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CHAPTER III
Among the rolling stock of a great railroad, a moving mass of steel. A soft sludge as it came noiselessly to rest beneath the glazed chintz awnings of the Butterfly Center station.
A faint scent of chypre from Petticoat’s cigarette as he alit.
From his private train, which had slithered across the intervening spaces and slid into its moorings as butter slides from a hot plate.
It is September, cool, green and well-sprinkled.
The obviously important man was followed by a yellow-topped, rose-cheeked girl, whose eyes were all blue and a yard wide as she looked about.
About what?
About eighteen.
They were Dr. Big Bill Petticoat and his bride, Warble.
They had been married and had spent their honeymoon in riotous loving.
It had been transforming. Warble had been frightened to discover how hungry she could be even on a wedding trip.
Bill had mused to himself; what’s the difference between an optimist and a pessimist? One honeymoon. And now they had reached their home town. People were not altogether new to Warble. She had seen them before. But these were her own people, to bathe and encourage and adorn—and, they didn’t seem to need it.
They distressed her. They were so smart. She had always held that there is no style in America, no chic effects out of Paris.
But here on the terrace of the simple little hewn stone station were hordes of men and women who seemed to be, mentally, morally and physically, literally butterflies.
“Isn’t there any way of waking them up?” she begged of Petticoat, grabbing his arm and shaking him.
“These guys? Wake ‘em up? What for? They’re happy.”
“But they’re so smug—no, that isn’t what I mean. They’re so stick-in-the-mud.”
“Look here, Warble, you want to get over your fool idea that because a woman is slender she isn’t adorable. These folks are up to date, snuff and mischief.”
“I know, that’s what’s biting me. Life seems so hard for them.”
“Oh, they don’t mind it. Now you must meet the bunch. They’re all down here to meet their husbands or something just as good. Now you behave yourself.”
“Yop.”
She had a grip on herself. She was ready to kiss and be friends with them all. But she was scared at the rackety pack who ballyhooed like Coney Island and surged down upon her like a Niagara Falls.
She had the impression that all the men had soft voices, large, embracing arms, gimlet eyes and bored, impersonal smiles. She knew they were taking her in. Their pleasant hoots and yells of greeting overcame her.
“Oh, pleathe—pleathe,” she lisped.
In her fresh frilled dimity and soft sash of baby-blue Surah, her rolled white socks disclosing but a few tantalizing inches of seashell-pink calf, Warble stood, eyes cast down, a pretty, foolish thing,
As soft as young,
As gay as soft,
and, to a man, the male population of Butterfly Center fell for her.
Not so the remainder of the citizens.
One of the men was yelling at Petticoat:
“Hop into my car, Bill, Don’t see yours—I’ll tote the bride-person you’ve got there—with joy and gladness.” Warble looked at the yeller.
“Can’t quite place me, chick, can you?” he grinned at her. “Well I’m only old Goldwin Leathersham—no use for me in the world but to spend money. Want me to spend some on you? Here’s my old thing—step up here, Marigold, and be introduced. She’s really nicer than she looks, Mrs. Petticoat.”
“Indeed I’m not,” Marigold Leathersham cried gaily, “I couldn’t be—nobody could be!”
She came running—a beautiful, slim young woman, with a wealth of expensive looking gold hair, white and gold teeth that broke into a lavish smile. Her voice was rich and though she looked above, away from and through Warble, yet she saw her.
“So glad to welcome you, you pretty baby,” she chirruped. “You’re going to love us all, aren’t you?”
“Yop,” said Warble, and smiled her engaging smile.
“You bet she’ll love us,” declared Leathersham, “she’ll make the world go round! Hello, Little One,” he turned to pat the cheek of a white-haired, red-faced old lady, who hawk-eyed and hawk-nosed, stood by, listening in. “This, Mrs. Petticoat, is our Lady Bountiful, Mrs. Charity Givens—noted for her generosity. She ostentatiously heads all Donation Lists, and she’s going to start a rest cure where your husband’s unsuccessful cases may die in peace. And here’s one of the cases. Hello, Iva Payne!”
“Hello,” languidly responded a girl like a long pale lily—a Burne-Jones type, who sometimes carried around a small stained-glass window to rest her head against.
