Despite Mr. Pottle's pessimistic predictions, there was not a vacant
seat or an unused cubic foot of air in the Granville Opera House that
clinging Spring night, when the asbestos curtain, tugged by tyro hands,
jerkily ascended on the prologue of the Grand Historical Pageant of the
Growth of Civilization in Granville for the Benefit of the
Browning-Tagore Club's Day Nursery. Those who did not have relatives in
the cast appeared to have been lured thither by a certain morbid
curiosity as to what a pageant was. Their faces said plainly that they
were prepared for anything.
After the orchestra had raced through "Poet and Peasant," with the
cornet winning by a comfortable margin, Mrs. P. Bradley Gulick, somewhat
short of breath and rendered doubly wall-eyed by an inexpert make-up,
appeared in red, white and blue cheese-cloth, and announced in a high
voice that she was the Spirit of Progress and would look on with a
kindly, encouraging eye while history's storied page was turned and
spread before them, and, she added, in properly poetic language, she
would tell them what it was all about. The audience gave her the
applause due the dowager of the town's leading family, and not one
hand-clap more. Mr. P. Bradley Gulick, bony but impressive, in a Grecian
robe, appeared and proclaimed that he was the Spirit of Civilization. A
Ballet of the Waters followed, and as a climax, Evelyn Gulick, age
thirteen, in appropriate green gauze, announced:
"_Who am I, oh friends and neighbors?
I'm the Spirit of the Waters,
Lordly, swift, Monongahela;
Argosies float on my bosom----_"
She tapped her narrow chest, and a look of horror crept into her face;
her mind seemed to be groping for something. Tremulously she repeated,
"_Argosies float on my bosom._"
The voice of Mrs. Pottle prompted from the wings,
"_And fleets of ships with treasures laden._"
Evelyn clutched at the sound, but it slipped from her, and she wildly
began,
"_Argosies float on my bosom_ (Slap, slap)
_And sheeps of flits--and sheeps of flits----_"
She burst into tears, and turning a spiteful face toward one of the
boxes, she cried,
"You stop making faces at me, Jessie Winterbottom."
Then she fled to the wings.
This served to bring to the attention of the audience the fact that a
strange thing had happened: Felix Winterbottom and his family had come
to the pageant. He was there, concealed as far as possible by the red
plush curtains of the box, defiant and forbidding. From the glance he
now and then cast at the decollete back of his wife, it was evident that
he had not come voluntarily.
Mrs. Pottle, in the wings, bit a newly manicured fingernail.
"I begged Mrs. Gulick to make that dumb child of hers learn her part,"
she whispered wrathfully to her husband.
"Mrs. Gulick says it's your fault for not prompting loud enough," said
Mr. Pottle.
"She did, did she?" Mrs. Pottle assumed what is known in ring circles as
a fighting face.
"I can't stand much more of their pestering," said Mr. Pottle darkly.
"Ssssh," said his wife. "The Paul Revere scene is going to start."
In the wings, Wendell Gulick, Junior, was making ready to mount his
charger. The charger, as he had specified, was white, peculiarly white,
for it had been found necessary at the last moment to conceal some
harness stains by powdering her liberally with crushed lilac talcum.
Agnes looked resentful but resigned. Mr. Gulick, Junior, was a plump
young man, with nose-glasses, and satisfied lips, who had the
distinction of being the only person in Granville who had ever ridden to
hounds. He cultivated a horsey atmosphere, wore a riding crop pin in his
tie, and was admittedly the local authority on things equine. He looked
most formidable in hip-high leathern boots, a continental garb, and a
powdered wig. It was regretable that the steed did not measure up to her
rider. Save for being approximately white, Agnes had little to
recommend her for the role. She had one of those long, sad, philosophic
faces, and she appeared to be considerably taller in the hips than in
the shoulders. She had a habit of looking back over her shoulder with a
surprised expression, as if she missed her milk wagon.
