# The Liver Bank

From Harper's Magazine, 1920
THE LIVER BANK
MARIE MANNING
JOHN WARREN FORBES had "passed." He had been snatched from high-school at the end of his second year and sent to "prep." where he had been submitted at all hours to painful inoculations of learning that he might qualify for a certain scholarship long identified with his family.
The inoculations were, of course, not continuous; there were respites for food, exercise, and pure loafing, but to the victim the process seemed as protracted as removing the tail from a fox-terrier, joint by joint. However, it was all over now, and "Forbsy" had absorbed a sufficient number of the germs of wisdom to react very creditably on paper, in the way of examinations.
His grandmother, a bit heady over the achievement of her descendant, presented him with ten dollars. The unexpected influx of wealth loomed to the prep. boy a forever-and-ever talisman proof against the incursions of want.
Doubtless he would have known more about the gilded pastimes of his age and station—movies, the thrilling abomination of having girls about, the joy of cultivating hair sleekly brushed back—had it not been for two factors in his life: adenoids and Aunt Belle. Adenoids kept him from school for two years, during which time Aunt Belle forced, pruned, lopped, and fertilized his mentality till he was able to leave prep. quite ready for the scholarship, a queer, sensitive, hobbledehoy made up chiefly of elbows and raw sensibilities.
He had gone to prep. the runt of the establishment, but something had pulled him out a foot, and discrepancies were always occurring between the tops of his shoes and the hems of his trousers. There were other changes, too, besides those of his long-distance hands and feet. He had gone to Doctor Sawyer's, hating girls as accessories to the torture of dancing-school; he couldn't bear their tee-heeing giggling and the way they nibbled candy for hours after he had bolted his. He hated them still, but somehow or other the mystery of the troublesome sex haunted him. He listened endlessly to other fellows talk, fellows who had sisters and actually lived in the same houses with these sphinxes.
There were no girls in the Forbes household; mother, father, John Warren, and a six-year-old brother named Maddox made up the family. Maddox had acquired a gusty temper because so many ladies told him he looked like "a little angel" and wanted to kiss him. Otherwise he had a refractory liver, a source at once of importance and income. The money received by the angelic tornado for drinking hot water, eating spinach, and sometimes taking castor-oil, he was in the habit of salting away in a padlocked stronghold known as "the liver bank." John Warren never saw his brother's bank without a defrauded feeling. One had a good workaday liver that ran up no doctor's bills, and what came of it? Nothing!
There was a girl named Margery Hunton whom John Warren had known well before he went to prep., and he decided when he came home that he hated her harder than he did the other girls because he was more curious and thought more about her than he did about the rest. When Margery was not around in the flesh, her image was.
He could not order it home as he did Maddox or his faithful dog, because it paid no attention lo these objurgations; and and he could not fight it, as he would have fought a boy who dogged his footsteps. In his helplessness he had to let this image of Margery Hunton tag along, but he hated her for collusion.
He would walk down the street blocks away from her home, scowling, and wondering how he appeared to her, and before he knew it something had assumed control of his legs and was walking him past her door. And ten times to one there would be the hateful thing! He would scowl and despise her inferiority, but she usually called out something pleasant and his hate melted. “It's a wonder she doesn't know what a pest she is!” he would say to himself a dozen times a day. At other times he would be vitally interested in the way she wrinkled up her nose when she laughed, and other “foolishness” that was exclusively hers. And so he would forget, for the time being, that she was a pest and be furiously angry when other boys joined them, and ask, savagely, “why they butted in." Still, he was sure he hated her.
About this time he began to brush his hair straight back, because most of the boys who "butted in" did so. The fervor of the devotee immediately obsessed him; the object of his tenderest solicitude, the child of his fancy, his pride, and his despair, became his hair. He watered it morning, noon, and night; he watered it in betweentimes; he made sudden excursions to the bathroom in its interests—like Isabella and her pot of basil, he might have watered it with his tears. He had certain secret rites, performed alone in his room at night with an old silk stocking of his mother's, but his locks always fell like a house of cards the moment the water dried out of them. On the contrary, the hair of the "butters-in" stood up, wet or dry. In his predicament John Warren even considered mucilage.
