Saratoga Trunk (27 page)

“That Nellie Leonard is an actress, they say she is going to be famous because that James Buchanan Brady has lots of money to put into plays for her. She is taking singing lessons every day. . . . Bet on Champagne Charlie in the third race, don’t let them talk you out of it. I know what I know. . . . That girl in the cottages with Sam Lamar isn’t his daughter at all, she’s his mistress. . . . President of the United States Arthur is coming to the United States Hotel next week. . . . They are going to have a great ball. . . . The Forosini has a new riding horse, pure white. He is trained to bow his head and swing toward her when she mounts the block. . . . Gould is going to buy the Manhattan Elevated Company. He is trying to ruin them so he can get it cheap. I listened at the keyhole when he was talking. . . . Kaka is teaching Creole cooking to Mrs. Lewis at the Club House, and Kaka is playing the roulette wheel from the kitchen. The waiters place her money for her. She won seventy-five dollars last night. They’re afraid to keep any out for themselves because they know she is a witch. . . . The old lady who is the mother of that Van Steed is coming to Saratoga. She doesn’t like you. . . . Tonight Mrs. Porcelain is going to wear a pink dress, tulle, with rosebuds. . . .”

He knew everything. His sources of news were devious but infallible. Bellboys, chambermaids, waiters, grooms, bartenders, faro dealers, stable hands, jockeys, trainers, prostitutes all brought him tidbits and spices with which to flavor the
pot-au-feu
which was forever stewing in his great domed skull. When he slipped into the hotel front lobby (where he was not permitted), the Negro boys swarmed around him, their faces gashed with anticipatory grins. He postured for them, he danced, he told droll dirty stories, he fabricated tremendous gargantuan lies. For the chambermaids he seemed to have a kind of fascination that was at once unwholesome and maternal. At the track the stablemen and even the jockeys admitted that his knowledge of horseflesh was uncanny.

Now he began his campaign. He wanted Maroon to enter Alamo. He begged to be allowed to ride him. Dawn daily found him at the track. He cajoled, begged, bribed, pleaded undl Maroon, trainer, stable-boys, all were worn down. He took the horse into his charge, bit by bit. Soon he was riding him daily in the early-morning track work. Crouched over the neck of the beautiful two-year-old he looked like a tiny bedizened monkey.

“Let me ride him, Mr. Clint. Let me race him; I promise you he will win. I swear it. Perhaps not first, but we will not shame you, Alamo and I. Think how chic it will be, your own horse to race at Saratoga . . . Miss Clio, speak for me. Speak for me!”

He was like a thwarted lover pleading that they intercede with a mistress. It was difficult to tell whether he was motivated by his slavish admiration for Maroon, his doglike devotion to Clio, or his worship of the spirited animal.

In the beginning Maroon had laughed indulgendy at the dwarf’s pleadings as one treats a child who cries for the moon.

“Listen at him! You’d be a sorry figure and so would Alamo, trailing along at the end of the field like a yearling strayed from the herd.”

Cupide turned to Clio. “Mad’moiselle, tell him how in France I rode in all the most famous races. Tell him—”

“What a lie!” Clio retorted.

Maroon roared good-naturedly. “Get going, Cupide, before I take a boot to you. Why, Alamo’s a big critter; he’d likely turn his head if you were up there on his back, racing, and eat you for a fly.”

“I’ve mounted him every day. You know this!” The little man was near to tears. His barrel-like chest was heaving. “I have the strength of a giant.” He clenched his fists, he made the muscles bulge in the tight sleeves of his uniform.

“Git, Scat! Drag it out of here!”

Suddenly the little man began to shake all over as with a chill. His popeyes searched the room wildly. With a bound he stood before the dreary little fireplace, he seized the iron poker, took it in his two tiny hands and bent it into a circle as though it were a willow twig. As suddenly, then, he threw it, rattling, to the floor, burst into tears and ran from the room.

Maroon, staring after him, shook his handsome head in bewilderment. “How come I ever got mixed up with a hystericky outfit like you folks I’m damned if I know! Why, say, that midget’s downright dangerous. If he was mine I’d sure enough tan him good. Did you see what he just did there! Why—say!”

Unreasonably, then, Clio turned about-face and sided with Cupide. “He’s wonderful with horses. You yourself have seen that. He can ride anything. You are jealous because Alamo loves him more than you.”

“God A’mighty!” shouted Maroon. “Let the sorry scoundrel ride him then. Serve him right if he gets throwed and killed. Only don’t blame me.” He stamped from the room as irate as a humdrum husband.

