I
They called him Wrong Number in the bank because he happened so often and was so annoying. His presence in the White River National was painful to bookkeepers, tellers and other practical persons connected with this financial Gibraltar because, without having any definite assignment, he was always busy. He was carried on the rolls as a messenger, though he performed none of the duties commonly associated with the vocation, calling or job of a bank messenger. No one assumed responsibility for Wrong Number, not even the Cashier or the First Vice President, and such rights, powers and immunities as he enjoyed were either self-conferred or were derived from the President, Mr. Webster G. Burgess.
Wrong Number’s true appellation as disclosed by the payroll was Clarence E. Tibbotts, and the cynical note-teller averred that the initial stood for Elmer. A small, compact figure, fair hair, combed to onion-skin smoothness, a pinkish face and baby blue eyes—there was nothing in Wrong Number’s appearance to arouse animosity in any but the stoniest heart. Wrong Number was polite, he was unfailingly cheerful, and when called upon to assist in one place or another he responded with alacrity and no one had reason to complain of his efficiency. He could produce a letter from the files quicker than the regular archivist, or he could play upon the adding machine as though it were an instrument of ten strings. No one had ever taught him anything; no one had the slightest intention of teaching him anything, and yet by imperceptible degrees, he, as a free lance, passed through a period of mild tolerance into acceptance as a valued and useful member of the staff. In the Liberty Loan rushes that well-nigh swamped the department, Wrong Number knew the answers to all the questions that were fired through the wickets. Distracted ladies who had lost their receipts for the first payment and timidly reported this fact found Wrong Number patient and helpful. An early fear in the cages that the president had put Wrong Number into the bank as a spy upon the clerical force was dispelled, when it became known that the young man did on several occasions, conceal or connive at concealing some of those slight errors and inadvertencies that happen in the best regulated of banks. Wrong Number was an enigma, an increasing mystery, nor was he without his enjoyment of his associates’ mystification.
Wrong Number’s past, though veiled in mist in the White River National, may here be fully and truthfully disclosed. To understand Wrong Number one must also understand Mr. Webster G. Burgess, his discoverer and patron. In addition to being an astute and successful banker, Mr. Burgess owned a string of horses and sent them over various circuits at the usual seasons, and he owned a stock farm of high repute as may be learned by reference to any of the authoritative stud books. If his discreet connection with the racetrack encouraged the belief that Mr. Burgess was what is vulgarly termed a “sport,” his prize-winning short-horns in conjunction with his generous philanthropies did much to minimize the sin of the racing stable.
Mr. Burgess “took care of his customers,” a heavenly attribute in any banker, and did not harass them unnecessarily. Other bankers in town who passed the plate every Sunday in church and knew nothing of Horse might be suspicious and nervous and even disagreeable in a pinch, but Mr. Burgess’s many admirers believed that he derived from his association with Horse a breadth of vision and an optimism peculiarly grateful to that considerable number of merchants and manufacturers who appreciate a liberal line of credit. Mr. Burgess was sparing of language and his “Yes” and “No” were equally pointed and final. Some of his utterances, such as a warning to the hand-shaking Vice president, “Don’t bring any anemic people into my office,” were widely quoted in business circles. “This is a bank, not the sheriff’s office,” he remarked to a customer who was turning a sharp corner. “I’ve told the boys to renew your notes. Quit sobbing and get back on your job.”
It was by reason of their devotion to Horse that Burgess and Wrong Number met and knew instantly that the fates had ordained the meeting. Wrong Number had grown up in the equine atmosphere of Lexington—the Lexington of the Blue Grass, and his knowledge of the rest of the world was gained from his journeys to race meets with specimens of the horse kind. Actors are not more superstitious than horsemen and from the time he became a volunteer assistant to the stablemen on the big horse farm the superstition gained ground among the cognoscenti that the wings of the Angel of Good Luck had brushed his tow head and that he was a mascot of superior endowment. As he transferred his allegiance from one stable to another luck followed him, and when he picked, one year, as a Derby winner the unlikeliest horse on the card and that horse galloped home an easy winner, weird and uncanny powers were attributed to Wrong Number.
