CHAPTER XXIIIBARON COMES HOME ON A BEER-DRAY
Baronwas not at all confident that any of the dramatic editors would want him to write a review of “The Break of Day.” He merely hoped his services might be required. And he was disappointed.
He might have had the assignment for the asking, perhaps; but he felt a hesitancy about asking. He had “fathered” the play, somewhat. He had a personal interest in it.
Moreover, there was one reason why he was glad to be disengaged. Now he could attend the performance as an ordinary spectator, and he could take Bonnie May with him.
The day of the first performance arrived. Baron left the mansion early in the forenoon, more for the purpose of escaping the half-insane Baggot than for any other reason. Baggot didn’t really believe that Baron could help him, perhaps, but his nature demanded that he talk about his play all the time, and Baron listened well.
Bonnie May was not about when Baron left the mansion. He had had no final understanding with her as to whether she was to go to the theatre that night or not. And it was for this reason that he wascoming home in a particularly eager mood, late in the afternoon, to tell her that he was foot-loose, and that she might depend upon him as an escort to the theatre.
He was coming home with much eagerness—and then an accident happened.
He started to alight from the cross-town car before it stopped, and his foot struck a loose fragment of stone, and he lost his balance. Thinking of the matter afterward, he decided that he could not recall an experience more banal, more needless. But he did not reach this conclusion at the time, for the good reason that his head struck the pavement and he lost consciousness. There had been just one instant of sharp agony.
He opened his eyes presently to find himself supported by two men. Every passenger in the crowded car, which had stopped, was staring at him. A crowd of pedestrians had also stopped to see what had happened.
He looked dazedly at the two men who were supporting him. One was the car-conductor, whose eyes expressed fear and disgust. The other man’s appearance was in some degree familiar to Baron. He was gigantic, ruddy, wholly self-possessed.
Baron wondered who this man was, and then, as his gaze roved weakly from point to point, he saw a red beer-dray—and he knew. This was the beer-driver whom he and Bonnie May had watched and discussed one day from the attic window.
“He’s all right,” declared the beer-driver, getting a firmer grip on Baron’s arm.
Baron was greatly relieved to hear that he was “all right.” He had his doubts. The back of his head seemed to be asleep, and there was a horrible pain in his left leg when he tried to touch the pavement with his foot.
“I’ll want your name and address, and the names of witnesses,” said the conductor. He had produced a little note-book.
“You don’t need them,” declared Baron. “It was my own fault. I don’t want to be detained here.”
“But the rules require—” said the conductor.
“Just forget the rules,” advised the beer-driver, who perceived that Baron meant what he said. And in an instant Baron was feeling a new sort of embarrassment, because the ruddy giant of the beer-dray had picked him up in his arms, and was taking long strides in the direction of his dray. “Out of the way!” he ordered, and people obeyed.
Baron had the helpless sensation of one who rides on an elephant. He thought he realized now just what it must be to perform the tasks of a mahout. “Though I don’t seem to need an ankus—yet,” he meditated. Baron had read his Kipling.
“I’m sorry to trouble you,” he said, speaking in a general downward direction.
“You’re not troubling me,” came back the answer.
The driver had reached his dray, and greatly to Baron’s amazement, he put a foot on the hub of the wheel, a disengaged hand on the iron bar surrounding the back of the seat, and had vaulted into a sitting posture, carrying his burden with him.
It seemed to Baron that he had been swung through limitless space, as if he had been a star, held to its place by gravity. He held his hat in place, as he might have done if a cyclone had seized him in its clutch. And with such attention as he could command he was observing the performance of the driver.
“Sit down,” commanded that individual: needlessly, for already Baron was by his side, holding on to the iron bar at the back of the seat, and feeling uncomfortably light and dizzy. His companion looked into his eyes. “A pretty hard jolt,” he said, thrusting a protecting arm about his charge. “Gee-app!” He pulled the reins dexterously with the aid of thumb and little finger, and the horses began to move.
Much to Baron’s surprise, the driver did not ask him where he lived, but quietly turned his horses’ heads in the right direction, adjusting the brake with his foot, and glancing ahead to see that the right of way was clear.
