The Bomb
A servant, entering the library of a Fifth Avenue club, approached me and said: “Mr. Converse telephones he will be here to see you in five minutes. Yes, sir.”
“At this hour!” I exclaimed.
It was three by the clock. But Converse had specious habits. He seldom appeared in the club before midnight. Hence my surprise. Though I little suspected it, I was in for another—for another one yet. But to Converse, so far, at least, as I am concerned, anything and everything was permissible.
I had always known him. We were in the same form at St. Paul’s, in the same corps at Heidelberg. In addition, I discreetly admired his sister, who had long lived abroad, and who but recently had returned here. Moreover, he had of late rather stirred me with inflammatory accounts of Margaret Dayce, a Philadelphia beauty, whom he was trying to win, in the face, too, of another chap, a man named Bundy, who also was in the running.
Naturally, my money was on Converse. But what did he want now, I wondered.
I looked about. The servant had gone. Save for the caryatides of the bookshelves, I was alone, and I took up a paper, an item of which had already absorbed me.
The item concerned Raritan, another old schoolmate. Though I would hardly have known him then, had I met him in a pantry, I could see him, as I first did, a slim, handsome lad, leaning against a table in my room in the upper school at Concord, and talking very agreeably about the Sicilian poets.
That day, when he had gone, I had missed my watch. But as I might have missed it earlier, I had omitted to suspect him. Subsequently, from other rooms, other things evaporated. Finally Raritan left St. Paul’s. For that matter, we all did. One cannot be a schoolboy forever, and more’s the pity. But I continued to hear about Raritan. What I heard was not ingratiating. Now here he was again, accused of forgery, and reported to be in hiding.
“Forgery!” I mentally exclaimed, and marveled a bit that he and I, who had been educated together, should have such different views on the proper use of pen and ink.
These meditations were interrupted. Converse, looking extremely red, and equally fit, was talking rapidly at me.
“Bundy’s got Margaret—or will have, unless I stop them, and I want you to help me. They came on from Philadelphia today, and have already secured the license.”
I jumped up. “Then you are done for. How did you hear?”
“Her mother wired. Bundy simply worked on the poor child’s jealousy.”
“A fruitful soil, was it?”
“Well, she saw me kissing a woman, saw me embracing her, saw her throw herself in my arms.”
I patted a smile. “Rather barefaced and luxurious of you, don’t you think? But how did she come to behold this idyl?”
“In a moving picture.”
Incredulously I stared. “But—”
Converse cut me short. “You remember when I went to meet the Lusitania? There the picture people got me and Sarah, too.”
“Your sister!”
“Yes, my sister.”
“But then—”
“Yes, of course. When Margaret learns the truth it will be rather a bomb. But meanwhile—”
I picked up my hat. “Meanwhile it is all too bad to be false.”
“It is worse. Margaret has never seen my sister. Bundy has. Bundy knows Sarah—however slightly. But he knows her. In spite of which, yesterday he took Margaret to see this confounded picture. There and then she threw me over, and he got her to promise to marry him here today.”
“I don’t wish him many happy returns of it, then.”
Absently, Converse nodded. “It is human to lose in death those for whom we care. It is inhuman to lose them in life.” He paused, looked grimly down, and determinedly up. “I can’t lose her, I shan’t, I won’t!”
“Bravo!” I cried. “The moving picture shows, and, having shown, moves on. Let’s be going. By the way, where is she?”
“Headed, her mother said, either for the Waldorf or the St. Regis. They got here at two. It is three now. It will have taken them an hour to get the license. We may be in time.”
“We have got to be,” I answered. “This club is midway between the two hotels. I will go to the one, you go to the other.”
In speaking I put my hat on, and made with Converse for the stair. “I think I know Bundy,” I added. “He was at St. Paul’s, wasn’t he? Apropos! That was an engaging tale about Raritan. Have you seen him lately?”
For a moment, Converse, occupied with other things, did not answer. Presently and indifferently he nodded. “The last time I saw the brute was in a Fifth Avenue bus. He was completely bald and presumed to complain to me about it. I told him it was unimportant what he had on his head, the important thing was what he had in it.”
But now we had reached the street, where, for club purposes, motors stood. “Take a cab,” Converse resumed. “I will take one, too.” As he spoke, he motioned to a chauffeur.
I motioned to another, and called at him: “If they are not at the St. Regis, join me at the Waldorf.”
From the taxi which he was then entering he called back at me: “If they are at the Waldorf, explode the bomb.”
“The bomb?” I queried mentally, as the car started, but at once I got it, and I fell to thinking, and rather platitudinously I fear, of the dynamic qualities of truth. At the Waldorf, though, I found new reflections.
The lobby, saturated with tobacco and electricity, full of people, of hurrying servants, of tourists eying one another hostilely, or with indifference, resounded with the call of pages, the click of the typewriter, the hum of
