
The latter flew over to Bob. If he was so “frank” and ingenuous about Miss Schermerhorn, perhaps he would be equally so with other persons. Miss Dolly asked him if he didn’t think the bishop’s sermons “just too dear?” Bob did not. “Why not?” she persisted. Bob had just been reading The Outside of the Pot. “Why not?” repeated Miss Dolly.
“Antediluvian!” groaned Bob, then turned a fiery red. The bishop, standing on the other side of the doorway, had overheard. Maybe Miss Dolly had known he stood there for she now giggled and fled. Bob wanted to sink through the floor, but he couldn’t.
“So, sir, you think my sermons antediluvian?” said the bishop, with a twinkle of the eye. He never got mad, he was the best old man that way that ever happened.
“Yes, sir,” replied Bob, by rote.
“Thank you,” said the bishop, and rubbed his nose. Then he eyed Bob curiously. “Maybe you’re right,” he said. That made Bob feel awful, but he couldn’t retract. The truth as he saw it! – He felt as if he were chained to the wheel of fate – the truth as he saw it, though the heavens fell!