Cupide was not yet finished. He knew power when he saw it; he had not listened at keyholes in vain. Straight as his little bandy legs would take him he ran to the room where power resided. It was napping time for the feminine guests of the United States Hotel—that hour which stretched, a desert waste, when the heavy midday meal was in the process of digestion and the three o’clock Broadway carriage parade had not yet begun.

Smardy, peremptorily, he rapped at the door of a third-floor suite. There was no answer. He rapped again.

“Go away!” bellowed the voice of Mrs. Coventry Bellop. “I’m sleeping.”

Rat-a-tat-tat, went the knuckles. Then again. Silence within the room. Rat-a-tat-tat. To a mind keyed to plots and petty conspiracies the peremptory knocking spelled exigency. A key turned, the door was opened, Mrs. Bellop, a huge shapeless mass in a rumpled muslin wrapper, peered out into the hall, saw nothing, then, feeling a tweak at her skirts, looked down in amazement over the shelf of her own tremendous bust to see the dny figure hovering in the neighborhood of her be-ruffled knees.

“Good God!” she boomed. “You gave me a start. What are you doing down there?”

“I must talk to you.” He laid one finger alongside his nose like a midget in a pantomime. Perhaps he had, in fact, seen this gesture of secrecy in some puppet show and with his gift of mimicry was unconsciously using it now.

She stood a moment, staring down at him. Then, without a word, she stood aside to let him enter. Accustomed to the fastidious neatness of Clio Dulaine’s apartment, he looked about Mrs. Bellop’s chamber with considerable distaste. A cluttered place in which chairs, tables, shelf were littered with a burden of odds and ends of every description. The froglike eyes of the little man saw everything, made a mental note of all they saw. Garments, letters, papers, half-smoked stubs of very small black cigars; food, gloves, wilted flowers, a hairbrush full of combings; stockings, a cockatoo in a cage, a fat wheezing pug dog whose resemblance to Cupide was striking.

“What do you want?” demanded the forthright Mrs. Bellop. “Who sent you?”

He put his hat in his hand, the polite and well-trained groom, but his tone was that of a plotter who knows an accomplice when he sees one.

“No one sent me. I came.”

“What for? Nothing good, I’ll be bound.”

He looked pained at this. “Would you like to make a thousand dollars?”

“Get out of here!” said Mrs. Bellop.

He put up his little hand, palm out, almost peremptorily. “You need only say one word to Mad’moiselle—to Mrs. De Chanfret, I mean. And spend fifty dollars. You have fifty dollars?”

“Get out of here!” Mrs. Bellop said again. But halfheartedly. It was plain that her interest was at least piqued.

“Madam Bellop,” he began, earnestly, “I am a great and famous jockey.”

“Likely story.”

“It is true. Look at me. Imagine my featherweight on a good horse, with my hands of iron. Listen. I am serious. I want to ride Alamo. You know—Monsieur Clint’s horse. If I ride him I shall win.”

“Ride him then. What d’you mean, rousing me out of my sleep! What’s behind all this twaddle? Quick, or I’ll have you thrown out of the hotel!”

Yet storm as she would, the sad eyes, the sardonic mouth, the stunted body commanded her interest, held her attention. He spoke simply, briefly, like one who is himself so convinced that he feels he will have no trouble convincing another.

“I will ride Alamo. I will win. That I can assure you.”

“Bosh! How?”

“I will win. Will you tell Mad’moiselle that it would be a good thing for Monsieur Clint and for her? To have a winning horse is very
chic.
All my life I have wanted to ride a winning horse. But all my life. It is my dream.”

“Look here,” interrupted Mrs. Bellop, testily. “Sometimes you talk like a nigger bootblack and sometimes you talk like a character in a book. I can’t make it out. For that matter, I don’t know why I’m wasting time on you. Get along, now, before I call the front office.” But her tone lacked conviction.

The midget could not be serious long. He shook himself like a litde dog, he grinned engagingly, the big front teeth, spaced wide apart, were friendly as a white picket fence. Suddenly he was all Negro. “Please tell her like I say, Miz Bellop. She do what you say. Looky, effen you ain’t got fifty, why, I put it in for you, you win a thousand dollars. Only”—his face now was a mask of cunning—”only you mustn’t speak a breathin’ word to any folks about it. Just you and Mr. Clint and Miss Clio.”

“Dirty work if I ever saw it,” said the forthright Mrs. Bellop. “She send you?”

