Turnabout

by Thorne Smith

  “Men,” resumed Mr. Gibber, “brevity is the breath of conviction, terseness the bone, and briskness the blood.”

  He interrupted himself at this point to jot down a note about his last utterance. It was good, he thought. Good enough for that book he was writing, that sensational book showing how Christianity had been handicapped and its rapid spread retarded because the Nationwide Advertising Agency had not been in existence during the time of Christ. His note finished, Mr. Gibber fixed the table with a threatening eye.

  “Now listen to me,” he said slowly and distinctly. “I want more punch in your copy. I want more hooks and”—he pawed the air as if sifting it for the right word—“I want more pith.”

  Mr. Gibber’s last want almost finished Tim Willows. He fixed the man with round, incredulous eyes and asked in his blandest manner: “You want more what, sir?”

  Mr. Gibber hesitated, then faced the situation like a man.

  “I said pith,” he replied with painful distinctness. “I want more pith. I must have more pith.”

  “You mean the stuff that goes into helmets?” Tim continued innocently.

  Mr. Gibber’s thoughts were somewhat confused. Tim’s unexpected question had thrown him off his stride.

  “What do you mean?” demanded Gibber gropingly. “Only heads go into helmets.”

  “I know,” said Tim. “Only heads should go into helmets, but lots of things could go into them, things like pith and all.”

  “How should I know what goes into helmets?” asked the exasperated Mr. Gibber. “Why should I care what goes into helmets?”

  “Oh, of course,” replied Tim in a hurt voice. “I didn’t know you felt so strongly on the subject. Let’s say no more about helmets.”

  “I don’t know why anything was said about them in the first place,” said Mr. Gibber, striving to control himself.

  “It was in connection with the word ‘pith,’” observed Tim helpfully. “We were just wondering if it went into helmets.”

  “Do I understand you to say that I was wondering whether pith went into helmets or not?” asked Mr. Gibber.

  “And heads,” added Tim.

  “But of course heads go into helmets,” said Mr. Gibber. “That’s what they’re for.”

  “I hope you don’t think I didn’t know that,” replied Tim, laughing deprecatingly.

  “But I made no implication that you didn’t know what went into helmets,” said Gibber.

  “Of course I do,” answered Tim brightly. “We all know. It’s heads. Not pith, but heads. Did your head ever go into a helmet, Mr. Gibber?”

  The good man was immediately mollified. His vanity was stimulated. It pleased him to be regarded as an extensively travelled person.

  “Time and time again,” he replied. “As a matter of fact I have one at home right now.”

  “And is there any pith in it?” asked Tim hopefully.

  Mr. Gibber’s tan took on an apoplectic glow.

  “I don’t,” he replied in a voice choked with emotion, “I don’t know what’s in that helmet, and frankly, Mr. Willows, I don’t give a damn.” He took a deep breath and added, “Will you excuse me, Miss Meades?”

  “Do you mean you want to leave the room for a minute?” asked that young lady innocently.

  “What!” ejaculated Mr. Gibber. “And why should I leave the room?”

  “Mr. Gibber,” said Miss Meades reprovingly, then lowered her eyes in confusion.

  “You don’t understand, Miss Meades,” Tim explained politely. “Mr. Gibber doesn’t want to leave the room. He doesn’t need to leave the room. That is, I don’t think so. He was—”

  “I didn’t say he needed to leave the room,” Miss Meades interrupted hotly. “If he needed to leave the room I hope he’d have sense enough to go.”

  “Of course he has,” answered Tim soothingly. “He knows when he needs to go.”

  “Well, I need to go right now,” gasped Steve Jones. “Excuse me a minute. Must telephone to a client.”

  Mr. Gibber was looking at the table with appalled eyes. Was it possible they were making sport of him? Willows was at the bottom of it all. Willows was responsible. How in God’s name had the situation got so out of hand? It was like a bad dream.

