"Fault of any non-conformist country," pleaded young Mr. Braid, finely
assuming mortification. "Raw, crude people--that sort of thing.
Well-meaning but crude! Appalling ignorance touching on savories. No
bitters in the home. No--"
"Don't make fun," said Mrs. Thwaites. "You know I don't mean that."
"Surely, surely you are not referring to our notable guest? Oh,
Perfidious Albinos!" He registered profound grief.
"I am not." Her words were like little screws turning. "Why should
we be ashamed of him--Rolf and I? He's not typical--the insufferable
bounder! Our writing folk aren't like that. He may have been
well-bred--I doubt it. But now utterly spoiled."
"Decayed," amended her husband. "Blighting perisher!" he added,
becoming, for him, positively oratorical.
"It's you Americans I'm ashamed of," continued this small, outspoken
lady. "Do you think we'd let an American, no matter how talented
he might be, come over to England to snub us in our own homes and
patronize us and preach to us on our shortcomings and make unfair
comparisons between his institutions and ours and find fault with our
fashion of doing things? We'd jolly well soon put him in his place.
But you Americans let him and others like him do it. You bow down and
worship before them. You hang on their words. You flock to hear them.
You pay them money, lots of it. You stuff them up with food, and they
stuff you with insults. This one, now--he's a sponge. He's notorious
for his sponging."
"Pardon, please," interjected Mr. Braid. "There you touch my Yankee
pride. Sponging is an aquatic pastime not confined to one hemisphere.
You perhaps may claim the present international champion but we have
our candidates. Gum we may chew, horn-rimmed cheaters we may wear,
but despite our many racial defects we, too, have our great spongers.
Remember that and have a care lest you boast too soon."
"You won't let me be serious, you do spoof so," said Mrs. Thwaites.
"Still, I shall say it again, it's you Americans that I'm ashamed of.
But I was proud of you tonight, young man. When you mispronounced the
name of Maudlin College by calling it 'Magdeline,' the Yankee way, and
he corrected you, and when immediately after that when you mentioned
Sinjin Ervine as 'St. John' Ervine and he corrected you again, I knew
you must be setting a trap. I held my breath. And then when you asked
him about his travels and what he thought of your scenic wonders and
he praised some of them, and you brought in Buffalo and he said he had
been there and he recalled his trip to Niagara Falls and you said:
'Not Niagara Falls, dear fellow--_Niffls!_' why that was absolutely
priceless scoring. Wasn't it absolutely priceless, Rolf?"
"Rarther!" agreed the Major. He seemed to feel that the tribute
demanded elaboration, so he thought briefly and then expanded it into
"Oh, rarther!"
"We do our feeble best," murmured young Mr. Braid modestly, "and
sometimes Heaven rewards us. Heaven was indeed kind tonight....
Speaking of heavenly matters--look!"
As though acting on cue the horizon to the west had split asunder, and
the red lightning ran down the skies in zig-zag streaks, like cracks in
a hot stove, and lusty big drops spattered on the porch roof above them.
"It's beginning to shower--and thank you once more for 'Niffls.'" Mrs.
Thwaites threw the farewell over her shoulder. "We shall have to run
for it, Rolf."
* * * * *
In the steeple of the First Baptist Church of Ingleglade, two blocks
distant, the clock struck eleven times. Except for the kitchen wing
the residence of the Gridleys on Edgecliff Avenue was, as to its lower
floor, all dark and shuttered. The rain beat down steadily, no longer
in scattered drops but in sheets. It was drunk up by the thirsty
earth. It made a sticky compound of a precious wagon-load of stable
leavings with which Mrs. Gridley, one week before, had mulched her
specimen roses in their bed under the living-room windows. It whipped
and it drenched a single overlooked garment dangling on the clothes
line between the two cherry trees in the back yard. Daylight, to any
discriminating eye, would have revealed it as a garment appertaining
to the worthy and broad-beamed Norah; would have proven, too, that
Norah was not one who held by these flimsy, new-fangled notions of
latter-day times in the details of feminine lingerie. For this was an
ample garment, stoutly fashioned, generously cut, intimate, bifurcated,
white, fit for a Christian woman to wear. It surreptitiously had been
laved that morning in the sink and wrung out and hung for drying upon a
lately almost disused rope, and then, in the press of culinary duties,
forgotten. Now the rain was more or less having its way with it, making
its limp ornamentation of ruffles limper still, making the horn buttons
upon its strong waistband slippery. So much for the exterior of this
peaceful homestead.