He had been home from prep. about a week when week when Margery Hunton called him upon the ’phone one day, told him she was giving a lawn party and wanted him to come. His mother, who was sewing in the room where the telephone was, said something to the seamstress, and he noticed their faces had the gravity of repressed smiles.
He turned on his mother fiercely. "I don't want to go to that old party."
"Why did you say you would, dear?"
"That Margery Hunton took me up so quick— What do they do at lawn parties, mamma?"
"Wander about, and eat ice-cream after a while."
" 'N' you play the mandolin 'n' wear white pants." This from the floor where Maddox, prone on his stomach, read the adventures of "The Seven Goslings."
"Bring down your white trousers and Mrs. Simpson will let down the hems and face them."
There was something horrible in the thought of having the seamstress do this thing. Why couldn't they be sent to a tailor like any other man's? But he knew the suggestion would be vetoed. It took a good deal of feminine strategy to get him ready for the lawn party; he had outgrown all last summer's clothes and the garments that were to replace them had not yet been selected. The extent to which his mother and the seamstress were concerned in his toilette seemed nothing short of disgraceful, considering his age and size. Mrs. Simpson let down the hems of his white trousers and constructed "cuffs" to make them longer; the effect was creditable enough, but he loathed the means. His mother bought him a chromatic tie and a negligé shirt; Mrs. Simpson performed a second operation on the sleeves of his blue-serge coat, and he became a summer man with ten dollars in his pocket.
On the night of the lawn party the neighborhood was made aware of the festivities by nine Japanese lanterns suspended from the back porch at Margery's; one took fire and then there were eight, like the little Indians of gate memory. Besides the lanterns there were four girls and four boys, and, true to the prediction of Maddox, not only one mandolin, but two. White trousers also prevailed.
Margery introduced John Warren as Mr. Forbes and he thus became formally acquainted with Mr. Harris, who, as "Bones," fought him to a black-eye finish before he went to prep.
And there was a girl named Annabelle, who lisped, and another with a lumpy forehead reputed to be intellectual—they called her Miss Davis and she was some sort of a relative of Margery's. The fourth girl was Bessie Chiswell, who had once lived next door to the Forbeses. She was pretty and dignified, but John Warren's perverse fancy clung to the time her mother had spanked her with a slipper. He had witnessed the tragedy from his bedroom window, which afforded a view of the Chiswells' back porch.
Mr. Brown and Mr. Harris went through a sort of pussy-wants-a-corner game to avoid sitting next the intellectual Miss Davis. Margery, as hostess, was devoting herself to an older man, who must have been every day of nineteen or twenty; they called him Mr. Urquhart. While John Warren planned how he could sit next to the hated Margery, Miss Davis fell upon him and asked him about school; she wanted to know if he was "through" Cicero.
He told her no, and she told him not to worry—Cicero was a bore, but Horace was fascinating.
He added Miss Davis to his hate album and stood up for his old friend Cicero. She told him she intended to write problem plays and that she "lived in a dream world where the seeming was the real."
Forbes told himself he did not give a darn where she lived. Two perspiring colored men carried in an ice-cream freezer through the back gate—the porch faced that way.
Mr. Harris, who had secured Bessie, and Mr. Brown, the lisping Annabelle, now began to tune their mandolins and play shivery-sounding songs with a more or less shivery technique. The cook and the two colored men got into an altercation about the placing of the freezer, the honors going to the cook.
John Warren, stealing a look at Margery, made up his mind she was "inscrutable." He had acquired the word lately and it lodged in his vocabulary like a fish bone in the throat. But Margery, sitting in the glow of a Japanese lantern, talking to the middle-aged Urquhart, now appealed to him as alone worthy of the epithet. He felt the thrill of a Columbus or a Balboa in applying the term to her. "Inscrutable, inscrutable," he murmured to himself, and his feeling for her changed: he no longer hated her; in some indefinable way she had contributed to his esteem.
Beside him, on the slat bench, Miss Davis seemed to be running an intellectual Marathon all her own. Without turning a hair, she took a long jump from Omar to Bernard Shaw. She threw the hammer straight through Zola and the school of French realists. Without perceptible heaving, she ran through three centuries and proclaimed O. Henry the intellectual descendant of Kit Marlowe. And the more she pitched and tossed great names about, the more John Warren hated. Sometimes he felt she was making them up—the half he had never heard of before. At such times he took comfort in contemplating the inscrutable one on the adjoining bench.