“Are you really Bill’s wife?” she asked, a little disinterestedly, of Warble.
“Yop,” said Warble, and made a face at her.
“How quaint,” said Iva.
“Whoopee, Baby! Here we are,” and Petticoat rescued his bride from the middle of a crowd and yanked her toward his car.
The car was a museum piece, and as Warble caromed into its cushions she felt that her lines had fallen in pleasant places.
That was the way Fate came to Warble. In big fat chunks, in slathers. Unexpected, sudden, inescapable—that’s Fate all over.
“I shall like Mr. Leathersham—I shall call him Goldie. They’re all nice and friendly—the men. But this town! Oh, my Heavens! This Jewel Casket—this Treasure Table! I can’t live through it! This Floating Island of a Tipsy Charlotte!” Her husband nudged her. “You look like you had a pain,” he said; “Scared? I don’t expect you to fit in at first. You have to get eased into things. It’s different from Pittsburgh. But you’ll come to like it—love is so free here, and the smartest people on earth.”
She winked at him. “I love you for your misunderstanding. I’m just dog-tired. And too many chocolates. Give me a rest, dear. I’m all in from wear sheeriness.”
She laid her feet in his lap and snuggled into the corner of the pearl-colored upholstery.
She was ready for her new home, beautiful, celebrated Ptomaine Haul. Petticoat told her that his mother had been living with him, but had fled incontinently on hearing a description of Warble.
The bride chuckled and smiled engagingly as the car slithered round a corner and stopped under the porte cochère of a great house set in the midst of a landscape.
Neo-Colonial, of a purity unsurpassed by the Colonists themselves.
A park stretching in front; gardens at the back; steps up to a great porch, and a front door copied from the Frary house in Old Deerfield.
A great hall—at its back twin halves of a perfect staircase. To the right, a charming morning room, where Petticoat led his bride.
“You like it? It’s not inharmonious. I left it as it is—in case you care to rebuild or redecorate.”
“It’s a sweet home—” she was touched by his indifference. “So artistic.”
Petticoat winced, but he was a polite chap, and he only said, carelessly, “Yes, home is where the art is,” and let it go at that.
In the hall and the great library she was conscious of vastness and magnificent distances, but, she thought, if necessary, I can use roller skates.
As she followed Petticoat and the current shift of servants upstairs, she quavered to herself like the fat little gods of the hearth.
She took her husband into her arms, and felt that at last she had realized her one time dreams of the moving pictures, ay, even to the final close-up.
What mattered, so long as she could paw at the satin back of his shirt, and admire his rich and expensive clothing.
“Dear—so dear—” she murmured.
CHAPTER IV
“The Leathershams are giving a ball for us to-night,” Petticoat said, casually, as he powdered his nose in the recesses of his triplicate mirror.
“A ball?”
“Oh, I don’t mean a dance—I mean—er—well, what you’d call a sociable, I suppose.”
“Oh, ain’t we got fun!”
“And, I say, Warble, I’ve got to chase a patient now; can you hike about a bit by yourself?”
“Course I can. Who’s your patient?”
“Avery Goodman—the rector of St. Judas’ church. He will eat terrapin made out of—you know what. And so, he’s all tied up in knots with ptomaine poisoning and I’ve got to straighten him out. It means a lot to us, you know.”
“I know; skittle.”
Left alone, Warble proceeded systematically to examine the interior of Ptomaine Haul. She gazed about her own bedroom and a small part of its exquisite beauty dawned upon her. It was an exact copy of Marie Antoinette’s and the delicately carved furniture and pale blue upholstery and hangings harmonized with the painted domed ceiling and paneled walls.
The dressing table bore beautiful appointments of ivory, as solid as Warble’s own dome and from the Cupid-held canopy over the bed to the embroidered satin foot-cushions, it was top hole.
The scent was of French powders, perfumes and essences and sachets, such as Warble had not smelled since before the war.
“Can you beat it,” she groaned. “How can I live with doodads like this?” She saw the furniture as a circle of hungry restaurant customers ready to eat her up. She kicked the dozen lace pillows off the head of the bed.