  “It’s all right, Mr. Gibber,” he heard Tim saying in an encouraging voice. “She knows now that you don’t need to leave the room and that you were simply asking her pardon for using a lot of bad language. Funny how things crop up like that—helmets and pith and leaving the room and all. Really, it’s quite confusing. Where were we, Mr. Gibber?”

  “Where were we?” repeated that gentleman, wearily passing a hand across his eyes. “I hardly know where we are much less where we were.”

  “It had something to do with brevity,” supplied Tim. “It was all very interesting even though most of the others didn’t seem to understand it.”

  “I understood every word he said,” stoutly declared Miss Meades. “Even about leaving the room.”

  “Certainly you did,” put in Tim pacifically, “Mr. Gibber isn’t so childish. He’d never do a thing like that.”

  “Like what?” snapped Miss Meades in a stubborn voice.

  Tim looked at the girl with admiring eyes.

  “Well, I wouldn’t like to say,” he hedged. “Hadn’t you better ask Mr. Gibber?”

  “Don’t ask me a thing,” Mr. Gibber shouted. “I won’t listen to another word.”

  “He doesn’t like to talk about it,” explained Tim. “You know how it is. Nobody does. No gentleman, that is.”

  “But I will talk about it,” Mr. Gibber cut in. “I’ll talk about it as much as I like.”

  “Is that quite necessary?” inquired Miss Meades, elevating her eyebrows.

  “Yes, by God, it is,” gritted the president of the Nationwide Advertising Agency. “It’s necessary for my sanity. It’s nobody’s business whether I need to leave the room or not. And if I do need to leave the room—which I don’t—I’ll get right up and walk out of the room and stay as long as I like.”

  “What did I tell you?” said Tim triumphantly to the table. “He knows how to act.”

  Miss Meades turned on him with battle in her usually calm eyes.

  “I won’t let you put me in a false light,” she retorted. “From the way you go on one would get the impression that I deliberately accused Mr. Gibber of not knowing when he needed to leave the room. I meant no such thing. I know he isn’t a baby and furthermore—”

  “Stop!” cried Mr. Gibber. “For God’s sake, stop! I must put my foot down somewhere. This can’t go on.”

  “Certainly not,” agreed Tim sympathetically. “Of all things.”

  Mr. Gibber cleared his throat and once more flattened his hands on the surface of the table. With an earnest eye he searched the faces confronting him. He would win his listeners back.

  “Boys,” he addressed them this time, playing the part of just a pal. “Boys,” he repeated, then his expression underwent a startling change. “Oh, dear,” he muttered. “Now I do have to leave the room.”

  And leave the room he did, very rapidly and without looking back.

  Miss Meades made a face and thrust out a small, red tongue at Tim Willows.

  “Smarty,” she said. “Mr. Know-it-all. He did need to leave the room all the time.”

  “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Tim told her with tremendous dignity. “I attribute the man’s strange conduct to nothing more nor less than the power of suggestion.”

  “Which means,” retorted the girl, “that he needed to leave the room.”

  “You win,” said Tim.

  Chapter 5

  The Malicious Magic of Mr. Ram

  Mr. Gibber did not return to the conference room. Few men would have in the face of such overwhelming odds. Instead, he sought the privacy of his office in which he did some highly concentrated fuming. Gibber’s skin was thick, but not impenetrable. Tim Willows and that Meades girl had done terrible thin
gs to him that morning. He would not forget the pair. When the trees began to fall they would be the first to go.

  Meanwhile the conference, relieved of the presence of its presiding officer, was rapidly assuming the aspect of a meeting of convivial friends from which those earnest spirits in whose nostrils advertising was the very breath of life promptly disassociated themselves amid the maledictions of the harder-boiled.