Burgess had found him sitting on an upturned pail in front of the stable that housed “Lord Templeton” at six o’clock of the morning of the day the stallion strode away from a brilliant field and won an enviable prestige for the Burgess stables. Inspired by Wrong Number’s confidence, Burgess had backed “Lord Templeton” far more heavily than he had intended and as a result was enabled to credit a small fortune to his horse account. For four seasons the boy followed the Burgess string and in winter made himself useful on the Burgess farm somewhere north of the Ohio. He showed a genius for acquiring information and was cautious in expressing opinions; he was industrious in an unobtrusive fashion; and he knew about all there is to know about the care and training of horses. Being a prophet he saw the beginning of the end of the Horse Age and sniffed gasoline without resentment, and could take an automobile to pieces and put it together again. Burgess was his ideal of a gentleman, a banker, and a horseman, and he carried his idolatry to the point of imitating his benefactor in manner, dress and speech. Finding that Wrong Number was going into town for a night course in a business college, Burgess paid the bill, and seeing that Wrong Number at twenty-two had outgrown Horse and aspired to a career in finance, Burgess took him into the bank with an injunction to the cashier to “turn him loose in the lot.”
While Mrs. Burgess enjoyed the excitement and flutter of grandstands, her sense of humor was unequal to a full appreciation of the social charm of those gentlemen who live in close proximity to Horse. Their ways and their manners and their dialect did not in fact amuse her, and she entertained an utterly unwarranted suspicion that they were not respectable. It was with the gravest doubts and misgivings that she witnessed the rise of Wrong Number who, after that young gentleman’s transfer to the bank, turned up in the Burgess town house rather frequently and had even adorned her table.
On an occasion Web had wired her from Chicago that he couldn’t get home for a certain charity concert which she had initiated and suggested that she commandeer Wrong Number as an escort; and as no other man of her acquaintance was able or willing to represent the shirking Webster, she did in fact utilize Wrong Number. She was obliged to confess that he had been of the greatest assistance to her and that but for his prompt and vigorous action the programmes, which had not been delivered at the music hall, would never have been recovered from the theatre to which an erring messenger had carried them. Wrong Number, arrayed in evening dress, had handed her in and out of her box and made himself agreeable to three other wives of tired business men who loathed concerts and pleaded important business engagements whenever their peace was menaced by classical music. Mrs. Burgess’s bitterness toward Webster for his unaccountable interest in Wrong Number was abated somewhat by these circumstances though she concealed the fact and berated him for his desertion in an hour of need.
Webster G. Burgess was enormously entertained by his wife’s social and philanthropic enterprises and he was proud of her ability to manage things. Their two children were away at school and at such times as they dined alone at home the table was the freest confessional for her activities. She never understood why Webster evinced so much greater interest and pleasure in her reports of the warring factions than in affairs that moved smoothly under her supreme direction.
“You know, Web,” she began on an evening during the progress of the Great War, after watching her spouse thrust his fork with satisfaction into a pudding she had always found successful in winning him to an amiable mood; “you know, Web, that Mrs. Gurley hasn’t the slightest sense of fitness,—no tact,—no delicacy!”
“You’ve hinted as much before,” said Webster placidly. “Cleaned you up in a club election?”
“Web!” ejaculated Mrs. Burgess disdainfully. “You know perfectly well she was completely snowed under at the Women’s Civic League election. Do you think after all I did to start that movement I’d let such a woman take the presidency away from me? It isn’t that I cared for it; heaven knows I’ve got enough to do without that!”
“Right!” affirmed Burgess readily. “But what’s she put over on you now?”
Mrs. Burgess lifted her head quickly from a scrutiny of the percolator flame.
“Put over! Don’t you think I give her any chance to put anything over! I wouldn’t have her think for a minute that she was in any sense a rival.”
“No; nothing vulgar and common like that,” agreed Webster.
“But that woman’s got the idea that she’s going to entertain all the distinguished people that come here. And the Gurleys have only been here two years and we’ve lived here all our lives! It’s nothing to me, of course, but you know there is a certain dignity in being an old family, even here, and my great grandfather was a pioneer governor, and yours was the first State treasurer and that ought to count and always has counted. And the Gurleys made all their money out of tomatoes and pickles in a few years; and since they came to town they’ve just been forcing themselves everywhere.”