“No utility anywhere,” she cried. “Everything futile, inutile, brutal! I hate it! I hate it! Why did I ever—”
And then she remembered she was a Petticoat now, a lace, frilled Petticoat—not one of those that Oliver Herford so pathetically dubbed “the short and simple flannels of the poor.”
Yes, she was now a Petticoat—one of the aristocratic Cotton-Petticoats, washable, to be sure, but a dressy Frenchy Petticoat, and as such she must take her place on the family clothesline.
She drifted from oriel window to casement, and on to a great becurtained and becushioned bay, and looked out on the outlook.
She saw gardens like the Tuileries and Tuilerums, soft, shining pools, little skittering fountains, marble Cupids and gay-tinted flowers. This was the scene for her to look down upon and live up to.
“I mustn’t! I mustn’t! I’m nervous this afternoon! Am I sick?… Good Lord, I hope it isn’t that! Not now! I’d hate it—I’d be scared to death! Some day—but, please, kind Fate, not now! I don’t want to go down now with ptomaine poisoning! Not till after I’ve had my dinner! I’m going out for a walk.”
When Warble had plodded along for six hours, she had pretty well done up the town.
Ptomaine Street, which took its name from her husband’s own residence, was a wide, leafy avenue with a double row of fine old trees on each side. They were Lebbek trees, and the whole arrangement was patterned after the avenue which Josephine built for Napoleon, out to the Mena House.
She passed the homes of the most respectable citizens. Often they were set back from the road, and the box hedges or tall iron fences prevented her from seeing the houses. But she saw enough and sped on to the more interesting business and shopping section of Butterfly Center.
She passed Ariel Inn, the hotel being like a Swiss Chalet, perched on some convenient rocks that rose to a height above street level. A few fairly nimble chamois were leaping over these rocks and Warble heard a fairy-like chime of bells as afternoon tea was announced.
A man in an artist’s smock sauntered across the street. A palette on one thumb, he scratched his chin with the other. A hearse, its long box filled with somebody, crawled down the block. A dainty Sedan with a woman’s idle face at its window wafted by. From a Greek Temple came the sound of Interpretative Dancing, and the applause of perfunctory hands.
She wanted to elope. Her own ideas of utility, efficiency, and economy were being shattered—broken in pieces like a potter’s vessel. Her sense of proportion, her instinct for relative values, her abhorrence of waste motion, her inborn system and method, all were swept away as a thief in the night. Could she reform this giddy whirl? Could she bring chaos out of cosmos? Was her own ego sufficient to egg her on in her chosen work?
She haed her doots.
She maundered down the street on one side—back on the other.
Dudie’s Drug-store was like unto a Turkish Mosque. Minaret and pinnaret, battlement and shuttle-door, it was a perfect drug-store, nobly planned. The long flight of steps leading up to its ptortal was a masterpiece in the step line.
Inside, the Soda Pagoda was a joy of temple bells and soft, sweet drinks, while at the prescription counter, the line formed on the right, to get Dr. Petticoat’s prescriptions filled for their ptomaines.
A Moldavian Incense Shop was the barber’s; a half-timbered house sold English-built clothes; a brick affair of Georgian influences and splendid lines, housed the hardware needed by the Butterflies, and the milliner’s was a replica of the pyramid of Cestus.
The bank was the Vatican, with Swiss guards in the doorway.
Perpetual waste motion! In all the town not one building that connoted to Warble the apotheosis of efficiency shown by the King Alfred tossing cakes in the window of Bairns’ Restaurant. Not a dozen buildings that even suggested use in addition to their beauty.
And the street was cluttered with trees in tubs, window boxes, sudden little fountains or statues; gilded wicker birdcages on tall poles—songs issuing therefrom.
Arbors, covered with pink Dorothy Perkinses, here and there by the curbside. And, worst of all, people sitting idle in the arbors. Idle!
She wouldn’t have cared so much, if the people had been busy—even one of them. She fought herself. “I must be wrong. It can’t be as silly as it looks! It can’t!”
She went home and found Petticoat waiting for her.
“Like the burg, eh? Great stuff, what? Not an eyesore inside the city wall. Good work, I’ll megaphone.”