Encouraged by a slap on the flank from a stage-hand, Agnes advanced to
the center of the stage at a brisk, business-like trot, and there
stopped, and nodded to the audience.
"Whoa, Agnes," shouted some bad little boy in the gallery.
Young Mr. Gulick, in the role of Paul Revere, affected to pat his
mount's head, and in a voice of thunder, roared:
"_Gallant stallion, swift and noble,_"
Agnes reached out a long neck and nibbled at the scenery.
"_Lent me by my good friend, Gulick,_"
Agnes looked over her shoulder and smiled at her rider.
"_Patriot, scholar, king of horsemen,_"
Agnes scratched herself heartily on a property rock.
"_Speed ye, speed ye, speed ye onward!_"
The business of the scene called for a spirited exit by Paul Revere,
waving his cocked hat. But Agnes had other plans. She liked the taste of
scenery. She did not budge. In vain did the scion of the Gulicks beat
with frantic heels upon her flat flanks.
"Speed ye onward, or we'll be late," he improvised cleverly.
She masticated a canvas leaf from a convenient shrub and did not speed
onward.
"Gid-ap, Agnes," shrilled the boy in the gallery. "The folks is waitin'
for their milk."
The audience grew indecorous.
Even his ruddy make-up could not conceal the fact that Mr. Wendell
Gulick, Junior, was very red in the face, and that his lips were forming
words not in that, or any other pageant. His leathern heels boomed
hollowly on Agnes's barrel of body. To ring down the curtain was
impossible; Agnes had taken her place directly beneath it.
Paul Revere turned a passionate face to the wings,
"Hey, Pottle," he bellowed, "why don't you do something instead of
standing there grinning like a baboon?"
Thus charged, Mr. Pottle's toga-clad figure came nimbly from the wings,
to great applause, and seized Agnes by the bridle. Pottle tugged
lustily. Agnes smiled and did not give way an inch.
"Send for Matt Runkle," hissed Mr. Gulick, Junior.
"Send for Matt Runkle," echoed Mr. Pottle.
"Send for Matt Runkle," cried voices in the audience.
"He's home in bed," wailed Mrs. Pottle from the wings.
"Get one of the Runkle kids," shouted Mr. Pottle, seeking to arouse
Agnes with kicks of his sandal-shod feet.
Little Etta Runkle, partly clad in the tinsel and cheese-cloth of a
violet, and partly in her everyday underwear, was fetched from a
dressing room. She was a bright child and sensed the situation as soon
as it had been explained to her twice.
"Oh," she said, "Pa always says Agnes won't start unless you clink two
milk bottles together."
The audience was calling forth suggestions to Paul Revere, astride, and
Pottle, on foot. They included a bonfire beneath Agnes, and dynamite.
Even the rock-bound face of old Felix Winterbottom, in the depths of the
box, showed the vestige of a crease that might, with a little
imagination, be considered the start of a smile.
A fevered search back stage netted two bottles, dusty and smelling of
turpentine and gin, respectively. Mr. Pottle grasped their necks and
clinked them together with resounding clinks. The effect on Agnes was
electrical. From utter immobility she started with a startled hop. The
unready Mr. Gulick, Junior, after one mad grasp at her mane, rolled
ignominiously from her broad back, and landed on the stage in a position
that was undignified for a Revere and positively painful for a Gulick.
Agnes bolted to the wings. The curtain darted down.
The audience seemed to take this occurrence in a spirit of levity, but
not so Mrs. Pottle. Hot tears gathered in her eyes.
"That wretch would have a white horse," she said. "They would put Paul
Revere's Ride in. Now look. Now look!"
"There, there, honey," said Mr. Pottle, between sympathetic teeth.
"We'll fix 'em."
The pageant pursued its more or less majestic way, but as the history of
Granville was unfolded, scene upon scene, it became all too apparent to
Mrs. Pottle that her poetic opus could not recapture the first serious
mood of the audience. It positively jeered when Miss Eltruda Gulick
announced that she was the Spirit of the Bogardus Canal. But it grew
more interested as the curtain slid up on the battle scene. This, Mrs.