“I’d hardly say that,” commented Burgess. “There’s no stone wall around this town. I was on a committee of the Chamber of Commerce that invited Gurley to move his canning factory here.”
“And after that he was brazen enough to take his account to the Citizen’s!” exclaimed Mrs. Burgess.
“That wasn’t altogether Gurley’s fault, Gertie,” replied Burgess, softly.
“You don’t mean, Web——”
“I mean that we could have had his account if we’d wanted it.”
“Well, I’m glad we’re under no obligations to carry them round.”
“We’re not, if that’s the way you see it. But Mrs. Gurley wears pretty good clothes,” he suggested, meditatively removing the wrapper from his cigar.
“Webster Burgess, you don’t mean——”
“I mean that she’s smartly set up. You’ve got to hand it to her, particularly for hats.”
“You never see what I wear! You haven’t paid the slightest attention to anything I’ve worn for ten years! You ought to be ashamed of yourself! That woman buys all her clothes in New York, every stitch and feather, and they cost five times what I spend! With the war going on, I don’t feel that it’s right for a woman to spread herself on clothes. You know you said yourself we ought to economize, and I discharged Marie and cut down the household bills. Marie was worth the fifty dollars a month I paid her for the cleaner’s bills she saved me.”
Mrs. Burgess was at all times difficult to tease, and Webster was conscious that he had erred grievously in broaching the matter of Mrs. Gurley’s apparel, which had never interested him a particle. He listened humbly as Mrs. Burgess gave a detailed account of her expenditures for raiment for several years, and revealed what she had never meant to tell him, that out of her personal allowance she was caring for eight French orphans in addition to the dozen she had told him about.
“Well, you’re a mighty fine girl, Gertie. You know I think so.”
The tears in Mrs. Burgess’s eyes made necessary some more tangible expression of his affection than this, so he walked round and kissed her, somewhat to the consternation of the butler who at that moment appeared to clear the table.
“As to money,” he continued when they had reached the living-room, “I got rid of some stock I thought was a dead one the other day and I meant to give you a couple of thousand. You may consider it’s yours for clothes or orphans or anything you like.”
She murmured her gratitude as she took up her knitting but he saw that the wound caused by his ungallant reference to Mrs. Gurley’s wardrobe had not been healed by a kiss and two thousand dollars. Gertrude Burgess was a past mistress of the art of extracting from any such situation its fullest potentialities of compensation. And Webster knew as he fumbled the evening newspaper that before he departed for the meeting of the War Chest Committee that demanded his presence downtown at eight o’clock he must make it easy for her to pour out her latest grievances against Mrs. Gurley. He is a poor husband who hasn’t learned the value of the casual approach. To all outward appearances he had forgotten Mrs. Gurley and for that matter Mrs. Burgess as well when, without looking up from the Government estimate of the winter wheat acreage, he remarked with a perfectly-feigned absent air:
“By-the-way, Gertie, you started to say something about that Gurley woman. Been breaking into your fences somewhere?”
“If I thought you would be interested, Web——”
This on both sides was mere routine, a part of the accepted method, the established technique of mollification.
“Of course I want to hear it,” said Webster, throwing the paper down and planting himself at ease before her with his back to the fire.
“I don’t want you to think me unkind or unjust, Web, but there are some things, you know!”
He admitted encouragingly that there were indeed some things and bade her go on.
“Well, what made me very indignant was the way that woman walked off with the Italian countess who was here last week to speak to our Red Cross workers. You know I wired Senator Saybrook to extend an invitation to the Countess to come to our house, and he wrote me that he had called on her at the Italian Embassy and she had accepted; and then when the Countess came and I went to the station to meet her, Mrs. Gurley was there all dressed up and carried her off to her house. For sheer impudence, Web, that beat anything I ever heard of. Every one knows our home is always open and it had been in the papers that we were to entertain the Countess Paretti. It was not only a reflection on me, Web, but on you as well. And of course the poor Countess wasn’t to blame, with all the hurry and confusion at the station, and she didn’t know me from Adam; and Mrs. Gurley simply captured her—it was really a case of the most shameless kidnapping—and hurried her into her limousine and took her right off to her house.”