Warble sat down in an easy-going chair—so easy, it slid across the room with her, and collided with a life-sized Chinese lady of yellow stone.
“Yes,” Warble responded, “it’s very uninteresting.”
CHAPTER V
Goldwin Leathersham was a great Captain of Industry. In fact, he put the dust in industry, or, at least, he took it out of it. He got it, anyway.
His home was an Aladdin’s Palace, with a slight influence of Solomon’s Temple. Gold was his keynote, and he was never off the key.
When our Petticoats arrived at the party, they were met by gold-laced footmen, who whisked them into shape and passed them along.
Warble found herself in a white and gold salon, so vast, that she felt like a goldfish out of water. The place looked as if Joseph Urban had designed it after he had died and gone to Golconda. Whatever wasn’t white was gold, and the other way round. The gold piano had only white keys, and the draperies were cloth of gold with bullion fringe. All real, too—no rolled or plated stuff.
A huge coat-of-arms in a gold frame announced that Mr. Leathersham was descended from the Gold Digger Indians, a noble ancestry indeed; and it was no secret that his wife had played in “The Gold-diggers,” during its second decade run.
Marigold Leathersham was a charming hostess, and greeted Warble with a shriek of welcome. “You duck,” she cried; “how heavenly of you to dress so well.”
Warble was simply attired in a white pussy-willow silk underslip. In her haste and excitement she had forgotten to add the gown meant to go over it, and as she wore no jewels save the chased gold lingerie clasps at her shoulders, the result was a simplicity as charming as it was unintentional.
And so she made a hit.
That was the way things came to Warble; a hit—a social success—and all because she forgot to put on her frock.
She mingled with the glittering throng of gilded youth, of golden lads and girls, of gilt-edged married people, and found herself in the arms of Goldwin Leathersham, her host.
“Here comes the bride,” he shouted, as he piloted her about and introduced everybody to her.
“This demure little beauty,” he said, “is Daisy Snow. Note her sweet, pure face and wide-eyed, innocent gaze.”
“It is all so new—so wonderful—” Miss Snow breathed, “I’m a débutante, you know, and I have scarcely butterflied out of my chrysalis yet. How splendid the Leathershams are. He has a heart of gold. Oh, he is such a good man, he says his life motto is the Golden Rule.”
“And Mrs. Leathersham?” asked Warble.
“Marigold? Oh, yes, she’s as good as gold, too. We’re firm friends.”
Warble was agog to mingle, so she moved on.
Le Grand Paynter, a celebrated Cubic artist, fascinated her with his flowing locks, flowing tie and marvelous flow of conversation. He asked to paint her as a Semi-nude Descending a Ladder, but she only said she must refer him to her Petticoat.
Freeman Scattergood, the well-known philanthropist was chatting with Mrs. Charity Givens, who was the champion Subscription List Header. Many had tried to oust her from this enviable position but without success. Near them stood Avery Goodman, the rector, and he was deeply engaged in a flirtation with Miss May Young, one of his choir girls.
Manley Knight, a returned soldier, was resplendent with a Croix de Guerre, a Hot Cross Bun and many other Noughts and Crosses.
Warble fingered them in her light way.
“Isn’t he splendid!” babbled Daisy Snow the ingénue; “Oh, how wonderful to offer one’s life for glory! You can fairly see the heroism bubble out of his eyes!”
“How you admire him!” said Warble.
“Yes, but he doesn’t care for me.”
“Not specially,” admitted Manley Knight. “Yes,” Daisy said. “He thinks me too ignorant and unsophisticated—and I am. Now, there’s Lotta Munn, the heiress—she’s more in his line. But Ernest Swayne is devoted to Lotta. I think it will be a real love match—like the Trues.”
“The Trues?” asked Warble, politely.
“Yes,” and she glanced toward a very devoted looking pair sitting apart from the rest, on a small divan. “They’re wonderful! Herman True is the most marvelous husband you ever saw. He never speaks to anyone but his wife. And she’s just the same. She was Faith Loveman, you know. And they’ve been married two years and are still honeymoon lovers! Ah, what a fate!”
Daisy sighed, a sweet little-girly sigh, and blushed like a slice of cold boiled ham.
But this Who’s Whosing was interrupted by a footman with a tray of cocktails.