Pottle felt, was her dramatic masterpiece. There lay the peaceful
pioneer settlement--artfully fashioned from paste-board--while the
simple but virile settlers strolled up and down the embryo Main Street
and exchanged couplets. The chief settler, an adipose young man with a
lisp, was Mr. Gurnee Gulick, until then noted as the most adept
practitioner of the modern dance-steps in that part of Ohio. Through a
beard, he announced, falsetto,
"_I give thee greeting, neighbor Gulick,
Upon this blossom-burgeoning morning,
I trust 'tis not the wily red-skin
I just heard whooping in the forest._"
His trust was misplaced. It was, indeed, the wily red-skin in the
persons of Mr. Edward Brannigan--known to intimates as "Beansy," and
nine of his fellow horseshoe makers who had been hired to impersonate
red-men, in rather loose-fitting brown cotton skins. Mr. Brannigan and
fellow red-skins had done their part dutifully at rehearsals, and had
permitted themselves to be knocked down, cuffed about a bit, and finally
put to inglorious rout by the settlers. But on the fateful night of the
pageant, while waiting for their turn to appear, they had passed the
moments with a jug of cider that was standing with reluctant feet at
that high point in its career where it has ceased to be sweet and has
not yet become vinegar. That was no reason why they should not do their
part, for it was not an intricate one. They were to rush on, with
whoops, be annihilated, and retire in confusion.
They did rush on with whoops that left nothing to be desired from the
standpoint of realism. Mrs. Pottle, tense in the wings, was
congratulating herself that one scene at least had dramatic strength. It
was at this moment that Mr. Brannigan, as Chief Winipasuki, sachem of
the Algonquins, encountered Mr. Gulick, the principal settler. In his
enthusiasm, Mr. Gulick over-acted his part. He smote the red-skin
warrior so earnestly on the ear that Mr. Brannigan described a parabola
and dented a papier-mache rock with his hundred and seventy pounds of
muscular body. His part called for him to lie there, prone and impotent,
while the settlers drove off his band.
It may have been a sudden rebellion of a proud spirit. It may have been
the wraith of history in protest; it may have been an inherently
perverse nature; or it may have been the cider. In any event, Chief
Winipasuki got to his feet, war-whooped, and knocked the principal
settler through the paste-board wall of the block-house. Those in the
audience who were fond of realism enjoyed what ensued immensely. The
settlers of the town, who were the nice young men, and the Indians, who
were not so nice but were strong and willing, had at one another, and
although they had only nature's weapons, the battle, as it waged up and
down and back and through the shattered scenery, was stirring enough.
When the curtain was at last brought down, Chief Winipasuki had a
half-nelson on Settler Gulick, who was calling in a loud penetrating
voice for the police.
In all the hub-bub and confusion, in all the delirium of the audience,
Mr. Pottle remained calm enough to note that a miracle had taken place;
Mr. Felix Winterbottom was chuckling. It was a dry, unpracticed chuckle
at best, but it was a chuckle, nevertheless. Mr. Pottle was observing
the phenomenon with wide eyes when he felt his elbow angrily plucked.
"You're to blame for this, Pottle," rasped a voice. It was Gurnee
Gulick's irate father.
"Me?" sputtered Mr. Pottle.
"Yes. You. You knew those ruffians had been drinking."
"I did not."
"Don't contradict me, you miserable little hair-cutting fool."
"What? How dare you----" began Mr. Pottle.
"Bah. You wart!" said Mr. Gulick, and turned his square yard of fat back
on the incensed little man.
Mr. Pottle was taking a step after him as if he intended to leap up and
sink his teeth into the back of Mr. Gulick's overflowing neck, when
another hand clutched him. It was his wife.
Her face was white and tear-stained, her lip quivering.
