Bess, the great van, became a willing mistress, and from her he derived a sort of unconfessed consolation; took to driving her at top speed whenever conditions permitted: when traffic was light and fast and Bess was empty; literally hurled her, roaring like a fire truck, along Seventh Avenue’s asphalt; and when opportunity presented, took her over to the Speedway for a rattling headlong romp. On such occasions if Jinx and Bubber were present, they would exchange wise looks and apprehensive grimaces, and Bubber invited annihilation one day when, on narrowly missing a coal truck, he asserted that it just wasn’t good arithmetic for no three men to commit suicide over one woman.
But the zest with which Shine drove Bess did not give him sufficient relief, left him still unsatisfied, like the deep but ineffectual breathing of a man suffering acute air-hunger. Hence his whole behavior took on a reckless vehemence, and whether he laughed or cursed, worked, drank, or gambled, he did so to excess.
Ordinarily he used two belts around an upright piano to be hoisted; two belts surrounding the treacherous instrument near either lateral end, a cable joining either belt to a central metal ring. When the tackle was hooked into this ring and raised, the two short cables became the legs of an isosceles triangle, the apex of which was the ring and the base the top of the piano. This arrangement was absolutely proof against tilting and slipping.
Now however he decided, jes’ for meanness, to dispense with approximately half of this apparatus and used only a single belt about the middle of the piano. It pleased him then to stand off and dare the blam-blam thing to slip.
Ordinarily when he drank it was with a modicum of caution. No sense getting drunk down. The way to lick liquor was to hit it and run—no man was lined with copper. Drop in on one of these new young doctors that had to write “scrips” to make it; or go to one of these drugstores that had prescriptions already written and could sell you the best rye right off at five or six bucks a pint. On thirty-five bucks you wouldn’t be able to do that but once a week, and so you’d be pretty sure to take it easy.
Now, however, he told himself he could drink anything anybody else could drink, and drink as much of it, too; sought out the venders of synthetic corn and gin and drowned himself in the pale stuff; and cursed to find that he awoke the mornings afterward without even so much as a headache.
Ordinarily, when he played blackjack in Pat’s back room, he played with a definite system: started with the minimum stake, doubled three rounds, then passed. Above all he never hit seventeen.
Now he played with no regard for rules or the laws of chance; doubled often five times straight, “stopped” the bank at every opportunity, and invariably hit a soft seventeen and usually a hard one as well.
None of these devices satisfied. Not a piano slipped, none of the liquor proved to be poison, and at the end of a week, his blackjack stood him eighty-six berries to the good.
In the midst of these exaggerated reflexes, an order came to the office of Isaacs’ Transportation Company for the removal of one load of valuable furniture from Fred Merrit’s country house to his residence on Court Avenue. Old man Isaacs was off duty, ill abed with a bad heart, otherwise Shine would have had the boss appoint a new foreman. Finding this impossible, he told himself that no girl’s presence was going to make him dodge a job any damn how.
There was, nevertheless, an unmistakable reluctance in his piloting of Bess this morning. Merrit’s place was only a dozen miles north of New York, but it took Bess two hours to get there. Once arrived, there was much palaver about the best way to negotiate the terrain.
“This place jes’ sprawls all over this hill,” observed Bubber. “Looks like a flock o’ hencoops. How we go’n’ git up yonder?”
The question was settled by uproarious but careful navigation of a steep side road which led to a plateau behind the flock of hencoops. Here they were greeted by Mrs. Arabella Fuller, who began at once to wheeze interminable directions.
Eventually, in spite of all Mrs. Fuller said, the load was on, each piece swaddled partly in quilting, and partly in that lady’s verbiage, which seemed to hover about it long after Bess was headed back townward:
“Yes—that goes—that’s a picture of his mother—the onliest one he’s got, so be awful careful. I know he’d die if he lost it. Take care o’ that if you lose all the rest. Now be careful—you’ll never care how you handle things and them table laigs’ll snap off if you sneeze at ’em—that’s a genuine redwood table and you know them’s expensive—look out f’ that vase!—the way y’all handle things, anybody’d know they wasn’t yourn. Chile, that vase cost mo’ ’n yo’ foot—if it break yo’ foot yo’ foot’ll git well, but if yo’ foot break it—yes—them’s chests and y’ needn’t think they ain’t valuable and that you can scrape ’em up bad as you please jes’ because they ain’t go not paint on ’em and got the hinges on th’ outside; they come from Siam or some them places Mr. Fred was where the folks is all colored but won’t admit it and you carry ’em by puttin’ two broomsticks through the sides, but deed I ain’t got no broomsticks f’ y’all to scratch up and break—they have their own kings and queens and ev’rything jes’ like in the Bible, only I say colored folks ain’t got no business tryin’ to act white ’cause it always gets ’em into trouble—where’s that other boy—that big one come with y’all? Why don’t he turn in and help?—he’s big enough—ought to be ’shamed o’ hisse’f lettin’
