Bunker Bean

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Bunker Bean

The Project Gutenberg eBook, Bunker Bean, by Harry Leon Wilson, Illustrated by F. R. Gruger
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Title: Bunker Bean
Author: Harry Leon Wilson
Release Date: May 2, 2005 [eBook #15743]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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BUNKER BEAN
by
HARRY LEON WILSON
Author of _The Spenders_, _The Lions of the Lord_, _The Boss of Little Arcady_, etc.
Illustrated By F. R. Gruger
Garden City ... New York Doubleday, Page & Company
1913

[Illustration: "Every time I get alone I just giggle myself into spasms. Isn't it the funniest?"]

To H.G. WELLS

ILLUSTRATIONS
"Every time I get alone I just giggle myself into spasms. Isn't it the funniest?"
It was a friendly young face he saw there, but troubled
"I feared he was discommoding you," ventured the Countess, elegantly apologetic
"Daughter!" said Breede with half a glance at the flapper
In that instant Bean read the flapper's look, the look she had puzzled him with from their first meeting
"Oh, put up your trinkets!" said Bean, with a fine affectation of weariness
Thereafter, until late at night, the red car was trailed by the taxi-cab
"Lumbago!" said Bean, both hands upon the life-belt

BUNKER BEAN

I
Bunker Bean was wishing he could be different. This discontent with himself was suffered in a moment of idleness as he sat at a desk on a high floor of a very high office-building in "downtown" New York. The first correction he would have made was that he should be "well over six feet" tall. He had observed that this was the accepted stature for a hero.
And the name, almost any name but "Bunker Bean!" Often he wrote good ones on casual slips of paper and fancied them his; names like Trevellyan or Montressor or Delancey, with musical prefixes; or a good, short, beautiful, but dignified name like "Gordon Dane." He liked that one. It suggested something. But Bean! And Bunker Bean, at that! True, it also suggested something, but this had never been anything desirable. Just now the people in the outside office were calling him "Boston."
"Gordon Dane," well over six feet, abundant dark hair, a bit inclined to "wave" and showing faint lines of gray "above the temples"; for Bean also wished to be thirty years old and to have learned about women; in short, to have suffered. Gordon Dane's was a face before which the eyes of women would fall in half-frightened, half-ecstatic subjection, and men would feel the inexplicable magnetism of his presence. He would be widely remarked for his taste in dress. He would don stripes or checks without a trace of timidity. He would quail before no violence of colour in a cravat.
A certain insignificant Bunker Bean was not like this. With a soul aspiring to stripes and checks that should make him a man to be looked at twice in a city street, he lacked courage for any but the quietest patterns. Longing for the cravat of brilliant hue, he ate out his heart under neutral tints. Had he not, in the intoxication of his first free afternoon in New York, boldly purchased a glorious thing of silk entirely, flatly red, an article to stamp its wearer with distinction; and had he not, in the seclusion of his rented room, that night hidden the flaming thing at the bottom of a bottom drawer, knowing in his sickened soul he dared not flaunt it?
Once, truly, had he worn it, but only for a brief stroll on a rainy Sunday, with an entirely opaque raincoat buttoned closely under his chin. Even so, he fancied that people stared through and through that guaranteed fabric straight to his red secret. The rag burned on his breast. Afterward it was something to look at beyond the locked door; perhaps to try on behind drawn shades, late of a night. And how little Gordon Dane would have made of such a matter! Floated in Bean's mind the refrain of a clothing advertisement. "The more advanced dressers will seek this fashion." "Something dignified yet different!" Gordon Dane would be "an advanced dresser."
But if you have been afraid of nearly everything nearly all your life, how then? You must be "dignified" only. The brave only may be "different." It was all well enough to gaze at striking fabrics in windows; but to buy and to wear openly, and get yourself pointed at--laughed at! Again sounded the refrain of the hired bard of