He stopped where he was, in the middle of the room, with his eyes and
his hands seeking for the seams of the closing of his main garment. Then
he remembered what in his stress he had forgotten--the opening or
perhaps one should say the closing was at the back. He twisted his arms
rearward, his fingers groping along his spine.
Now any normal woman has the abnormal ability to do and then to undo a
garment hitching behind. Nature, which so fashioned her elbows that she
cannot throw a stone at a hen in the way in which a stone properly
should be thrown at a hen, made suitable atonement for this articular
oversight by endowing her joints with the facile knack of turning on
exactly the right angle, with never danger of sprain or dislocation, for
the subjugation of a back-latching frock. Moreover, years of practice
have given her adeptness in accomplishing this achievement, so that to
her it has become an everyday feat. But man has neither the experience
to qualify him nor yet the bodily adaptability.
By reaching awkwardly up and over his shoulder Mr. Leary managed to tug
the topmost button of his array of buttons out of its attendant
buttonholes, but below and beyond that point he could not progress. He
twisted and contorted his body; he stretched his arms in their sockets
until twin pangs of agony met and crossed between his shoulder blades,
and with his two exploring hands he pulled and fumbled and pawed and
wrenched and wrested, to make further headway at his task. But the
sewing-on had been done with stout thread; the buttonholes were taut and
snug and well made. Those slippery flat surfaces amply resisted him.
They eluded him; defied him; outmastered him. Thanks be to, or curses be
upon, the passionate zeal of Miss Rowena Skiff for exactitudes, he,
lacking the offices of an assistant undresser, was now as definitely and
finally inclosed in this distressful pink garment as though it had been
his own skin. Speedily he recognised this fact in all its bitter and
abominable truth, but mechanically, he continued to wrestle with the
obdurate fastenings.
While he thus vainly contended, events in which he directly was
concerned were occurring beneath that roof. From within his refuge he
heard the sounds of slamming doors, of hurrying footsteps, of excited
voices merging into a distracted chorus; but above all else, and from
the rest, two of these voices stood out by reason of their augmented
shrillness, and Mr. Leary marked them both, for since he had just heard
them he therefore might identify their respective unseen owners.
"There's something--there's somebody in the house!" At the top of its
register one voice was repeating the warning over and over again, and
judging by direction this alarmist was shrieking her words through a
keyhole on the floor below him. "I saw it--him--whatever it was. I
opened my door to look out in the hall and it--he--was right there. Oh,
I could have touched him! And then it ran and I didn't see him any more
and I slammed the door and began screaming."
"You seen what?"
The strident question seemed to come from far below, down in the depths
of the house, where the caretaker abided.
"Whatever it was. I opened the door and he was right in the hall there
glaring at me. I could have touched it. And then he ran and I----"
"What was he like? I ast what was he like--it's that I'm astin' you!"
The janitress was the one who pressed for an answer.
For the moment the question, pointed though it was, went unanswered. The
main speaker--shrieker, rather--was plainly a person with a mania for
details, and even in this emergency she intended, as now developed, to
present all the principal facts in the case, and likewise all the
incidental facts so far as these fell within her scope of knowledge.
"I was awake," she clarioned through the keyhole, speaking much faster
than any one following this narrative can possibly hope to read the
words. "I couldn't sleep. I never do sleep well when I'm in a strange
house. And anyhow, I was all alone. My nephew by marriage--Mr. Edward
Braydon, you know--had gone out with the gentleman who lives on the
floor above to play cards, and he said he was going to be gone nearly
all night, and my niece--I'm Mrs. Braydon's unmarried aunt from
Poughkeepsie and I'm down here visiting them--my niece was called to
Long Island yesterday by illness--it's her sister who's ill with
something like the bronchitis. And he was gone and so she was gone, and
so here I was all alone and he told me not to stay up for him, but I
couldn't sleep well--I never can sleep in a strange house--and just a
few minutes ago I heard the bell ring and I supposed he had forgotten
to take his latchkey with him, and so I got up to let him in. And I
called down the stairs and asked him if it was him and he answered back.
But it didn't sound like his voice. But I didn't think anything of that.
But, of course, it was out of the ordinary for him to have a voice like
that. But all the same I went back to bed. But he didn't come in and I
was just getting up again to see what detained him--his voice really
sounded so strange I thought then he might have been taken sick or
something. But just as I got to the door a plank creaked and I opened
the door and there it was right where I could have touched him. And then
it ran--and oh, what if----"
"I'm astin' you once more what it was like?"
"How should I know except that----"
"Was it a big, fat, wild, bare-headed, scary, awful-lookin' scoundrel
dressed in some kind of funny pink clothes?"
"Yes, that's it! That's him--he was all sort of pink. Oh, did you see
him too? Oh, is it a burglar?"
"Burglar nothin'! It's a ravin', rampagin' lunatic--that's what it is!"
"Oh, my heavens, a lunatic!"
"Sure it is. He tried to git me to let him in and----"
"Oh, whatever shall we do!"