Baron’s mind reverted to Bonnie May for an instant, and he remembered that she had noted how the driver had held his reins with authority, and sat with his great legs planted purposefully before him. Yes, that was precisely right.
“You haven’t asked me where I live,” he remarked, trying to be partly independent of his companion’s support.
“I don’t have to. I know.”
“How?”
“I’ve noticed you before now. You’re one of the Barons.”
The injured man felt flattered. Still, he reflected, the driver might have noticed him for any number of unflattering reasons. For a moment he tried to fathom this thought: Was it an evidence that the driver was simple and stupid, that he had interested himself in the people who lived in his neighborhood? He couldn’t reach a satisfactory conclusion.
“It’s awfully good of you to give me a lift like this,” he remarked. He was beginning to feel a little less shaken and strange.
“Oh, I don’t know. You’d do as much for me, wouldn’t you?”
“Carry you around and lift you up on a high seat?” asked Baron incredulously.
The driver threw back his immense head, revealing a bronzed, bull-like throat from which a sound like thunder came. “Well, no, I guess you wouldn’t dothat,” he admitted.
The horses, with their ears turned alternately toward the driver and pointed ahead, were brought to a halt in front of the mansion.
“Now you sit up here and hold tight, and try to look as if nothing had happened,” directed thedriver. He removed his arm and sprang to the pavement.
“Why?” Baron wanted to know.
“I want to call your old lady out, so she can see you sitting up on the seat.”
Baron frowned. “Why?” he asked again.
“If I’d carry you to the door and ring the bell, she’d have a fit when she came out. She’s pretty high-strung, anyway.” It was as if he were describing a woman of his own household, instead of Baron’s.
“Oh!” responded Baron. He was thinking that it was difficult to know where to expect chivalry in one form or another, and that there were various ways of manifesting it. “I believe you’re right,” he added.
It was Mrs. Baron who came to the door in response to a ring. It is not improbable that she had been looking out of the upper window.
“Your son wants to speak to you,” said the driver, dragging off his German cap and revealing a shock of dishevelled hair.
Mrs. Baron seemed to ignore the man utterly. She stood, pale and rigid, staring at Baron. She comprehended at least one thing: he had driven up to the door of the mansion in a beer-dray.
Then she smiled ominously. “What a quaint idea!” said she, passing the driver and descending the steps. “Of course, this is one of your jokes!”
She paused then. She had swiftly become less assured in her anger.
“I’ve had a mean fall, mother,” said Baron, trying to keep a martyr-like tone out of his voice. “I’m afraid I’ll have to be carried into the house. This man was good enough to bring me home. He was afraid of alarming you. It was his idea that you ought to be notified before he carried me in.”
“Oh, I didn’t understand!” There was swift, childlike remorse in her bearing. “It was kind of you,” she added to the driver, by way of atonement for her rudeness. She regarded him with flickering eyes. She could not help shrinking from the warm, gross bulk of the man, yet she admired him somewhat as a lamb might admire a benevolent bull that has just driven a wolf away.
She went as far as the curb and looked up at Baron critically. Yes, he was seriously injured. Something told her that. A strained expression about his lips and eyes, perhaps, and his attitude.
She turned anxiously to the driver. “Do you suppose you can get him in without any help?” she asked.
“Sure!” The driver derived no joy from her sudden discomfiture—in the sudden levelling of her high spirit to the lowly plane of a fearful mother. Perhaps he did not realize that she had been wrathful toward her son, and rude to him. “You go and push the door open and get things ready.” He approached Baron and held his arms up.
Baron put his hands on the immense fellow’s shoulders, and again he experienced that sensation of being swung through space. In an instant he was being borne up his own front steps.
“Can you carry him up-stairs?” inquired Mrs. Baron dubiously.
“Why not?” And up the stairs the driver proceeded, without the slightest evident effort.
At the top Mrs. Baron led the way into Baron’s old room—now Bonnie May’s. But the driver paused on the threshold, leisurely casting his eyes over the evidences of feminine proprietorship.
“You’d better let me take him to his own room, mother,” he declared decisively. He seemed quite unconscious of bearing a burden. He was woodenly indifferent to Baron’s efforts to get down.
“But that’s up another flight,” was Mrs. Baron’s faltering response.
