THE SPELL OF THE PAJAMAS
"George!" breathed Billings, breaking a curious, tense silence.
The professor suddenly faced us, holding up the pajamas with a gesture
of inquiry.
"From a friend of Mr. Lightnut's in China," Billings explained.
Aside, he whispered hurriedly: "Don't say a word about the rubies! You
heard him--murder, grand larceny or arson--it's all one to the old
gazabe! Anybody can see that. He doesn't let little things like those
stand in the way of getting what he wants!" He frowned warningly.
"H'm! In the neck, Professor--I mean inside the collar," he said,
approaching the table--"there's some kind of freak lettering. Looks
foolish to me."
The professor looked perplexed.
"I mean, looks like it was done by some one who was batty--had wheels,
you know; probably some chink whose biscuit was drifty," floundered
Billings. "_You_ understand!"
The professor didn't. I knew that jolly well by the way he cocked his
head on one side, standing like a puzzled crow, don't you know.
"Ha! I fear I do not as I should," he said with an apologetic cough.
"Perhaps I do not intelligently and logically follow your deductions
because your premises are inscrutable until I have seen the lettering.
Ah!"
Out came glasses and lens again and he bent over the collar eagerly.
"H'm! The _Hwuyi_, or ideographic characters, rather than the
ideophonetic!" He looked up at Billings and myself inquiringly. "Ha! I
trust we start together in accord upon that conclusion, eh, gentlemen?"
Billings nodded emphatically.
"Surest thing you know," he declared firmly, and whispered to me
triumphantly. "Didn't I tell him it was idiotic?"
The professor's lips moved rapidly and his visage twisted into a
horrible frown.
"Why, why--a--what!" With mouth open, and gripping the pajamas tightly,
he glared at us each in turn.
"Oh, impossible!" he rasped harshly, seizing the lens and bending again.
"Incredible--poof--absurd--tut, tut, what nonsense!"
The glass swept the lines rapidly. Suddenly, with a cry, the professor
dropped the lens, a violent start almost lifting him from the floor.
"_Papauhegopoulos!_" he cried explosively, and whirled on us again.
Dash me, if I didn't fall back a step, his eyes rolled so wildly. But
Billings stood his ground, by Jove!
"I didn't quite catch--" he began hesitatingly, angling his bristly red
head forward and smiling pleasantly.
The professor seemed abashed of a sudden.
"H'm! Your pardon, gentlemen! Merely an expletive--h'm--a Greek word I
indulge in sometimes when--when excited; a weakness, I might say. H'm!"
He seized his lens again.
Billings' eyes yielded admiration.
"Great Scott, Dicky!" he whispered in my ear. "See what a thing
education is! Think of being able to swear _in Greek_--in Greek, Dicky!"
Billings' voice expressed awe. "Why, he's got an Erie Canal skipper
backed clear off the board, and if he wanted to turn loose, I'll bet he
could make a certain railway president I know look like a two-spot!"
At this point the professor struck his fist angrily upon the pajamas.
The face that he turned was unnaturally flushed and his chin quivered
excitedly.
"Ridiculous, I say! Poof!" He snapped his fingers. "Necromancy and
thaumaturgy transmitted in pajamas! Absurd!"
"Piffle!" said Billings emphatically. "Don't know what they are," he
whispered to me, "but I'll take a hundred-to-one shot on anything he
says. The professor's a corker!"
"By Jove!" I remarked. "Perhaps Professor Huckleberry won't mind telling
us--"
"What I think, gentlemen? What _could_ I think but what I am sure is
your own conclusion--though you have generously and considerately left
me to form my own opinion--namely, that the claim of supernatural
attributes of these garments is preposterous. Enchanted pajamas! Haunted
pajamas! Poof! Nursery lore; children's fairy tales! Ghosts, gentlemen?
Tut, tut--nonsense!"
He snorted indignantly.
"Ghosts!" faltered Billings.
"Oh, I say!" I rather gasped. Dash me if it didn't give me a turn,
rather!
The professor shrugged his shoulders.
"What other interpretation is admissible, gentlemen?" he questioned
somewhat peevishly, taking up the coat. "Here we have the royal insignia
of the cruel emperor, Kee, and we note that these garments were given
some one in his court by the alleged sorcerer, Fuh-keen. Perhaps it was
revenge--perhaps some court plot in which Fuh-keen, for reasons of his
own, was an active participant; it is of no importance, that part of it.
So much for the first line: but now we come--"
He paused to polish his spectacles.
"Tell me," he said more cheerfully, "do our free translations of the
ideographs so far agree in essentials--eh?"
"Like as two peas!" Billings declared with manifest enthusiasm.
The professor looked gratified and bowed.