The amiable tinklings of Mr. Brown and Mr. Harris assumed new purpose. Mr. Urquhart was blowing smoke rings with magnificent technique—he had not even thought it necessary to pass his cigarette-case to any of the other men. A heartening rattle of spoons and plates was evident from the kitchen, and, true to the prophecy of his mother, pink ice-cream appeared.
Mr. Urquhart brought Miss Davis a plate of ice-cream, almost forcibly displacing John Warren, who sat beside her. And, with a baffled feeling, the prep. boy wondered if there was more in that kind of talk than he had imagined.
Miss Davis and Mr. Urquhart began to discuss an evening they had spent at the Cambridge. In the words of its own unblushing advertisement, the Cambridge was "the most exclusive hotel in town and was prepared to cater to the most exclusive patronage."
"The orchestra was extraordinary—for a hotel," Miss Davis condescended.
"And the eats! Oh, boy!" Mr. Urquhart became as a little child.
"The open-air ball-room in the court made dancing so comfortable." The woman was human—she danced.
"And the 'peach Melba,'" dreamily recalled Mr. Urquhart. "Oh, boy!"
"Some cabaret people from New York were really excellent. You've all seen Polonitzka dance, of course?" Miss Davis encouraged her young friends. But no, not one of them had seen the famous Russian dance. A hush of shame and inexperience made them all dumb, while Miss Davis and Mr. Urquhart flung wide the banner of their cosmopolitanism. Margery was no longer inscrutable; she was a wide-eyed little girl who listened to these wonders with an open mouth.
The honking of an automobile in the street below arrested the recital of these glories. Miss Davis and Mr. Urquhart, it seemed, were going on to more mature festivities at the country club; they made their farewells and honked away, taking all the joy of the lawn party with them. They had made it a flat and childish affair, in which the tinkling of the two mandolins was drowned in the far-off glories of the Cambridge orchestra and Polonitzka's dancing. The pink ice-cream suddenly became a wretched understudy for the glories of peach Melba.
Mr. Harris then produced his trump card in the way of news—"Urquhart and Miss Davis were engaged, and she was seven years older than he."
Margery sighed, "It mist be splendid to go to the Cambridge and see Polonitzka dance."
There was no human envy in her tone nor hope of such achievement, only a sigh for the unattainable. And, though the affianced pair had not remained long, they had wrecked the party as completely as if they had taken crowbars and axes to the work of demolition.
"That was Turkish tobacco he smoked," Mr. Brown remarked to Mr. Harris. "I know the smell."
Mr. Harris made no comment—he was doing something to his mandolin; but for this tinkling the party had the hush of a funeral.
In a flash John Warren Forbes remembered something which imparted an almost superhuman sense of power; he remembered the ten-dollar bill his grandmother had given him for passing his examinations. To make sure he was not dreaming, he put his hand in his pocket. It closed over something crisp. Yes, the wealth of a Monte Cristo was his. The gift of his grandmother could command an Arabian Night entertainment at the Cambridge Hotel. His face flushed, his hands grew clammy as he pumped out:
"What's the matter with you coming to the Cambridge with me, night after next, 'n' see Polonitzka dance?"
There were no takers among the lawn party to this invitation; it was regarded as a witticism of questionable taste.
Mr. Brown, still tuning his mandolin, uttered a derisive, "Sure!"
John Warren, feeling every inch a prince, sprang to his feet, fully expecting a counter-display of enthusiasm on the part of his friends.
"Say, wha's the matter with you people? Don't you want to go to the Cambridge?"
The wild improbability of such a figure entertaining at the Cambridge seemed evident. Excitement had laid low the upstanding locks; they hung a demoralized "bang." The tie had escaped coat anchorage and hung wild and free as an insurrectionary flag.
Messrs. Brown and Harris wondered how a gentleman could joke at his own and his friends' poverty in the presence of ladies.
Their attitude affronted the prince, who was having a hard time remembering he was a gentleman in long white trousers attending a lawn party. He wanted to be debonair, to take them to the Cambridge as if such a thing might have been habitual, but their attitude goaded him into the detestable brag of a fifth-grade boy. Reaching into his pocket, he displayed his grandmother's gift and was immediately overcome by remembering the vulgarity of such a thing.