* * * * *
Above in the main guest-room, Mr. Boyce-Upchurch fretted as he
undressed for bed. He felt a distinct sense of irritation. He had set
forth his desires regarding a portable tub and plenty of water to be
made ready against his hour of retiring yet, unaccountably, these had
not been provided. His skin called for refreshment; it was beastly
annoying.
A thought, an inspirational thought, came to him. He crossed to his
front window and drew back the twin sashes. The sashes opened quite
down to the floor and immediately outside, and from the same level,
just as he remembered having noted it following his arrival, the roof
of the veranda sloped away with a gentle slant. The light behind him
showed its flat tin covering glistening and smooth, with a myriad of
soft warm drops splashing and stippling upon it. Beyond was cloaking
impenetrable blackness, a deep and Stygian gloom; the most confirmed
Styg could have desired none deeper.
So Mr. Boyce-Upchurch walked back and entered the bathroom. There, from
a pitcher, he poured the basin full of water and then stripped to what
among athletes is known as the buff, meaning by that the pink, and
he dipped an embroidered guest towel in the basin and with it sopped
himself from head to feet, then dampened a cake of soap and wielded it
until his body and his head and his limbs and members richly had been
sudded. This done he recrossed his chamber, pausing only to turn out
the lights. He stepped out upon the porch roof, gasping slightly as the
downpouring torrent struck him on his bare flesh.
* * * * *
From the head of the stairs Mr. Gridley, in a puzzled way, called down:
"Say, Emaline?"
"In a minute--I'm just making sure everything is locked up down here,"
answered Mrs. Gridley in a voice oddly strained.
"Say, do you know what?" Mr. Gridley retreated a few steps downward.
"He's gone and put his shoes outside his door in the hall. What do you
suppose the big idea is?"
"Put out to be cleaned," explained Mr. Braid from the foot of the
stairs. "Quaint old custom--William the Conqueror always put his out.
But don't call 'em shoes; that's one of those crude Americanisms of
yours. The proper word is 'boot.'"
"Well, who in thunder does he expect is going to clean them?--that's
what I want to know!" demanded the pestered Mr. Gridley.
"Perhaps the slavey--" began Mr. Braid.
"Ollie, for heaven's sake hush!" snapped Mrs. Gridley. "I warn you
my nerves can't stand much more tonight. They're still up out in the
kitchen--and suppose Delia heard you. It's a blessing she didn't hear
him this afternoon."
"I wonder if he thinks I'm going to shine 'em?" inquired Mr. Gridley,
his tone plaintive, querulous, protesting. He strengthened himself with
a resolution: "Well, I'm not! Here's one worm that's beginning to turn."
"There's Ditto," speculated Mrs. Gridley. "I wouldn't dare suggest such
a thing to either of those other two. But maybe possibly Ditto--"
"Never, except over my dead body," declared Mr. Braid. "I'd as soon
ask His Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury to press my pants for me.
Fie, for shame, Dumplings!"
"But who--"
"I, gallant Jack Harkaway the volunteer fireman," proclaimed Mr. Braid.
"I, Michael Strogoff the Courier of the Czar--I'll shine his doggone
shoes--I mean, his doggone boots. I'll slip up and get 'em now. There's
a brush and some polish out back somewheres. Only, by rights, I should
have some of the genuine Day & Martin to do it with. And I ought to
whistle through my teeth. In Dickens they always whistled through their
teeth, cleaning shoes."
"Well, for one, I'm going to take a couple of aspirin tablets and go
straight to bed," said Mrs. Gridley. "Thank goodness for one thing,
anyway--it's just coming down in bucketsful outside!"
* * * * *
On the porch top in the darkness, Mr. Boyce-Upchurch gasped anew but
happily. The last of the lather coursed in rivulets down his legs; his
grateful pores opened widely and he outstretched his arms, the better
to let the soothing cloudburst from on high strike upon his expanded
chest.