“No
ma’am!”

“He send you?”

“No
ma’am!”

It was impossible to doubt his sincerity. Mrs. Bellop possessed the spirit of adventure; and she was not a lady to forego a chance at gain. Still she hesitated, pondering. Her fine eyes, shrewd, intelligent, searched the froglike face upturned to her. Honor among thieves. Desperate, he played his last card. “No call to feel backward about the fifty, Miz Bellop. No call at all. I can spare it and you can pay me back when you win. I stole it.”

At this engaging example of candor she burst into rollicking laughter, her bosom heaved, her sides shook. “Run along, you imp! I’ve a mind to do it, just out of curiosity. If you’re lying—”

Always dramatic, he finished the sentence for her. “You can kill me.”

“I know worse ways than that to punish you. Get, now! Shoo!”

But he must have final assurance. “You the boss of this here whole Saratoga. You going to do it, Miz Bellop? H’m?”

“I might.” But he saw that he had won.

It was almost too simple. Sophie Bellop, bidding her usual train of attendants to remain where they were, waddled into the paddock at next day’s race, alone. Her sharp eye had caught sight of Clint and Clio, but even if she had not seen them she need only have followed the turning of heads, like the waving of grain in the wind, as they passed through any crowd. Accustomed though Saratoga was to the dramatic, there always was a stir when these two handsome and compelling creatures appeared together.

Mrs. Coventry Bellop wasted no time on finesse. Hers was an almost brutal directness of method, always. “Good morning, Countess! How are you, Colonel Maroon!” She scarcely paused to hear their courteous return of greeting. “What’s become of that horse of yours, Colonel?”

“He’s here, Ma’am. In the stables. Eating his pretty head off.”

“Race him, why don’t you? Isn’t that what a race horse is for?”

A light leaped in Clio’s eyes. So! she thought. Cupide. She said, aloud, “I’ve been urging Colonel Maroon to enter him, Mrs. Bellop.”

“Certainly,” said the blunt Sophie, brisk and businesslike as any bookie. “Get that little dwarf imp of yours to ride him, he’s just made for a jockey. I’ve watched him with horses; he’s born to ride. Saratoga needs a new sensation. Come on. Surprise them.”

The man’s mind sensed intrigue; he looked from the girl’s sparkling face to the purposeful countenance of the powerful woman. “What’re you two girls cooking up!” His caressing laugh was sheer flattery, as always, but his eyes were unsmiling. He had a feeling of helplessness, of being propelled into something by wills stronger than his. This very morning Kaka had fixed him with her hypnotic eye and had murmured, “I had a dream last night, Mr. Clint. I saw a horse and it seemed like the horse belonged to you and yet it didn’t. And the jockey, he was Cupide and yet it wasn’t, riding him. And it was like a race, and at the same time it wasn’t exactly a race, neither.”

“M’m,” Clint cut in, laconically. “You’d better change your voodoo powers, Kaka.”

Gently, persistently, they wore down his resistance.

“It would give you great
réclame “
Clio said. “The New York papers.”

An unknown horse. An unknown jockey. They ordered—rather, Clio ordered—for the diminutive figure a suit of silks in the historic colors of the stormy Texas flag. Kakaracou, when the shining suit arrived, embroidered the Lone Star on his sleeve.

“All right, all right,” Maroon had said. “You’ll make a laughing stock of me, but maybe it’ll teach you a lesson.”

But he knew Cupide; he had watched Kaka’s secret impassive face. He had taken his own precautions the night before the race.

In the sitting room of Clio’s apartment the big Texan had called Cupide to him. The little man had trotted over to him and the Texan, lolling in an armchair, had locked the midget firmly between his steel-muscled horseman’s knees.

“Now listen at what I’m fixing to say, Cupide. I’m not just passin’ the time of day. You’re riding Alamo tomorrow. You haven’t a Chinaman’s chance to win, but you might bring him in fourth or even third, if you’re smart. But if I hear you’ve been too smart, you might as well light out somewheres right from the stables and never come back. I reckon you know what I mean. Don’t you touch another horse, hear me! Don’t you even show your ugly litde face in another stall, only Alamo’s. If I hear of any monkeyshines I’ll tie you to the bedpost here and I’ll pay Kaka to do such voodoo over you that—”

“No!” Cupide screamed. “I promise. I promise.”

“All right. Now fork over, pronto, before I shake it out of you. Everything you got on you, because I’m going to search you, later, down to your toenails. Don’t figure to throw off on me, because I’m watching you.”