But the lawn party was, apparently, less concerned with gentility than Forbsy, who was promptly overwhelmed with noisy enthusiasm. He hadn't been joking; he actually meant it. Immediately they decided what a splendid fellow he was, even if his hair would never stand, nor his tie stay in place!
Their joyous anticipations of the Cambridge attracted the attention of Margery's mother, who, with the valiant assistance of the Encyclopedia Britannica, was composing a club paper on "Social Customs of the Early Phœnicians." Her mind submerged in the late festivities of Tyre and Sidon, Mrs. Hunton grasped vaguely that John Warren's grandmother had given him a present for passing his examinations, which he generously proposed spending in taking his young friends to a movie, or something of the sort. She gave her immediate consent and hastened back to the Phœnicians, leaving the early social customs of the Americans to proceed unchallenged.
Reaction—chill and deadly—laid hold of John Warren next morning; he awakened with a feeling that all was not well. It dogged him during breakfast, curtailing his customary supply of flannel-cakes and prompting the family to ask him questions which were a disgrace to one of his age. After almost forcibly ejecting his mother and grandmother from the room, he succeeded in achieving a tête-à-tête with his father, and very subtly, as he thought, led the conversation in the direction of the Cambridge, winding up with:
"How much would it cost to eat there—say dinner?"
His father's trained eye appraised the fallen hair, obtrusive wrists, ankles, outgrown clothes, and general hobbledehoy aspect of his older son, and concluded his first suspicions were unfounded—the idea was too preposterous.
"About five dollars a plate, if one knows how to order well."
"Do you have to eat dinner to see Polonitzka dance?"
"You pay about four times the price of everything and they throw in the Russian lady and her gyrations. If you're thinking of entertaining, take a vegetarian." His parent departed, chuckling over the idea.
At the end of an hour, one looking over John Warren's shoulder would have seen four sheets of foolscap covered with strings of names beginning Margery, Bessie, Annabelle, Harris, Brown, Self, and then followed problems in division, division, division—long and short—with the sum of ten dollars unfailingly as the dividend.
He flung the paper aside and walked out. Wretchedness dogged his footsteps, following him into "Prince's cut-price drug-store," where he went to refresh his sinking spirits with a "banana split."
He went home and prowled from room to room, like a strange cat, finally seating himself alongside his mother. He inquired if people ever invited other people to dinner, then told them not to come, if they weren't sick or dead or anything?
"Which is supposed to be sick or dead, the host or the guests?"
John Warren brushed the melancholy locks from his eyes. "S'pose every one's perfec'ly well, but the man who's givin' the dinner just changes his mind and tells them not to come. Could that be done, mamma?"
"No gentleman would act that way."
"It would be against a gentleman's honor to tell them to stay home?"
"Code, I expect you mean. But what on earth are you bothering your head about such things for? Are you contemplating a dinner party?" And his mother laughed, even as his father had done.
He went to his own room and again began his calculations regarding six dinners at five dollars a head—if one knew how to order well—the whole to be subtracted from a ten-dollar bill. By mid-afternoon he had decided to eat nothing at his dinner party, which would reduce the gross total five dollars; this would still leave him fifteen dollars short.
A chill despair that localized itself in the pit of his stomach took possession of him. He confided to his hate album his grandmother for presenting him with the root of all evil, Miss Davis and Mr. Urquhart for inspiring him to this folly, and his young friends for their eagerness in taking him up so quickly. And, lastly, made of his own countenance the frontispiece of the hate album for being a "simp." Any other boy in the world would have known that ten dollars was nothing to take a bunch like that to the Cambridge. He was a "simp" and deserved his fate. As a gentleman he could not tell his guests to stay home, as an honest man he could not pay for the entertainment to which he had invited them; in either case his plight was contemptible.
No desperate expedients for raising the sum of fifteen dollars occurred to him; the amount was too colossal; as well try to raise the national debt. He had lived too long in a world apart, a world dominated by adenoids and Aunt Belle's cramming, to have any knowledge of the expedients of youth. The good lady had talked a good deal about honor and being a gentleman, and not falling back in his studies because adenoids had kept him out of school, but she had neglected finance and human nature, so that John Warren knew less about being a boy than his brother Maddox, aged six.