Daisy Snow refused, of course, as became a débutante so did Judge Drinkwater, who stood near by, frowning upon the scene, he being a Prohibitionist.
A sickly looking lady next to him achieved several, and Warble asked Daisy who she might be.
“Oh, that’s Iva Payne—you met her, you know. She’s very delicate, a semi-invalid, under the care of specialists all the time. I don’t exactly know what her malady is, but it’s something very interesting to the doctors. There’s scarcely anything she can eat—I believe she brings her own specially prepared food to parties.
“She seems to relish the cock-a-whoops all right,” Warble commented.
“I understand the doctors prescribe stimulants for her—she is not at all strong. They give her artificial strength, she says.”
“Yes, she seems to be strong for ‘em. Don’t you take any?”
“Oh no! I’m a débutante. And mother says she wants to be with me when I take my first cocktail and smoke my first cigarette.”
“Dear girl, Daisy, so fresh and unspoiled! Her mother is one of a thousand.”
This from Manley Knight, who constituted himself Daisy’s proxy in the matter of cocktails and drank all that would have been Daisy’s had her mother permitted.
Goldwin Leathersham seemed to be acting as proxy for some débutante also, for he seemed to feel pretty bobbish, but Warble was only slightly interested in the whole matter.
She rolled her Wedgwooden eyes about, hoping the horde would be herded toward the dining-room. But no such luck.
Instead they drifted in the opposite direction and, swept along with the crowd, Warble found herself in one of a serried series of gilt chairs, facing a platform as large as a theater stage.
An erudite looking man who appeared on the platform received tumultous applause.
“Who is he?” Warble whispered to her neighbor, who chanced to be Avery Goodman, “an impersonator?”
“Lord, no; it’s Wunstone, the great scientist—rants on Fourth Avenue dimensions, or something like that.”
In a tone of forceful mildness the speaker began: “It must be conceded that, other things being equal, and granting the investiture of all insensate communication, that a psychic moment may or may not, in accordance with what under no circumstances could be termed irrelevancy, become warily regarded as a coherent symbol by one obviously of a trenchant humor. But, however, in proof of a smouldering discretion, no feature is entitled to less exorbitant honor than the unquenchable demand of endurance.
“Though, of course, other things being equal, and granting the investiture of all insensate communication, no feature is entitled, in accordance with what under no circumstances could be termed irrelevancy, to become warily regarded as a coherent symbol. And doubtless in proof of a smouldering discretion, and in accordance with one obviously of a trenchant humor, it may or may not be warily regarded.
“Though it cannot be denied that the true relevancy of thought to psychic action is largely dependent on the ever increasing forces of disregarded symbolisms. And this again proves the pantheistic power of doubt, considered for the moment and for the subtle purposes of our argument as faith. For, granting that two and two are six, the corollary reasoning must be that no premise is or may be capable of such conclusion as will render it sublunary to its agreed parallel.
“But this view is ultra and should be adopted with caution.
“We are therefore forced to the conclusion that pure altruism is impossible in connection with neo-psychology.”
There was more, but it was at that point that Warble went to sleep.
She was awakened later by the high notes of a celebrated Metropolitan soprano, who had consented to exchange a few of her liquid notes for Goldwin Leathersham’s yellow-backed ones.
Tired, hungry and sleepy, Warble fidgeted in her little gilt chair, but the music went inexorably on.
It was followed by the appearance of a Neo Poet.
This man wore eccentric dress of some sort, and as he waited for the applause to melt away, he stood, absent-mindedly picking crumbs out of his beard.
By subtle hint of auto-suggestion this made Warble hungrier than ever and she looked around for Petticoat. But he was busy flirting with Daisy Snow, and it was not Warble’s way to cut in.
In hollow tones the performer read extracts, excerpts and exceptions from the works of Amy Lynn, Carl Sandpiper and Padriac, the Colyumist, and Warble went back to sleep.
There was more, but no merrier, and when at last the platform was cleared for the last time, the guests were refreshed by the passing of a small glass of punch and a wafer to each.
Then they went, with a flutter of silk stockings and twinkling slipper buckles, and a medley of shrieked goodbys.
