TYPICAL November evening, tinged with fog and coal smoke, was settling down as Bellsmith pushed into the street in front of the doctor's office. Around him the mottled asphalt, the uneven pavement, the glare of lights from small shops under tenement blocks, before which fat Italians argued and gesticulated, all reflected the sounds and smells of a slowly growing, slowly decaying old Eastern seaboard city.
In the sudden damp chill, Bellsmith gathered his coat around him. His limousine, dimly lighted fore and aft, like a ship at anchor, was waiting dutifully at the curb, but the chauffeur, who was watching with profound amusement three small boys in a quarrel at the head of an alley, was distinctly caught napping. His master's hand was on the door of the car before he was startled out of his preoccupation.
The chauffeur was a cheery, freckled, and broad-faced type of young Irishman. In the early, hysterical days of motoring, he had been a race driver of some modest prominence, but now his chief interest in life was centered on boxing-bouts, which he attended two or three evenings a week and at which he could yowl and heckle to his heart's content. His secret ambition, these days, was to sit officially in a "corner" and wave a bath-towel for some third-rate slugger.
It was a curious but rather attractive commentary on human nature that Bellsmith and Keefe, the chauffeur, were on the best of terms, not only professionally but personally. They were of about the same age, but one would have thought that the rugged, tough, battling Irishman would have looked with supreme contempt on his effete and old-maidish master. As a matter of fact, Keefe had for Bellsmith a hearty respect and something approaching a genuine fondness. The reason lay in the paradoxical fact that they had not one single thing in common. If Bellsmith, like most young men of his class, had tried continually to impress Keefe with his own sage knowledge of cars or of professional sport, the chauffeur would indeed have regarded him with a veiled contempt; but Bellsmith knew nothing of cars, he never expected to know anything of cars, in the presence of an engine he lay inert and helpless. He took everything that Keefe said as supreme law and oracle, and, as a result, Keefe responded like a man and a sportsman. The two lived in separate worlds, and, in his own field, each acknowledged the other's complete supremacy.
Thus it had not chafed Keefe a bit to have been kept waiting for more than two hours, although the return trip home was less than three city blocks. Like Bellsmith himself, Keefe had a sense of fitness which understood plainly enough that certain occasions, such as a trip to the station or a trip to a doctor's office, no matter how short, called inevitably for the etiquette of a car. Besides, it always amused Keefe to work his way through the traffic at this crowded hour between five and six on a winter evening. The old Bellsmith mansion, behind its tall iron fence, lay in the very heart of the business district of Leicester, the only private residence within a mile of the spot. On one side an office building rose sheer above it. On the other stretched indiscriminate blocks of small shops and tenements. A big department store was only a stone's-throw away. At this hour not only the streets but the side-walks before the Bellsmith mansion would be packed with shoppers and clerks returning from work. It gave Keefe a fine sense of importance to throw up his hand, turn suddenly, and drive in at the gates through a narrow lane of wide-eyed pedestrians, suddenly blocked in two ranks in their progress and staring amazed at this sight of a huge motor-car coming right up across the sidewalk. At that moment Keefe always felt as if he were driving the chief of police or the President of the United States.