On the sudsy underfooting his bare soles slipped--first one sole
began to slip, then the other began to slip. He gasped once more, but
with a different inflection. His spread hands grasped frantically and
closed on the void. Involuntarily he sat down, painfully and with
great violence. He began to slide: he began to slide faster: he kept
on sliding. His curved fingers, still clutching, skittered over stark
metal surfaces as he picked up speed. He slid thence, offbound and
slantwise, toward the edge. He gave one low muffled cry. He slid faster
yet. He slid across the spouting gutter, over the verge, on, out, down,
into swallowing space.
* * * * *
Out in the service ell the last of the wastage from the Gridleys'
dinner party was being disposed of and the place tidied up against the
next gustatory event in this house, which would be breakfast. Along
the connecting passage from his butler's pantry where he racked up
tableware, Ditto was speaking rearward to the two occupants of the
kitchen. He had been speaking practically without cessation for twenty
minutes. With the _h's_ it would have taken longer--probably twenty-two
to twenty-four minutes.
He was speaking of the habits, customs, and general excellencies of the
British upper classes among whom the greater part of his active life
congenially had been spent. He was approaching a specific illustration
in support and confirmation of his thesis. He reached it:
"Now, you tyke Mr. Boyce-Upchurch, now. Wot pride of bearin' 'e's got!
Wot control! Wot a flow of language when the spirit moves 'im! Always
the marster of any situation--that's 'im all oaver. Never losin' 'is
'ead. Never jostled out of 'is stride. Never lackin' for a word. Stock
of the old bull-dog--that's wot it is!"
Where he stood, so discouraging, he could not see Norah. Perhaps it was
just as well he could not see her. For a spell was lifting from Norah.
If there is such a word as 'unenglamored' then 'unenglamored' is the
proper word for describing what Norah rapidly was becoming.
From Delia the tattle-tale, Norah had but just now heard whispered
things. She was sitting at ease, resting after an arduous spell of
labors, but about her were signs and portents--small repressed signs
but withal significant. The lips tightly were compressed; one toe
tapped the floor with an ominous little tattoo; through the clenched
teeth she made a low steady wasp-like humming noise; in the eyes
smoldered and kindled a hostile bale. It was plain that before long
Norah would herself be moved to utterance. She did but bide her time.
However, as stated, Ditto could not see. He proceeded to carry on:
"No nonsense abaht 'im, I tell you. Knows wot 'e wants and speaks up
and arsks for it, stryte out."
* * * * *
Several of Mrs. Gridley's specimen rose bushes served somewhat
to break the force of Mr. Boyce-Upchurch's crash, though their
intertwining barbed fronds sorely scratched him here and there as he
plunged through to earth. He struck broadside in something soft and
gelatinous. Dazed and shaken, he somehow got upon his feet and first he
disentangled himself from the crushed-down thorny covert and then he
felt himself all over to make sure no important bones were broken.
Very naturally, the thought next uppermost with him, springing forward
in his mind through a swirl of confused emotions, was to reenter the
house and return, without detection, to his room. He darted up the
front porch steps and tried the front door. It was barred fast. He
tried the windows giving upon the porch; their blinds were drawn,
latched from within.
Out again in the storm he half circled the main body of the house,
fumbling in the cloaking blackness at yet more snugly fastened windows.
An unbelievable, an appalling, an incredible conviction began to fasten
its horrid talons upon Mr. Boyce-Upchurch. He could not get in without
arousing someone and certainly in this, his present state, he dare not
arouse anyone in order to get in. Yet he must get in. Desperation,
verging already on despair, mounted in his swirling brain.
Past a jog in the side wall he saw, thirty feet on beyond and
patterning through some lattice-work, a foggy shaft of light from a
rain-washed window. As cautiously he moved toward it a taut obstacle in
the nature of a cord or small hawser rasped him just under the nose
and, shrinking back, he was aware of a ghostly white article swinging
gently within arm-reach of him. Partly by touch, partly by sight, he
made out its texture--woven linen or cotton cloth, limp and clammy with
wetness--and he made out its contours; divined likewise its customary
purposes. At home a few old-fashioned ladies still were addicts; he
recognized the pattern; he had an elderly maiden aunt. In emergency
it would provide partial covering--of a sort. Most surely this was an
emergency. And yet--
As he hesitated, with tentative fingers still pawing the sopping shape
of it, and torn between a great loathing and a great and compelling
temptation, the sound of a human voice penetrated the clapboards
alongside him and caused him to cower down close.