“Well, after the time you’d spent thinking up Italian dishes for the lady to consume, I should say that the spaghetti was on us,” said Burgess, recalling with relief that the Countess’ failure to honor his home had released him for dinner with a British aviator who had proved to be a very amusing and interesting person. “I meant to ask you how the Gurleys got into the sketch. It was a contemptible thing to do, all right. No wonder you’re bitter about it. I’ll cheerfully punch Gurley’s head if that’ll do any good.”
“What I’ve been thinking about, Web, is this,” said Mrs. Burgess, meditatively. “You know there’s an Illyrian delegation coming to town, a special envoy of some of the highest civil and military officials of poor war-swept Illyria. And I heard this afternoon that the Gurleys mean to carry them all to their house for luncheon when the train arrives Thursday at noon just before Governor Eastman receives them at the statehouse, where there’s to be a big public meeting. The Gurleys have had their old congressman from Taylorville extend the invitation in Washington and of course the Illyrians wouldn’t know, Web.”
“They would not,” said Webster. “The fame of our domestic cuisine probably hasn’t reached Illyria and the delegation would be sure to form a low opinion of Western victualing if they feed at the Gurleys. The Gurleys probably think it a chance to open up a new market for their well-known Eureka brand of catsup in Illyria after the war.”
“Don’t be absurd!” admonished Mrs. Burgess.
“I’m not absurd; I’m indignant,” Webster averred. “Put your cards on the table and let’s have a look. What you want to do, Gertie, is to hand the Gurleys one of their own sour pickles. I sympathize fully with your ambition to retaliate. I’ll go further than that,” he added with a covert glance at the clock; “I’ll see what I can do to turn the trick!”
“I don’t see how it can be done without doing something we can’t stoop to do,” replied Mrs. Burgess with a hopeful quaver in her voice.
“We must do no stooping,” Webster agreed heartily. “It would be far from us to resort to the coarse kidnapping tactics of the Gurleys. And of course you can’t go to the mat with Mrs. Gurley in the trainshed. A rough and tumble scrap right there before the Illyrians would be undignified and give ’em a quaint notion of the social habits of the corn belt. But gently and firmly to guide the Illyrian commissioners to our humble home, throw them a luncheon, show ’em the family album and after the show at the statehouse give ’em a whirl to the art institute, and walk ’em through the Illyrian relief rooms, where a pretty little Illyrian girl dressed in her native costume would hand ’em flowers—that’s the ticket.”
“Oh, Web, you are always so helpful when you want to be! That’s the most beautiful idea about the flowers. And perhaps a group of Illyrian children would do some folk dances! I’m sure the visitors would be deeply touched by that.”
“It would certainly make a hit,” said Webster, feeling that he was once more rehabilitated in his wife’s affections and confidence. “You say the Gurleys’ publicity agent has already gazetted their hospitable designs? Excellent! The more advance work they do on the job the better. We’ll give a jar to the pickles—that’s the game! Did you get that, Gertie? Pickles, a jar of pickles; a jar to the pickle industry?”
“I was thinking,” said Mrs. Burgess, with a far-away look in her eyes, “how charming the folk dances would be and I must see the settlement house superintendent about choosing just the right children. But, Web, is it possible to do this so no one will know?”
“Don’t worry about that,” he assured her. “Arrange your luncheon and do it right. I’ve heard somewhere that a great delicacy in Illyria is broiled grasshoppers, or maybe it’s centipedes. Better look that up to be sure not to poison our faithful ally. You’d better whisper to Mrs. Eastman that you’ll want the Governor, but tell her it’s to meet a prison reformer or a Congo missionary; Eastman is keen on those lines. And ask a few pretty girls and look up the Illyrian religion and get a bishop to suit.”
“But you haven’t told me how you mean to do it, Web. Of course we must be careful——”
“Careful!” repeated Burgess shaking himself into his top coat in the hall door. “My name is discretion. You needn’t worry about that part of it! The whole business will be taken care of; dead or alive you shall have the Illyrians.”