"They've ruined it, they've ruined it," she exclaimed. "I warned that
simpleton Gurnee Gulick not to be rough with those horseshoe boys. Oh,
dear, oh, dear." She pillowed her brimming eyes in his toga-draped
shoulder.
"You've got to go out, now," she sobbed, "and give the historical
epilogue."
"Never," said Mr. Pottle. "A thousand nevers."
"Please, Ambrose. We've got to end it, somehow."
"Very well," announced Mr. Pottle. "I'll go. But mind you, Blossom
Pottle, I won't be responsible for what I say."
"Neither will I," sobbed his spouse.
Mr. Pottle hitched his toga about him, and strode out on the stage.
There was some applause, but more titters. He held up his hand for
silence, as orators do, and glared so fiercely at his audience that the
theater grew comparatively quiet. At the top of his voice, he began,
"_Who am I, oh list'ning peoples?_"
"Pottle the barber," answered a voice in the gallery.
Mr. Pottle paused, fastened an awful eye on the owner of the voice, and,
stepping out of character, remarked, succinctly:
"If you interrupt me again, Charlie Meacham, I'll come up there and
knock your block off." He swept the house with a ferocious glance. "And
that goes for the rest of you," he added. The intimidated audience went
"ssssssh" at each other; Pottle was popular in Granville. He launched
himself again.
"_Who am I, oh list'ning peoples?
Hist'ry's spirit, stern and truthful!
Come I here to give you an earful,
Of our city's inside history,
How the Gulicks grabbed the real estate,
By foreclosing poor folk's mortgages._"
He did not have to ask for silence now. The hush of death was on the
house, and the audience bent its ears toward him; even old Felix
Winterbottom, on the edge of his chair, cupped a gnarled, attentive ear.
Mr. Pottle went on,
"_You have heard the Gulick's blowing,
Of their wonderful relations._
_Lend an ear, and I will slip you,
What the real, true, red-hot dope is._"
He gave his toga a hitch, advanced to the foot-lights, and continued,
"_Old Saul Gulick was a drinker,
Always full of home-made liquor,
And he got the town of Granville,
From the Indians, by cheating,
Got 'em drunk, the records tell us,
Got 'em boiled and stewed and glassy;
Ere they sobered up, they sold him,
All the land in this fair county,
For a dollar and a quarter,
Which, my friends, he never paid them._"
The audience held its breath; Felix Winterbottom cupped both ears.
Pottle hurried on,
"_Now we come to 'Lijah Gulick,
Him that lent the noble stallion
To Revere, the midnight rider.
Honest, folks, you'll bust out laughing,
When I tell you 'Lijah stole him.
For Elijah was a horsethief,
And, as such, was hanged near Boston.
"Patriot, scholar, king of horsemen"--
Honest, folks, that makes me snicker.
Yes, he let Paul ride his stallion--
And charged him seven bucks an hour!
If you think that I am lying,
You will find all this in writing,
In the library in the state house._"
Sensation! Gasps in the audience. Commotion in the wings. Felix
Winterbottom made no attempt to conceal the fact that he was chuckling.
Pottle drew in a deep breath, and spoke again.
"_Then you've heard of Noah Gulick,
Him that won the Revolution.
If he ever was a major,
George J. Washington never knew it.
When they charged at Saratoga,
He was hiding in a cellar.
Was he on the staff of Washington?
Sure he was--but in the kitchen.
I'll admit he made good coffee--
But a soldier? Quit your kidding.
Now I'll take up Nathan Gulick,
His descendants never mention
That he spent a month in prison
More than once, for stealing chickens----_"
Here Mr. Pottle abruptly stopped. The curtain had been dropped with a
crashing bang by unseen hands in the wings.
As it fell, there was a curious, cackling noise in one of the boxes, the
like of which had never before been heard in Granville. It was Felix
Winterbottom laughing as if he were being paid a dollar a guffaw.