With every hour his panic grew, and finally crystallized into the thought of running away from home; in blacker moods, suicide seemed the only solution. He would have cheerfully welcomed arrest, a sudden attack of smallpox, a broken leg—anything that would have saved him from his party at the Cambridge the following evening.
By eleven o'clock, when the house had quieted down and he was supposed to be asleep in his room, he decided on flight, with perhaps suicide as a tragic finale. But before this step could be taken there was work to be done, letters to be written, and final disposition to be made of certain cherished effects. His first letter was to his mother and there was no difficulty about its composition; it required no literary effort, his mother being well acquainted with his seamiest side. He wrote:
Dear Mamma,—When you get this I shall be gone. I hope you will excuse my absence, but circumstances over which I have no control compel me to go away. It is a question of honor that makes me go; no gentleman could stay and still be a gentleman. Also it would not be honest to stay. I am leaving my knife for father. Maddox can have my monkey-wrench and you can have my fountain-pen to remember me by. Don't worry over me mamma, and I thank you for being so nice to me always. With best wishes for the family's success,
Your Aff't son, John Warren Forbes.
Then he grimly hooked his legs around those of his chair, preparatory to the great literary composition of his life, his farewell letter to Margery. The first dragon to confront him was the proper method of beginning. In every-day life he called her Margery, but was that proper for a life-and-death letter? He took counsel with himself, gravely and soberly, and wrote as a series of possibilities, "Dear Miss Margery, Dear Miss Hunton, Miss Hunton, Dear Madame—Honored Miss Hunton." He condemned them all with wanton destruction of stationery and a murmured accompaniment of "rot, rot, rotten!"
How did a man write to a girl whom he was never going to see again? The letter must be very formal and distant. It must be Dear Madame or just plain Madame. He decided in favor of plain Madame as more befitting the tragic occasion. His first attempt ran:
Madame,—If I could have died on some lonesome battle-field—
He stopped and considered. But was a battle-field lonesome? It would be bloody, glorious, gruesome perhaps—but it would not be lonesome. He considered substituting bloody or gruesome, but rejected both in favor of glorious, and began again:
Madame,—If I had died on some glorious battle-field, I would have been worthy of your friendship.
This was rotten. He put his head on one side pathetically, like a melancholy bird. It was bad enough to have to go away for your honor without having to worry over literary composition. Then that splendid phrase he was so fond of came to his relief:
But circumstances over which I have no control compel me to go far away. I cannot explain; a question of honor leaves me no other choice. Good-by.
Doubt overcame him; the letter was too short and also lacking in lofty sentiments. Memory again pointed the way. Doctor Sawyer at prep, was addicted to concluding his homilies with:
And may you be blest with such happiness as is compatible with steadfast principles.
Without realizing the tepid quality of this wish, he filched the phrase and concluded his letter:
I am, madame,
Yours very truly, John Warren Forbes.
An exhilarating relief at having done the thing made him almost cheerful. He reviewed his situation. The boys would talk about him and speculate over the mystery that led him to go away—and perhaps take his promising young life—and Margery would ask, more than all the rest, "why had he done it?"
There was rich comfort in this, and the picture of him supplying a perpetual mystery to the gang was not without its thrill. But it was a sad picture, that of a young hero wandering off into the world, perhaps to die, and doing it because he could not redeem the pledge his generous young heart had prompted him to offer. The thought evoked tears small and trickly at first, followed late by a more fortissimo accompaniment. But it was the sonorous nose-blowing that aroused to utter wakefulness little Maddox, sleeping in the next room.
Maddox heard, and with the ear of a connoisseur recognized the sounds. Tears were all right for him, but the thought of his hero brother reduced to tears was appalling. Accordingly, Maddox, the faithful, cast about for consolation that could be offered to a boy of John Warren's advanced age. Naturally it was epicurean; great indeed must be his brother's woe if it could not be lifted by news of pop-overs and strawberry jam for breakfast.
"Say, John Warren, c'm on to bed; we're goin' to have pop-overs 'n' strawberry jam for breakfast."
