The Competitive Nephew Part 51

"I didn't come down here to eat," Mrs. Fieldstone said, with a catch in her voice.

"Even so, Mrs. Fieldstone, don't you try to start nothing with this woman, as you never know what you're stacking up against in cafes,"

Ralph warned her. "Young Hartigan, the featherweight champion of the world, used to be a--now--coat boy in Sam's; and they got several waiters working there who has also graduated from the preliminary cla.s.s."

"I wouldn't open my head at all," Mrs. Fieldstone promised; and with this a.s.surance they entered the most southerly of the three doors to Sam's.

One of the penalties of being one of the few restaurants in New York permitted to do business between one A.M. and six A.M. was that Sam's Cafe and Restaurant did a light business between six P.M. and one A.M.; and consequently at eleven-thirty P.M. J. Montgomery Fieldstone and Miss Goldie Raymond were the only occupants of the south dining-room.

It is true that there were other customers seated in the middle and north dining-rooms--conspicuously Mr. Sidney Rossmore and Miss Vivian Haig; and it was this young lady who, though hidden from J. Montgomery Fieldstone's view, formed one of the subsidiary heads of his discourse with Miss Raymond.

"Well, I wish you could 'a' seen her, kid!" he said to Miss Raymond.

"My little girl seven years old has took of Professor Rheinberger plain and fancy dancing for three weeks only, and she's a regular Pavlowa already alongside of Haig. She's heavy on her feet like an elephant!"

"You should tell me that!" Miss Raymond exclaimed. "Ain't I seen her?"

"And yet you claim I considered giving her this part in the new piece,"

Fieldstone said indignantly. "I'm honestly surprised at you, kid!"

"Oh, you'd do anything to save fifty dollars a week on your salary list," she retorted.

"About that fifty dollars, listen to me, Goldie!" Fieldstone began, just as Ralph and Mrs. Fieldstone came through the revolving doors. "I don't want you to think I'm small, see? And if you say you must have it, why, I'll give it to you." He leaned forward and smiled affably at her. "After the thirtieth week!" he concluded in seductive tones.

"Right from the day we open!" Miss Raymond said, tapping the tablecloth with her fingertips.

"Now, sweetheart," Fieldstone began, as he seized her hand and squeezed it affectionately, "you know as well as I do when I say a thing I mean it, because----"

And it was here that Mrs. Fieldstone, losing all control of herself and all remembrance of Ralph's admonition, took the aisle in as few leaps as her fas.h.i.+onable skirt permitted and brought up heavily against her husband's table.

"Jake!" she cried hysterically. "Jake, what is this?"

Fieldstone dropped Miss Raymond's hand and jumped out of his chair.

"Why, mommer!" he exclaimed. "What's the matter? Is the children sick?"

He caught her by the arm, but she shook him off and turned threateningly to Miss Raymond.

"You hussy, you!" she said. "What do you mean by it?"

Miss Goldie Raymond stood up and glared at Mrs. Fieldstone.

"Hussy yourself!" she said. "Who are you calling a hussy? Mont, are you going to stand there and hear me called a hussy?"

Fieldstone paid no attention to this demand. He was clawing affectionately at his wife's arm and repeating, "Listen, mommer!

Listen!" in anguished protest.

"I would call you what I please!" Mrs. Fieldstone panted. "I would call you worser yet; and----"

Miss Raymond, however, decided to wait no longer for a champion; and, as the sporting writers would say, she headed a left swing for Mrs.

Fieldstone's chin. But it never landed, because two vigorous arms, newly whitened with an emulsion of zinc oxide, were thrown round her waist and she was dragged back into her chair.

"Don't you dare touch that lady, Goldie Raymond!" said a voice that can only be described as clear and vibrant, despite the speaker's recent exhausting solo in the second act of "Rudolph Where Have You Been."

"Don't you dare touch that lady, or I'll lift the face off you!"

Miss Raymond was no sooner seated, however, than she sprang up again and with one begemmed hand secured a firm hold on the bird of paradise in Miss Vivian Haig's hat.

"No one can make a mum out of me!" she proclaimed, and at once closed with her adversary.

Simultaneously Mrs. Fieldstone shrieked aloud and sank swooning into the arms of her husband. As for Sidney Rossmore and Ralph Zinsheimer, they lingered to see no more; but at the first outcry they fled through a doorway at the end of the room. In the upper part it was fitted with a ground-gla.s.s panel that, as if in derision, bore the legend: Cafe for Men Only.

When they emerged a few minutes later Miss Goldie Raymond had been spirited away by the management with the mysterious rapidity of a suicide at Monte Carlo, and Miss Vivian Haig, hatless and dishevelled, was laving Mrs. Fieldstone's forehead with brandy, supplied by the management at forty cents a pony.

"You know me, don't you, Mrs. Fieldstone?" Miss Vivian Haig said. "I'm Hattie Katzberger."

Mrs. Fieldstone had now been laved with upward of two dollars and forty cents' worth of brandy, and she opened her eyes and nodded weakly.

"And you know that other woman, too, mommer," Fieldstone protested.

"That was Goldie Raymond that plays Mitzi in 'Rudolph.' I was only trying to get her to sign up for the new show, mommer. What do you think?--I would do anything otherwise at my time of life! Foolish woman, you!"

He pinched Mrs. Fieldstone's pale cheek and she smiled at him in complete understanding.

"But you ain't going to give her the new part now, are you, Jake?" she murmured.

"Certainly he ain't!" Miss Vivian Haig said. "I'm going to get that part myself, ain't I, Mr. Fieldstone?"

Fieldstone made a gesture of complete surrender.

"Sure you are!" he said, with the earnestness of a waist manufacturer and not a producing manager. "And a good dancer like you," he concluded, "I would pay the same figure as Goldie Raymond."

The following morning Lyman J. Bienenflug dispatched to Mrs. J.

Montgomery Fieldstone a bill for professional services, consultation and advice in and about settlement of action for a separation--Fieldstone versus Fieldstone--six hundred dollars. He also dispatched to Miss Vivian Haig another bill for professional services, consultation and advice in and about settlement of action for breach of contract of employment--Haig versus Fieldstone--two hundred and fifty dollars.

Later in the day Ralph Zinsheimer, managing clerk in the office of Bienenflug & Krimp, and over and above the age of eighteen years as prescribed by the Code, served a copy of the summons and complaint on each of the joint tort-feasors in the ten-thousand dollar a.s.sault action of Goldie Raymond, plaintiff, against J. Montgomery Fieldstone and others, defendants. There were important changes that evening in the cast of "Rudolph Where Have You Been."

CHAPTER TEN

CAVEAT EMPTOR

For many years Mr. Herman Wolfson had so conducted the auctioneering business that he could look the whole world, including the district attorney, in the eye and tell 'em to go jump on themselves. This was by no means an easy thing to do, when the wavering line of demarcation between right and wrong often depends on the construction of a comma in the Code of Criminal Procedure. Nevertheless, under the competent advice of Henry D. Feldman, that eminent legal pract.i.tioner, Mr.

Wolfson had prospered; and although his specialty was the purchasing _en bloc_ of the stock in trade and fixtures of failing shopkeepers, not once had he been obliged to turn over his purchases to the host of clamouring creditors.

"My skirts I keep it clean," he explained to Philip Borrochson, whose retail jewellery business had proved a losing venture and was, therefore, being acquired by Mr. Wolfson at five hundred dollars less than its actual value, "and if I got an idee you was out to do somebody--myself or anybody else--I wouldn't have nothing to do with you, Mr. Borrochson."