* * * * *
_ILLUSTRATIONS_
"Are you payin' an election bet three weeks after the
election's over? Or is it that you're jest a plain
bedaddled ijiet?" _Frontispiece_
PAGE
"That's nice," spake the fearsome stranger. "Now
stay jest the way you are and don't make no
peep or I'll have to plug you wit' this here gat" 24
Mr. Leary's gait became a desperate gallop, and as
he galloped he shouted: "Wait, please, here I
am.--Here's your passenger" 32
* * * * *
_The Life of the Party_
I
It had been a successful party, most successful. Mrs. Carroway's parties
always were successes, but this one nearing its conclusion stood out
notably from a long and unbroken Carrowayian record. It had been a
children's party; that is to say, everybody came in costume with intent
to represent children of any age between one year and a dozen years. But
twelve years was the limit; positively nobody, either in dress or
deportment, could be more than twelve years old. Mrs. Carroway had made
this point explicit in sending out the invitations, and so it had been,
down to the last hair ribbon and the last shoe buckle. And between
dances they had played at the games of childhood, such as drop the
handkerchief, and King William was King James' son and prisoner's base
and the rest of them.
The novelty of the notion had been a main contributory factor to its
success; that, plus the fact that nine healthy adults out of ten dearly
love to put on freakish garbings and go somewhere. To be exactly
truthful, the basic idea itself could hardly be called new, since long
before some gifted mind thought out the scheme of giving children's
parties for grown-ups, but with her customary brilliancy Mrs. Carroway
had seized upon the issues of the day to serve her social purposes,
weaving timeliness and patriotism into the fabric of her plan by making
it a war party as well. Each individual attending was under pledge to
keep a full and accurate tally of the moneys expended upon his or her
costume and upon arrival at the place of festivities to deposit a like
amount in a repository put in a conspicuous spot to receive these
contributions, the entire sum to be handed over later to the guardians
of a military charity in which Mrs. Carroway was active.
It was somehow felt that this fostered a worthy spirit of wartime
economy, since the donation of a person who wore an expensive costume
would be relatively so much larger than the donation of one who went in
for the simpler things. Moreover, books of thrift stamps were attached
to the favours, the same being children's toys of guaranteed American
manufacture.
In the matter of refreshments Mrs. Carroway had been at pains to comply
most scrupulously with the existing rationing regulations. As the
hostess herself said more than once as she moved to and fro in a
flounced white frock having the exaggeratedly low waistline of the sort
of frock which frequently is worn by a tot of tender age, with a wide
blue sash draped about her almost down at her knees, and with fluffy
skirts quite up to her knees, with her hair caught up in a coquettish
blue bow on the side of her head and a diminutive fan tied fast to one
of her wrists with a blue ribbon--so many of the ladies who had attained
to Mrs. Carroway's fairly well-ripened years did go in for these
extremely girlishly little-girly effects--as the hostess thus attired
and moving hither and yon remark, "If Mr. Herbert Hoover himself were
here as one of my guests to-night I am just too perfectly sure he could
find absolutely nothing whatsoever to object to!"
It would have required much stretching of that elastic property, the
human imagination, to conceive of Mr. Herbert Hoover being there,
whether in costume or otherwise, but that was what Mrs. Carroway said
and repeated. Always those to whom she spoke came right out and agreed
with her.
Now it was getting along toward three-thirty o'clock of the morning
after, and the party was breaking up. Indeed for half an hour past, this
person or that had been saying it was time, really, to be thinking about
going--thus voicing a conviction that had formed at a much earlier hour
in the minds of the tenants of the floor below Mrs. Carroway's studio
apartment, which like all properly devised studio apartments was at the
top of the building.
It was all very well to be a true Bohemian, ready to give and take, and
if one lived down round Washington Square one naturally made allowances
for one's neighbours and all that, but half past three o'clock in the
morning was half past three o'clock in the morning, and there was no
getting round that, say what you would. And besides there were some
people who needed a little sleep once in a while even if there were some
other people who seemed to be able to go without any sleep; and finally,
though patience was a virtue, enough of a good thing was enough and too
much was surplusage. Such was the opinion of the tenants one flight
down.
So the party was practically over. Mr. Algernon Leary, of the firm of
Leary & Slack, counsellors and attorneys at law, with offices at Number
Thirty-two Broad Street, was among the very last to depart. Never had
Mr. Leary spent a more pleasant evening. He had been in rare form, a
variety of causes contributing to this happy state. To begin with, he
had danced nearly every dance with the lovely Miss Milly Hollister, for
whom he entertained the feelings which a gentleman of ripened judgment,
and one who was rising rapidly in his profession, might properly
entertain for an entirely charming young woman of reputed means and
undoubted social position.
A preposterous ass named Perkins--at least, Mr. Leary mentally indexed
Perkins as a preposterous ass--had brought Miss Hollister to the party,
but thereafter in the scheme of things Perkins did not count. He was a
cipher. You could back him up against a wall and take a rubber-tipped
pencil and rub him right out, as it were; and with regards to Miss
Hollister that, figuratively, was what Mr. Leary had done to Mr.
Perkins. Now on the other hand Voris might have amounted to something as
a potential rival, but Voris being newly appointed as a police
magistrate was prevented by press of official duties from coming to the
party; so Mr. Leary had had a clear field, as the saying goes, and had
made the most of it, as the other saying goes.
Moreover, Mr. Leary had been the recipient of unlimited praise upon the
ingenuity and the uniqueness expressed in his costume. He had not
represented a Little Lord Fauntleroy or a Buster Brown or a Boy Scout or
a Juvenile Cadet or a Midshipmite or an Oliver Twist. There had been
three Boy Scouts present and four Buster Browns and of sailor-suited
persons there had been no end, really. But Mr. Leary had chosen to
appear as Himself at the Age of Three; and, as the complimentary comment
proved, his get-up had reflected credit not alone upon its wearer but
upon its designer, Miss Rowena Skiff, who drew fashion pictures for one
of the women's magazines. Out of the goodness of her heart and the
depths of her professional knowledge Miss Skiff had gone to Mr. Leary's
aid, supervising the preparation of his wardrobe at a theatrical
costumer's shop up-town and, on the evening before, coming to his
bachelor apartments, accompanied by her mother, personally to add those
small special refinements which meant so much, as he now realised, in
attaining the desired result.
"Oh, Mr. Leary, I must tell you again how very fetching you do look!
Your costume is adorable, really it is; so--so cute and everything. And
I don't know what I should have done without you to help in the games
and everything. There's no use denying it, Mr. Leary--you were the life
of the party, absolutely!"
At least twice during the night Mrs. Carroway had told Mr. Leary this,
and now as he bade her farewell she was saying it once more in
practically the same words, when Mrs. Carroway's coloured maid, Blanche,
touched him on the arm.
"'Scuse me, suh," apologised Blanche, "but the hall man downstairs he
send up word jes' now by the elevator man 'at you'd best be comin' right
on down now, suh, effen you expects to git a taxicab. He say to tell you
they ain't but one taxicab left an' the driver of 'at one's been
waitin' fur hours an' he act like he might go way any minute now. 'At's
whut the hall man send word, suh."
Blanche had brought his overcoat along and held it up for him, imparting
to the service that small suggestion of a ceremonial rite which the
members of her race invariably do display when handling a garment of
richness of texture and indubitable cost. Mr. Leary let her help him
into the coat and slipped largess into her hand, and as he stepped
aboard the waiting elevator for the downward flight Mrs. Carroway's
voice came fluting to him, once again repeating the flattering phrase:
"You surely were the life of the party!"