For a second the stricken boy's spirits soared like the upward dart of a fighting-plane, then fell like a plane with a broken wing. Strawberry jam and pop-overs were, not for him, nor breakfast, nor to-morrow. Again he was overcome by the cruel anticipation of having to go away and maybe die for his honor. It was bad enough in any case, but to be obliged to make this dark and melancholy exit the morning before strawberry jam and pop-overs was the last straw. The tears that the doomed hero thought inaudible became a series of hoarse, jerking sniffs.
Maddox, being wholly free from stoicism, abandoned his bed and crept to his stricken hero.
"What 'n heck 're you buttin' in here for? Go to bed—go to sleep—go to thunder!"
But Maddox only took a harder grip on the matting with his bare feet. He knew his brother's troubles were financial—the endless figuring told him that—and there began to work in the brain of the child capitalist benevolent projects, for Maddox was a moneyed man. The liver bank, already referred to, was no childish affair fed with the grudging pennies of grown-ups. It was a squat institution literally bursting with tainted money, representing, as it did, a shocking system of barter and exchange between the angel child and his mother. The liver bank was a scandal; any one who has sat ten minutes in a mothers' congress could have told you the iniquity of paying a child money for eating what was good for it and taking an occasional dose of medicine. But the liver bank was a fact.
The staggering gift of this institution Maddox now offered to his brother, offered it freely, handsomely, and with no conditions, saying merely, "You take it, J'n War'n—I don't want it."
Here at last was the friend in need—the despised little brother who had been teased, patronized, and ordered about ruthlessly. The young gentleman who contemplated entertaining at the leading hotel suddenly felt as if he were wearing a tight collar—a collar that invisible fingers were pulling. The poor, despised little kid had offered his bank—dang it! Was a man of his age going to slop over again?
"You take it, J'n War'n; 'twon't take me long to get more, not with my liver."
The big brother picked up the little one and hugged him, as he hugged his dog Major sometimes, but as he hadn't hugged a fellow-creature since he had set up to be a man and put on "long pants."
"Kid, you're a brick! I'll take it for a loan, and I'll work like the deuce till every penny is paid back. I'm going to keep people's lawns in order and water their grass. Gee! kid, yo're some little brother!"
To Maddox the hearty enthusiasm of his hero and his immediate zest in life, now that he did not have to go away or die for his honor, was reward enough. John Warren was almost a god to Maddox; to sacrifice to him was a privilege. What was a liver bank between such friends—what was a liver bank at all when one possessed the talisman of such a liver?
On the night of the festivity a pale young man with a damp and slicked-back hair, feet and hands that jerked, seemingly under the control of an outside influence, led his guests down that valley of palms, gilt, and staring eyes that the ambitious town enjoyed calling "peacock alley." As he proceeded his face burned fiery, and the automatic hands and feet appeared to have been left on some arctic shore.
And when he had run the gamut of this trial by eyes, a fresh terror assailed him. Perhaps they would think his party too young to be let in. Just inside the door loomed the head waiter, like an executioner. Would he expel them before all those people?
He stood before the executioner, a pitifully young cockerel awaiting the fall of the ax. "Six, sir?" inquired the head waiter, without batting an eye. He presented six menu cards in French. Their troubles began. None of the diners-out, it happened, had "taken" French; the boys "took" Latin and the girls would not take a foreign language till next year.
The barmecidal list began with, Hors-d'œuvre and continued bewilderingly, "canapé d' anchois, canapé de homard, timbales à la cardinal," and so on to the bitter end of the mysteries under that head. The sub-division classified "Potages" continued bafflingly elusive, nor was there any ray of understanding with "Poissons," which conveyed sinister intimations. Like soldiers fighting in the dark, they battled their way through Relevés, Entrées, Rôtis, Salades, Frappés, Gâteaux, without recognizing friend or foe.
By this time twelve minutes had passed, and their waiter went to another table. Margery then recognized the solitary word "bœuf," and, though beef was not appetizing on such a hot night, she immediately decided in favor of it. In sheer despair, Annabelle ordered the unknown quantity "Écrevisse." John Warren again reviewed the list and ordered the first item, "canapé de caviar." Mr. Brown took "potage Mongol" on account of friendly associations with the name. He once owned a compound dog whose too obvious antecedents resulted in the name of "Mongol." And, while he suspected no connection between the two, the name in that gulf of the unknown was heartening.