* * * * *
"Doggone it!"
Mr. Braid, bearing in one hand a brace of varnished boots of Regent
Street manufacture, tumbled over a sharp-cornered object in the inky
darkness of the cuddy behind the living-room and barked his shins, and
his cry was wrung with anguish.
"Doggone it!" he repeated. "Who's gone and hid the infernal electric
light in this infernal Mammoth Cave of a storeroom? And where in
thunder is that box of polish and that blacking brush? I'm sure I saw
'em here the other day on one of these dad-blamed shelves. Ouch!"
His exploring arm had brought what from weight and impact might have
been an iron crowbar to clatter down upon his shoulders. As a matter of
fact, it was the discarded handle of a patent detachable mop.
"Oh, damn!" soliloquized Mr. Braid. "Everything else in the condemned
world is here but what I'm after. And I haven't got any matches and I
can't find the light bulb. Maybe Norah or Delia 'll know."
He backed out of the cavernous closet into the hall, heading for the
kitchen by way of the intervening pantry.
* * * * *
That vocal threat of peril from within diminished, died out. Mr.
Boyce-Upchurch straightened, and in that same instant, piercing the
night from a distance but drawing nearer, came to his dripping ears the
warning of a real and an acute danger. A dog--a very large and a very
fierce dog, to judge by its volume of noise output--was coming toward
him from the right and coming very swiftly.
The Thwaites' police dog, born in Germany but always spoken of by its
owners as Belgian, was the self-constituted night guard of all premises
in the entire block. To her vigilant senses suspicions of a prowler
abroad had floated out of the void. Baying, belling, she was now
bounding across lots to investigate.
With a frenzied snatch, Mr. Boyce-Upchurch tore the pendent flapping
thing free from its clothes-pin moorings and he thrust his two legs
into its two legs and convulsively he clutched its hemmed girth about
his middle, and forgetting all else save that a menacing monster was
almost upon him breathing its hot panted breaths upon his flinching
rear, he flung himself headlong toward that sheltering entryway from
whence the blurry radiance poured.
* * * * *
Enlarging upon his subject, Ditto stepped into the kitchen.
"As I was syin' a bit ago, tyke Mr. Boyce-Upchurch," he continued.
"Look at 'm, I arsk you? Poise, composture, dignity--that's 'im agyne!
It's qualities like them 'as mykes the English wot they are the 'ole
world over. It's--"
"Saints defind us!" shrieked Norah, starting up.
In through the back door burst Mr. Boyce-Upchurch, and he slammed it
to behind him and backed against it, and for a measurable space stood
there speechless, transfixed, as it were, being, in a way of speaking,
breeched but otherwise completely uncovered excepting for certain
clingy smears of compost--compost is the word we will use, please--upon
the face and torso.
Delia's accompanying scream was just a plain scream but Norah's further
outcry took on the form of articulated words:
"Proud, sez you? Yis, too proud to sup our cocktails but not too proud
to be rampagin' around in the rain turnin' somersaults in somebody's
cow-yard. Dignified, you sez? Yis, too dignified to ate the vittles I
was after fixin' fur him, but not too dignified to come lapein' in on
two dacint women wearin' nothin' only a pair of somebody's--_Whooroo_,
it's me own best Sunday pair he has on him!"
On the linoleum of the butler's pantry behind them Mr. Oliver Braid
laid him down, holding in either hand a Regent Street boot, and uttered
gurgling sounds denoting a beautiful joy.
* * * * *
From the American of July 22d:
Among the passengers sailing today on the Mulrovia for Southampton
was Mr. Jeffreys Boyce-Upchurch, the well-known English novelist,
returning home after suddenly breaking off his lecture tour in
this country on account of lameness resulting from a severe fall
which he is reported to have had less than a week ago while filling
an engagement in New Jersey. Mr. Boyce-Upchurch declined to see
the reporters desirous of questioning him regarding the accident.
Walking with a pronounced limp, he went aboard early this morning
and remained secluded in his stateroom until sailing-time.