  Tim Willows and Miss Meades were among the last to leave. They decided it was no more than their duty to await the return of Mr. Gibber. They were conscientious about it. While so doing there was nothing to prevent them from discussing the more important things of life such as books and plays and places to go and the numerous persons they disliked. It was a quiet, restful morning and Tim was both surprised and delighted to discover upon consulting his watch that it was time to be doing something about luncheon. Accordingly he took Dolly Meades to a lunch club, at which they prolonged the conference well into the afternoon. Tim drank ale, which Dolly was unable to stomach. She had to be satisfied with rye. And she was. Back at the office Tim spent the remainder of the afternoon listening to the bedtime stories of several newspaper and magazine representatives, all of whom displayed a sort of well-bred pride in the quality and size of the circulations of their respective publications.

  In this manner Tim passed his last day, had he but known it, at the Nationwide Advertising Agency, an organization to which he had already given almost all of his self-respect in return for just sufficient money to enable him to exist in comparative ease, what with buying things on time.

  Sally did not meet him at the station, but she was waiting for him at the door. As a matter of fact, when he opened it she almost popped out of the house.

  “It’s gone!” were her first words, her eyes round and fearful.

  “What’s gone?” asked Tim, his mind on other matters, chief among which was the possibility of getting a drink.

  “The body,” replied Sally. “It’s gone, it’s not there.”

  Tim then deliberately did a little husbandly tormenting.

  “What are you talking about?” he demanded “Whose body has gone where?”

  “Don’t be dull,” continued Sally sharply. “The body in the bin. The body of the man you murdered in cold blood. The body you struck down in its prime.”

  “Oh, that body,” exclaimed Tim comprehendingly. “That body never had any prime.”

  “Well, it would have had a prime if you hadn’t struck it down,” retorted Sally.

  “How do you know that?” her husband asked. “Some bodies never have any prime.”

  “Yours, for example,” said Sally. “Your withered, mean, little rat of a body.”

  “Come, come,” protested Tim Willows. “That’s no way to refer to your husband’s body. Why, only last night you were swearing to high heaven you were never going to have anything to do with anyone’s body save the one you are now so harshly criticizing.”

  “Well, prime or no prime,” said Sally, “I’ve got to make the best of it, such as it is.”

  “You mean the most of it,” he told her crisply. “And I do wish you’d stop referring to my body as if it were a rather questionable rib of beef. Now tell me about this other body. You seem to miss it. Do you want it back in the bin? I should think the disappearance of that long, lugubrious stiff has saved us no end of mental anguish, not to mention unremunerative labour.”

  “I know,” she said, “but we can’t have a dead body knocking about the streets. People will begin to talk.”

  Tim laughed shortly.

  “I suppose they’ll criticize us for not knowing how to entertain a dead body,” he remarked. “Well, if that dead body has left my bed and board I wash my hands of all further responsibility for it. It’s not my dead body if it goes visiting neighbors.”

  “But suppose it hasn’t gone visiting?” asked Sally in a hushed voice. “Suppose it tries to crawl in bed with one of us to-night? That’s what’s burning me up.”

  “Then it will be a doubly dead body,” said Tim, who, having divested himself of his hat and overcoat, was strolling in the direction of a cocktail shaker gleaming cheerfully on the sideboard. “By the way,” he called back casually over his shoulders, “that dead body rather intimated to me that he mistook my bed for yours this morning.”

  “The nerve of the thing,” said Sally, then, suddenly grasping the full significance of Tim’s remark, she asked, “What do you mean by that, you grub?”

  “Nothing,” the other replied. “Merely that the grub rode into the city this morning in the poisonous company of that dead body.”

  “What!” gasped Sally. “Do you mean the body has taken up travelling?”

  “Just that,” returned the other. “The body was most unappreciatively alive. Only the body, though, for as you yourself know, it never did have any brain.”

  Sally sank down in a chair and considered this new situation. The dead body of Mr. Bentley was one thing. His live body was quite another.

  “A body like that doesn’t need any brain,” she said at last. “Make it snappy with that cocktail, you shadow of a midget.”