Bessie, employing her native tongue, asked for a ham sandwich, and Mr. Harris said, "Same for me." The waiter seemed a bit puzzled by what might be called the chronological sequence of the various orders.
"Shall I serve them all at the same time, sir?" he inquired.
They consulted, and, deciding to stand or fall together, ordered simultaneous service. A colored 'bus-boy gave them bread, butter, and ice-water, which they devoured; again he supplied them; again they ate ravenously; the process of supplying and despatching bread, butter, and water continued—in its simplicity it suggested mailing letters. They were less afraid of the 'bus-boy than of the waiter. John Warren asked him when Polonitzka would dance.
"De gues'es most in gineral eats on twell ha'f pas' ten or 'leben, den she dances."
Panic ensued. They would never be able to get enough words off the menu card to keep them going till that time. Meantime the waiter arrived with their order. Margery's beef was almost quiveringly underdone; she helped herself to a sprig of parsley and a spoonful of gravy. "Canapé de caviar" appeared to be an arrangement of bird-shot on a round of toast. But it was Annabelle's choice which contributed the surprise and amusement of the feast. The cover of the dish, on being removed, disclosed scarlet insects, resembling tiny lobsters. Annabelle could not even persuade herself to eat the shrubbery with which they were decorated.
The 'bus-boy hung around, friendly and attentive; he gave Annabelle more rolls and she mailed them. John Warren ate his bird-shot, and the two patrons of the ham sandwich ate their orders greedily, then took to the shrubbery. Still every one was desperately hungry, in spite of the constant mailing of bread, butter, and ice-water due to the friendly co-operation of the 'bus-boy. No one had the courage, after Annabelle's experience, to again try the lottery of the bill of fare, where a nice, tempting word like "écrevisse" was apt to come back to you in the shape of little red grasshoppers.
Presently Margery threw up her head like an impatient young pony. "I wish people would stop staring at this table; every time I look up some one is smiling at us."
"Same here!" echoed Mr. Brown and Mr. Harris.
"Isn't it awful," Margery spoke from the depths of an intensely practical nature, "to have to pay for raw meat, little red grasshoppers, 'n' things like that, when we could have a nice table at Prince's cut-price drug-store and have lovely things like 'banana split' and 'marshmallow delight' and 'Chocolate Tower of Babel'?"
"Oh, boy!" murmured Messrs. Harris and Brown in chorus.
"What do you all say about passin' up this Polonitzka dame and going to Prince's for banana splits?" inquired the host.
"Sounds all right to me!" "Second the motion!" "Banana split every time!" were some of the enthusiastic exclamations. So Forbsy paid the bill, tipped the waiter like a man of the world, tipped the friendly 'bus-boy, and they left the splendors of the Cambridge.
"S'pose you go to Prince's and get a table and order the banana splits. I'm going home and get my brother Maddox."
This sudden enthusiasm for the superfluous child seemed strange to the diners-out, who recalled Maddox chiefly as a small boy chronically being sent home by his older brother.
It was evident to the three girls, when John Warren arrived with the Angel Child, a few minutes later, that he had been kidnapped from his slumbers and that his mother had been no party to the enterprise. A lack of women's editing was perfectly apparent to the three pairs of feminine eyes. No single button had found its mate in the way of a button-hole.
But these discrepancies had no effect on the little brother, who was enjoying the exultation of a small country on terms of intimacy with a great and powerful one—besides, he loved the great country. So, drunk with power over his new ally, Maddox brazenly ordered "Chocolate Tower of Babel." This structure had minarets of marshmallow, rose windows of cherries, a moat of chocolate sauce, a drawbridge of lady-fingers—and his mother had never let her darling get nearer to one of these liver-wrecking confections than the street side of Prince's plate-glass window.
The Angel Child without a qualm picked up the doubtful drug-store spoon—his things at home were sterilized—and dug into that pyramid of concentrated self-indulgence, asking, casually:
"How long d'jew think it will take me to get 'nother bank started, J'n War'n?"
And John Warren, not dreaming he prophesied, answered, "No time at all, kid."
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1945, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 78 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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