Deering was at the point of tears. Hood was a fool, and he wished to tell him so, but the words stuck in his throat.
“We move eastward toward the Connecticut border, Cassowary,” Hood ordered and pushed Deering into the machine.
Hood was as merry as the morning itself, and talked ceaselessly as they rolled through the country, occasionally bidding Cassowary slow down and give heed to his discourse. The chauffeur listened with a grin, glancing guardedly at Deering, who stared grimly ahead with an unlighted cigar in his mouth. He was not to be disturbed in his meditations upon the blackness of the world by the idiotic prattle of a madman. For half an hour Hood had been describing his adventures with a Dublin University man, whose humor he pronounced the keenest and most satisfying he had ever known. He had gathered from this person an immense fund of lore relating to Irish superstitions.
“He left me just when I had learned to love him,” Hood concluded mournfully. “Became fascinated with a patent-medicine faker we struck at a county fair in Indiana. He was so tickled over the way the long-haired doctor played the banjo and jollied the crowd that he attached himself to his caravan. That Irishman was one of the most agreeable men to be in jail with that I ever knew; even hardened murderers would cotton to him. That spire over there must be Addington. The inn is nothing to boast of, but we’d better tackle it.”
His gayety at luncheon once more won Deering to a cheerier view of his destiny. Hood called for the proprietor and lectured him roundly for offering canned-blueberry pie. The fact that blueberries were out of season made no difference to the outraged Hood; pie produced from a can was a gross imposition. He cited legal decisions covering such cases and intimated that he might bring proceedings. As the innkeeper strode angrily away an elderly woman at a neighboring table addressed the dining-room on the miserable incompetence of the pastry-cooks of these later times, winding up by thanking Hood heartily for his protest. She was from Boston, she announced, and the declining intellectual life of that city she attributed to the deterioration of its pie.
Hood rose and gravely replied in a speech of five minutes, much to the delight of two girls at the old lady’s table. Hood wrote his name on the menu card, and bade the giggling waitress hand it to the lady from Boston. Her young companions conferred for a moment, and then sent back a card on which appeared these names neatly pencilled:
| Maid Marian The Queen of Sheba The Duchess of Suffolk (Mass.) |
“My dear boy,” Hood remarked to Deering after he had bowed elaborately to the trio, “I tell you the whole world’s caught step with us! That lady and her two nieces, or granddaughters as the case may be, are under the spell, just as you and I are and Cassowary and your Pierrette and Babette of the bungalow. If only you could yield yourself to the May spirit, how happy we might be! Just think of Cassowary; worth a million dollars and eating his lunch with the chauffeurs somewhere below stairs and picking up much information that he will impart to me later! What a bully world this would be if all mankind followed my system: stupid conventions all broken-down; the god of mirth holding his sides as he contemplates the world at play! You may be sure that old lady is a stickler for the proprieties when she’s at home; widow of a bishop most likely. Those girls have been carefully reared, you can see that, but full of the spirit of mischief. The moment I tackled that stupid innkeeper about his monstrous pie they felt the drawing of the mystic tie that binds us together with silken cords. Very likely they, like us, are in search of adventure, and if our own affairs were less urgent I should certainly cultivate their further acquaintance.”
The lady who called herself the Duchess of Suffolk (Mass.) was undoubtedly a person of consequence and the possessor of a delightful humor. Deering assumed that she and her companions were abroad upon a lark of some kind and were enjoying themselves tremendously. Hood’s spell renewed its grip upon him. It occurred to him that the whole world might have been touched with the May madness, and that the old order of things had passed forever. It seemed ages since he had watched the ticker in his father’s office. As they sat smoking on the veranda the Duchess of Suffolk, the Queen of Sheba, and Maid Marian came out and entered a big car. The old lady bowed with dignity as the car moved off; the girls waved their hands.
“Perfect!” Hood muttered as he returned their salutations. “We may never meet again in this world, but the memory of this encounter will abide with me forever.”