From the Telegram, same date, under Situations Wanted:
BUTLER, English, unimpeachable references, long experience,
perfectly qualified, desires employment in cultured household, city
preferred. Positively will not accept position where other members
of domestic staff are Irish. Address: L. D., General Delivery.
TWO OF EVERYTHING
[Decoration]
There was no warning. There rarely is in such cases. To be sure, those
gophers acted peculiarly a minute before the tremor started, and that
whistling marmot did too. But until he felt the first heave, Chaney
attached no significance to the behavior of such as these. He was not
concerned with the small mammalia of northern Montana. The fishing was
what interested him.
He was disentangling a fly from where, on the back cast, it had woven
itself into an involved pattern with the adjacent shrubbery, when he
became aware that dozens of the little gray ground-squirrels were
popping out of the mouths of their burrows and scooting about in all
directions, making sharp chirking noises as they went. Through the day
he had seen them by the hundreds and usually they were in motion, but
this was the only time he heard an outcry from any of them. A fat one
popped up out of the dirt crust almost between his toes and caromed
off against an ankle. It appeared to be in an especial haste to get
somewhere else.
Just about this time the marmot, a much larger animal, scuttled
down the hill, whistling steadily and wrinkling up its back like a
caterpillar in a hurry. What happened, of course, was that the earth
sent along a preliminary notification to the creatures who delve in
the earth and live in the earth, telling them their ancient mother was
about to have a very hard chill. This is the way a layman might put it;
no doubt a geologist would phrase the explanation differently. But it
was a warning, all right enough.
While Chaney still was mildly speculating regarding the reasons for the
panic among these ground-dwellers, the solid boulder beneath his feet
seemed to lift and stir and the scrub aspens behind him all at once
began to bend the wrong way, that is, toward the wind instead of from
it. So then he knew it must be a quake. Instinctively he slid off the
stone and splashed down on the loose shale in the edge of the creek
bed. As he half crouched there, up to his shanks in water and suddenly
apprehensive, he felt through his boot soles a progressive rippling
movement that grew swift and more violent. It was as though the world
were flindering its skin on the haunches of these mountains precisely
as a pestered horse does to get rid of a horse-fly.
Evidently this meant to be quite a shock. It was quite a shock. The
newspapers were full of it for a week; the scientists were full of it
for months after the newspapers eased up. Over in southern California
it shuffled the houses of one coast town like a pack of cards and down
in the Wyoming Rockies it blocked a gap through which a river ran,
so that a valley of ambitious irrigation projects became a lake while
the dispossessed residents were getting their families and their cattle
out. But when Chaney looked up and saw the face of the cliff above him
starting to come loose, he very naturally jumped to the conclusion that
the whole thing had been devised for the main purpose of annihilating
him; there was going to be a disaster and he was going to be the chief
victim.
The mental process of any normal human being would operate thus in
a similar abnormal emergency. Lightning strikes near us and in the
moment of escape we give thanks for deliverance from a peril launched
expressly at us. Heaven sped its direst artillery bolt with intent for
our destruction, but we were too smart for it; we dodged. Probably it
is mortal vanity that makes us say that to ourselves--and even believe
it. We are forever assuming that nature gets up her principal effects
either for our benefit or for our undoing.
Anyhow, that was how it was with Chaney. There he squatted with his
pleasant sins all heavy upon him, and the front of Scalded Peak was
fetching away from its foundation to coast down and totally abolish
Chaney. His bodily reflexes synchronized with his mind's. As his brain
recorded the thought his legs bent to jump and set him running off to
the left along the shore. But before he could take ten long leaps the
slide was finished and over with.
It was miraculous--he marveled over that detail later when he was in a
frame fit for sorting out emotions--it really was miraculous that the
entire contour of one side of the basin could change while a scared man
was traveling thirty yards. Yet that was exactly what took place. In so
brief a space of time as this, the façade of the steep, rocky wall had
been rent free and shoved off and had descended a thousand feet or so,
picking up a million billion bushels of loose stuff on the way, and had
stopped and was settling.
In another half-minute the grit clouds were lifting, and Chaney was
rising up from where he had flopped over into a tangle of windfall.
He was bringing his face slowly out from under the arms which
instinctively he had crossed on his head as he stumbled and sprawled
and he was wiping his hand across his eyes and taking stock of the
accomplished transformation and of his own sensations.