  Tim rang for Peter and immediately that aged creature appeared. He was small, sharp, and unbent, and he gave the impression of having been kept too long in front of a drying machine. He had swapped all of his hair with the years in exchange for a face full of wrinkles. From somewhere near the center of this complicated system a thin hooked nose projected itself, and on either side of this object two small eyes glittered as brightly as a thieving sparrow’s. Peter had a way of swinging his arms at his sides as if he were keeping them in readiness for immediate action. Unlike the majority of domestics, he enjoyed being summoned to duty. If Tim did not call for him in the course of an evening he would invent an excuse to call on Tim, because, as he expressed it, Mr. Tim was his personal responsibility with whom he had spent many pleasant days in the past when both of them had been a whole lot younger.

  Tim now fumbled in his vest pocket and produced three cigars, the day’s gleanings from the visiting representatives.

  “Here’s your share, Peter,” he said, extending them to the old man. “They look pretty good to-night. Better than usual.”

  Peter subjected each cigar to the expert examination of his nose, then permitted himself a smile of appreciation.

  “Fifteen cents straight, at least,” he gloated. “This one looks like a quarter. I shall smoke them, Mr. Tim.”

  “I know damn well you will,” said Tim, “but in the meantime can you do a little something helpful about orange juice and ice?”

  When the shaker had ceased its shaking and the cocktails had been poured, Tim turned to Sally.

  “I don’t know whether I’m to be congratulated or not,” he told her, “but the fact is I don’t happen to be a murderer any more. It all comes from not putting on enough coal. That body came to life some time after we went to bed, finished off a bottle of gin, and went barging drunkenly about the house before it went home.”

  “Was it—I mean, was he—in great pain?” asked Sally a little timidly.

  “Yes,” said Tim complacently, delicately moistening his lips at the rim of the glass. “He was in excruciating pain. Agony, I’d call it. I made him feel even worse.”

  “You would, you scorpion,” his wife replied. “Does he know all the things that happened to him—the part I played?”

  “Not yet,” he smiled. “I’m saving that for some future occasion, my dear little accessory after the fact.”

  Sally remained thoughtfully silent.

  Because of a great lassitude induced by the high revelry and nervous tension of the previous night the Willowses did not linger long in the lounge after dinner had been served. Dopey appeared footily for a brief review of the events of the day, which he immediately forgot upon suspecting the presence of a few pieces of candy concealed in a bowl. After mouthing these individually and collectively he discovered they were not so good. Accordingly he left them
messily on the rug and clumped back to his box in the kitchen and the soothing conversation of Mr. and Mrs. Twill. Tim and Sally proceeded to their room, where they became busy about going to bed. Tim was always a little puzzled at the speed and ease with which Sally completed these preparations. At one moment she would be fully clad, at the next there would be just Sally, unadorned, then amazingly she would appear decked out in some tricky nightgown all set for the sheets. Tim decided that she must wear practically no clothes at all to be able to disrobe with such breath-taking precision and dispatch. For him the business of getting undressed was a long, involved, and laborious one necessitating no end of searching for this thing and that. The good Mrs. Twill believed in putting everything in some place, but preferably not in the same place twice if a new one could be found. To-night, for example, he eventually found his slippers resting on a row of books on the lowest shelf of the bookcase. It was a good place he had to admit, a splendid place, but then any place would have been good had he but known where it was. Thus cogitating on the strange ways of Sally and Mrs. Twill he came at last to his socks, and at this point he seemed to run down. After a few tentative pluckings his fingers ceased to work. He was thinking of Claire Meadows and wondering what she was thinking. That had been a queer experience, too. Like a song growing fainter in a swiftly fading dream. It seemed quite apart from life and the ordinary affairs of life. It was as if Time had suddenly remembered a moment it had forgotten to give him and had tossed it back at random. It could never be recaptured. He knew that, and strangely enough he was not disappointed.

  “Tim,” he heard Sally saying, and her voice sounded grimly determined, “if you don’t stop doddering over those socks I’ll come over there and drag them off.”

  “So you feel as strongly about it as that, do you?” replied Tim Willows, looking at her with a slow, irritating smile. “Well, what I want to know is, why should I take off these socks?”