“That’s all right. You see, I’m used to delivering beer-barrels, and they always find they save trouble if they let me put ’em just where they belong.”
Baron, thinking of the difficulties which might arise when this willing and capable Atlas was gone, quite agreed with the suggestion. “I’m sure he’s right, mother,” he said, “if he doesn’t mind.”
Up another flight Baron was borne, and at the top the driver turned about haltingly, but still seemingly unaware of having his strength taxed, and called down: “You better see about getting adoctor, mother. He’ll need to have himself looked after. I can put him to bed.”
Baron was able to grin weakly at the driver’s simple generalship—and at the fact that his mother obeyed with nervous promptitude. “That way,” said he, pointing, and then he essayed a little joke. “I think you forgot to carry me around the block a time or two before you started up here, didn’t you?” he asked the driver.
“Oh, it’s nothing,” came back the response. “If I had a twelve-year-old boy who didn’t weigh more than you do, I’d drown him.”
With this the attic room was entered, and Baron was placed carefully on a chair. Then his shoes and other garments were removed with caution, and before he quite realized what had happened, he was in bed.
“I wish I had your strength,” he said, feeling that such service as he had received ought to be acknowledged somehow.
“What? Oh, you’d better leave that to me. I need it and you don’t. I guess that’s about the only thing I’ve got.”
“No, it isn’t. You’ve got the right kind of a heart, too.”
This created instant embarrassment. By way of escape from praise, the big fellow whispered loudly: “Say the word and I’ll jump out and get a bucket of beer before the mother gets back.”
“Beer!” exclaimed Baron. He had always associatedbeer with festive occasions, and he was quite sure the present moment was not a festive occasion. “I don’t believe I care for any beer—just now.” He believed he had achieved a commendably diplomatic stroke by adding the two last words. He was prompted to add: “But if you’re sure your horses won’t get restless, I’d be glad to have you stay until mother comes.”
The driver sat down, selecting a straight-backed chair, and holding himself so upright that he made Baron think of a huge, benevolent heathen god. He had dropped his cap to the floor beside him, and his hands were clasped about his capacious stomach. There was now a restful placidity as well as extraordinary power in his presence.
“And it isn’t just your strength that I envy,” said Baron, catching the luminous blue eyes of the driver for an instant, “it’s the generous way you’ve got of treating a fellow as if he were a brother!”
This, too, created great embarrassment. The driver’s face flamed and he struggled to get away from anything resembling praise. “Yes, sir!” he exclaimed, as if he were merely continuing, “that bay horse would stand in his tracks until I came back, even if the owner of the brewery tried to drive him away.”
Baron laughed. “Well, I won’t say anything more to your credit, if you don’t want to hear it,” he said. But after a moment’s silence he went on, more seriously than he had yet spoken, “but dotell me, for my own good, how you manage to feel so well disposed toward people—toward everybody!”
“Who, me? Oh, I just drink a bucket of beer every time I get thirsty, and every time I begin to feel mean I go out and dance with the girls pretty near all night. The bigger they are the easier I swing ’em.” He leaned back and laughed until things in the room shook. A book fell off the table.
Mrs. Baron came in with the doctor then, and it remained for her to make the mistake which Baron had avoided.
“You must let me pay you for your trouble,” she said. “I don’t know what would have happened but for you.”
But the extraordinary creature grasped his cap in both hands and reddened again. “Who, me?” he said. “Oh, no, mother. I make mine flirting with beer-barrels.” He made his exit uneasily. They heard him whistling on the stairs. In the distance the front door closed with a bang.
“What an extraordinary creature!” exclaimed Mrs. Baron.
“Yes,” replied Baron, “I’m afraid he is—extraordinary.”
He was remembering something about the misleading effects of a make-up. Surely this big fellow’s immense body and his rough speech were only a make-up, after all, hiding those qualities which even from the standpoint of a Baron weremost to be sought and cherished! That was what Bonnie May had tried to impress upon him.
Then, with sudden anxiety, Baron turned to his mother. “Where is Bonnie May?” he asked.
“She went away this afternoon,” was the response. Mrs. Baron avoided her son’s eyes. She spoke rather guiltily.
“She went away,” Baron mused disconsolately. “And it was to-night she was so eager to have somebody take her to see ‘The Break of Day.’”