The Sin of Monsieur Pettipon Part 37

Weakly Tidbury said he couldn't.

"And say," went on Mr. Hydeman, lowering his voice to a confidential whisper, "I'll have a flask of hip oil on me."

"Hip oil?"

"Sure. Diamond juice."

"Diamond juice?"

"Aw, hooch. For me and the gal."

"The girl?" quavered Tidbury.

"Say," demanded Mr. Hydeman, "did you think I was going to take a hippopotamus with me?"

Tidbury's small face was pathetic.

"You don't know what you're missing, Tid," Mr. Hydeman rattled on. "It's a real naughty party. Those costumes! Oh, bebe." Mr. Hydeman rolled his eyes toward the roof and blew thither a kiss. "Last year there was a Cleopatra there and she didn't have a thing on her but a pair of----"

"The cashier's waiting for these figures," mumbled Mr. Epps. "I've got to go to him."

He heard Hydeman's sniggle of laughter behind him.

That evening the desperate Tidbury met Martha Ritter as she was leaving the hat company's building.

"May I come to see you to-night?" he asked, trying not to stammer, and hoping his ears were not as red as they felt. "There's a nice band concert in Prospect Park and I thought----"

Martha Ritter c.o.c.ked her head to one side and smiled mysteriously.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Epps," she said coolly, "but I have an engagement."

"You--have--an--engagement?" He repeated the words as if they were a prison sentence.

"Yes."

"Where?"

"Oh, it's a masquerade." She smiled, her head on one side.

"Whom are you going with?" he blurted; he was trembling.

"That would be telling," she laughed. "Well, good night, Mr. Epps. I must hurry home and get my costume on. I'm going as a gypsy."

And she disappeared into the maw of the Subway.

A masquerade! In gypsy costume! Tidbury was struck by the lightning of complete realization; he understood Hydeman's leer now. Feebly he leaned against a lamp-post until his numbed brain could recover from the impact. Then he committed a sin. Deliberately he kicked the lamp-post a vicious kick.

"Darn it all," he muttered through clenched teeth. "Yes, gosh darn it all!"

Then he went wearily to his boarding house. Morosely he ate of Mrs.

Kelty's boiled beef and bread pudding; morosely he sat in his lonely stall of a bedroom and glowered at a hole in the red carpet.

"I'm too quiet. Too darn quiet," he kept saying to himself in a sort of litany. "Yes, too gosh darn quiet."

And when he thought of Martha, sweet simple Martha, and so short a time ago his Martha, at the Pagan Rout with Hydeman, surrounded by indecorous and no doubt inebriate denizens of Greenwich Village, his head all but burst. That she was lost, and, most poignant thought of all, lost to him, kept beating in upon his brain. He moaned.

Suddenly his spine straightened with a terrible resolve. His small guileless face was set in lines of stern decision. He leaped from his chair, dived under his bra.s.s bed, rummaged in his trunk and fished up twenty-five hard-saved dollars in a sock.

Clapping his hat on his head in emulation of the tilt of Mr. Hydeman's hat Tidbury issued forth. In the hall he pa.s.sed Mrs. Kelty, who regarded him with some surprise.

"You're not going out, Mr. Epps?" she asked. "Why, it's after nine!"

"I am going out, Mrs. Kelty," announced Tidbury Epps.

"Back soon?"

"I may never come back," he answered hollowly.

"Sakes alive! Where are you going?"

"I am going," said Tidbury Epps firmly, "to the devil."

And he strode into the night.

--2

Never having gone to the devil before, Mr. Epps was somewhat perplexed in mind as to the direction he should take. But a moment's reflection convinced him that Greenwich Village was the most promising place for such a pilgrimage. He had never been there before; he had been afraid to go there. Startling stories of the gay profligacy rampant in that angle of old New York had reached his ears. He believed firmly that if the devil has any headquarters in New York they are somewhere below Fourteenth Street and west of Washington Square.

Mr. Epps debouched from a bus in Washington Square and started westward along West Fourth Street with the cautious but determined tread of an explorer penetrating a trackless and cannibal-infested jungle. He glanced apprehensively to right and left, his eyes wide for the sight of painted sirens, his ears agape for gusts of ribald merriment. At each corner he paused expectantly, antic.i.p.ating that he might come upon a delirious party of art students gamboling about a model. He traversed two blocks without seeing so much as a smock; what he did see was an ancient man of Italian derivation carrying a bag of charcoal on his head, and a stout woman wheeling twins stuffed uncomfortably into a single-seater gocart, and a number of nondescript humans who from their sedate air might well have been Brooklyn funeral directors. He owned, after a bit, to a certain sense of disappointment. Going to the devil was more of a ch.o.r.e than he had fancied.

As he trekked ever westward a sound at length smote his dilated ears and made him catch his breath. It was issuing from a dim-lit bas.e.m.e.nt, and was filtering through batik curtains stenciled with strange, smeary beasts. He had heard the wild, dissipated notes of a mechanical piano. A lurid but somewhat inexpertly lettered sign above the bas.e.m.e.nt door read,

YE AMIABLE OYSTER

REFRESHMINTS AT ALL HRS.

With a newborn boldness Tidbury Epps thrust open the door and entered.

No shower of confetti, no popping of corks, no rousing stein song greeted him. Save for the industrious piano the place seemed empty.

However, by the feeble beams that came from the lights, bandaged in batik like so many sore thumbs, he discerned a mountainous matron behind a cash register, engaged in tatting.

"Where's everybody?" he asked of her.

"Oh, things will liven up after a bit," she yawned.

Tidbury sat at a small bright blue table and scanned a card affixed to the wall.

Angel's Ambrosia ........ $0.50 Horse's Neck ............ .60 Devil's Delight ......... .70 Dry Martini ............. .50 Very dry Martini ........ .60 Very, very dry Martini .. .90 Champagne Sizzle ........ .75