"Of course, the rendition is entirely a free one," he remarked. "You
must not expect too much."
"Devilish handsome and clever of him!" I whispered to Billings, as the
professor proceeded to adjust his spectacles. "Dash it, I wish he'd let
me pay him, though."
"Forget it!" hissed Billings. "Didn't he just say it was free? He's no
cheap skate, I tell you."
The professor resumed:
"Now we come to the second line, or, more strictly speaking, column," he
said, straightening impressively. "Here we find the astonishing claim
made that there will be a change or metamorphosis of any kind of animal
life that these habiliments enshroud. Um!"
The great man breathed heavily and batted at us over his glasses.
"_Credat Judaeus apella_--eh, gentlemen?" And he winked knowingly.
Dashed if he didn't almost catch me swallowing a yawn, too! For I hadn't
any idea what he was talking about or driving at, and, by Jove, I _did_
know I was getting devilish sleepy.
The professor waved his glasses. "Did you ever read such a childish,
ridiculous, extravagant asseveration?" he demanded.
"Ass--eh? I should say so!" I worked this off indignantly.
"Tommyrot!" murmured Billings absently. He seemed thoughtful.
I was thoughtful, too--wondering, by Jove, whether the professor would
go soon, so we could turn in and get the earlier start to-morrow up the
river. But chiefly I was wondering wistfully if Frances would still be
angry with me.
"Moreover," broke in the professor's voice as he turned again to the
lettering, "to assert further that there will be a semblance--not
actual, gentlemen, mind you, but an optical illusion--taking the form of
some creature of the same kind that this silken tenement has previously
inclosed.
"In other words, gentlemen, if I were to don these garments, I might no
longer look like myself, but like some one else who had worn them upon
some previous occasion--perhaps last night--perhaps a thousand years
ago. Eh? Is that what you understand?"
He ducked again over the letters and came up, looking chagrined.
"Moreover, I am forced to confess, gentlemen, that I fail to find a
system--any rule governing these ridiculous transformations. The
hypothesis is, therefore, that the alleged materializations merely
follow the arbitrary caprice of the magic." He shook his head. "Well,
gentlemen, I--really, I must laugh!"
And he did! I hadn't caught the drift of what it was he thought he was
laughing at--I got the words, but I was too dashed sleepy to get the
sense. But I was awfully glad I understood this much--that what he was
attempting now _was_ a laugh. I never would have known it. It was more
like a shrieking squeak--rusty hinge, you know, that sort of thing.
"First-time-I've-laughed-in-twenty-years!" His shrill cackle ran a
treble scale that ended in high C. "I know you--you won't believe it!"
"Believe it?" said Billings drily, "I'd bet a purse on it." He whispered
to me: "Don't need any affidavit; it _shows_. Sounds like a country
wagon on a down grade, brake on, and shrieking like a banshee."
Behind me the door opened slightly. I turned to see Jenkins, looking
devilish chalky and a little wild-eyed. He lifted a coil of stout sash
cord questioningly.
"Eh? Why, no!" I whispered through the opening. "He's just _laughing_.
Don't be a jolly ass!" And I closed the door sharply.
The professor looked up from the pajamas, and folding his arms, eyed
Billings with a cunning leer.
"I think I see," he said, leveling his finger. "You have both
demonstrated how nonsensical is the assertion in this inscription.
Doubtless you desire an experiment upon my part to confirm your proof of
its absurdity. _Reductio ad absurdum_--eh, gentlemen?"
Billings looked at me, but I couldn't help him. Why, dash it, I didn't
even know yet what the inscription was. And, by Jove, I didn't know
what experiments he wanted to try with the pajamas, but I didn't care.
He could boil them, if he wanted to, if he would only let us get to bed.
So at random I just nodded eagerly.
"Excellent!" The professor's chuckle sounded like dice rattling in a
metal box. "An excellent jest upon this fellow, Fuh-keen, to furnish a
demonstration by twentieth-century scientists of the presumption of his
claims of necromancy and thaumaturgy. You have done so--now I will do
so, in turn. Eh, gentlemen?"
I hadn't the ghost of an idea what he was talking about. Fact is, I was
thinking of my darling and wondering if she was asleep. By Jove, I
wished that _I_ was!
But a devilish queer look had come into Billings' face. He nodded,
gathered the pajamas into the professor's arms and patted him on the
shoulder in a way I thought offensively familiar.
"You've got it, Professor!" he said, grinning.
Then he whispered to me aside:
"Not a word, Dicky--great Scott!" But he needn't have said that, even if
I had been mind-reader enough to guess what word he meant. It was about
all I could do to get out a last word to the professor as he went out
the door:
"'Night!"