It was Betty Mercer who said she was hungry, and got us switched from the delicate subject of which was the thief to the quite as pressing subject of which was to be cook. Aunt Selina had slept quietly through the whole thing—we learned afterward that she customarily slept on her left side, which was on her good ear. We gathered in the Dallas Browns’ room, and Jimmy proposed a plan.
“We can have anything sent in that we want,” he suggested speciously, “and if Dal doesn’t make good with the city fathers, you girls can get some clothes anyhow. Then, we can have dinner sent from one of the hotels.”
“Why not all the meals?” Max suggested. “I hope you’re not going to be small about things, Jimmy.”
“It ought to be easy,” Jim persisted, ignoring the remark, “for nine reasonably intelligent people to boil eggs and make coffee, which is all we need for breakfast, with some fruit.”
“Nine of us!” Dallas said wickedly, looking at Tom Harbison, who was out of earshot, “Why nine of us? I thought Kit here, otherwise known as Bella, was going to show off her housewifely skill.”
It ended, however, with Mr. Harbison writing out a lot of slips, cook, scullery-maid, chamber-maid, parlor-maid, furnace-man, and butler, and as that left two people over—we didn’t count Aunt Selina—he added another furnace-man and a trained nurse. Betty Mercer drew the trained nurse slip, and, of course, she was delighted. It seems funny now to look back and think what a dreadful time she really had, for Aunt Selina took the grippe, you know, that very day.
It was fate that I should go back to that awful kitchen, for of course my slip said “cook.” Mr. Harbison was butler, and Max and Dal got the furnace, although neither of them had ever been nearer to a bucket of coal than the coupons on mining stock. Anne got the bedrooms, and Leila was parlor-maid. It was Jimmy who got the scullery work, but he was quite crushed by this time, and did not protest at all.
Max was in a very bad temper; I suppose he had not had enough sleep—no one had. But he came over while the lottery was going on and stood over me and demanded unpleasantly, in a whisper, that I stop masquerading as another man’s wife and generally making a fool of myself—which is the way he put it. And I knew in my heart that he was right, and I hated him for it.
“Why don’t you go and tell him—them?” I asked nastily. No one was paying any attention to us. “Tell them that, to be obliging, I have nearly drowned in a sea of lies; tell them that I am not only not married, but that I never intend to marry; tell them that we are a lot of idiots with nothing better to do than to trifle with strangers within our gates, people who build—I mean, people that are worth two to our one! Run and tell them.”
He looked at me for a minute, then he turned on his heel and left me. It looked as though Max might be going to be difficult.
While I was improvising an apron out of a towel, and Anne was pinning a sheet into a kimono, so she could take off her dinner gown and still be proper, Dallas harked back to the robbery.
“Ann put the collar on the table there,” he said. “There’s no mistake about that. I watched her do it, for I remember thinking it was the sole reminder I had that Consolidated Traction ever went above thirty-nine.”
Max was looking around the room, examining the window locks and whistling between his teeth. He was in disgrace with every one, for by that time it was light enough to see three reporters with cameras across the street waiting for enough sun to snap the house, and everybody knew that it was Max and his idiotic wager that had done it. He had made two or three conciliatory remarks, but no one would speak to him. His antics were so queer, however, that we were all watching him, and when he had felt over the rug with his hands, and raised the edges, and tried to lift out the chair seats, and had shaken out Dal’s shoes (he said people often hid things and then forgot about it), he made a proposition.
“If you will take that infernal furnace from around my neck, I’ll undertake either to find the jewels or to show up the thief,” he said quietly. And of course, with all the people in the house under suspicion, every one had to hail the suggestion with joy, and to offer his assistance, and Jimmy had to take Max’s share of the furnace. So they took the scullery slip downstairs to the policeman, and gave Jim Max’s share of the furnace. (Yes, I had broken the policeman to them gently. Of course, Anne said at once that he was the thief, but they found him tucked in and sound asleep with his back against the furnace.)
“In the first place,” Max said, standing importantly in the middle of the room, “we retired between two and three—nearer three. So the theft occurred between three and five, when Anne woke up. Was your door locked, Dal?”
“No. The door into the hall was, but the door into the dressing room was open, and we found the door from there into the hall open this morning.”
“From three until five,” Max repeated. “Was any one out of his room during that time?”
“I was,” said Tom Harbison promptly, from the foot of the bed. “I was prowling all around somewhere about four, searching”—he glanced at me—“for a drink of water. But as I don’t know a pearl from a glass bead, I hope you exonerate me.”
Everybody laughed and said, “Of course,” and “Sure, old man,” and changed the subject quickly.
While that excitement was on, I got Jim to one side and told him about Bella. His good-natured face was radiant at first.
“I suppose she DID come to see Takahiro, eh, Kit?” he asked delicately. “She didn’t say anything about me?”
“Nothing good. She said the house was in a disgraceful condition,” I said heartlessly. “And her diamond bracelet was stolen while she took a nap on the kitchen table”—he groaned—“and—oh, Jim, you are such a goose! If I could only manage my own affairs the way I could my friends’! She’s too sure of you, Jimmy. She knows you adore her, and—how brutal could you be, Jim?”
“Fair,” he said. “I may have undiscovered depths of brutality that I have never had occasion to use. However, I might try. Why?”
“Listen, Jim,” I urged. “It was always Bella who did things here; she managed the house, she tyrannized over her friends, and she bullied you. Yes, she did. Now she’s here, without your invitation, and she has to stay. It’s your turn to bully, to dictate terms, to be coldly civil or politely rude. Make her furious at you. If she is jealous, so much the better.”
“How far would you sacrifice yourself on the altar of friendship?” he asked.
“You may pay me all the attention you like, in public,” I replied, and after we shook hands we went together to Bella.
There was an ominous pause when we went into the den. Bella was sitting by the register, with her furs on, and after one glance over her shoulder at us, she looked away again without speaking.
“Bella,” Jim said appealingly. And then I pinched his arm, and he drew himself up and looked properly outraged.
“Bella,” he said, coldly this time, “I can’t imagine why you have put yourself in this ridiculous position, but since you have—”
She turned on him in a fury.
“Put MYSELF in this position!”
She was frantic. “It’s a plot, a wretched trick of yours, this quarantine, to keep me here.”
Jim gasped, but I gave him a warning glance, and he swallowed hard.
“On the contrary,” he said, with maddening quiet, “I would be the last person in the world to wish to perpetuate an indiscretion of yours. For it was hardly discreet, was it, to visit a bachelor establishment alone at ten o’clock at night? As far as my plotting to keep you here is concerned, I assure you that nothing could be further from my mind. Our paths were to be two parallel lines that never touch.” He looked at me for approval, and Bella was choking.
“You are worse that I ever thought you,” she stormed. “I thought you were only a—a fool. Now I know you—for a brute!”
Well, it ended by Jim’s graciously permitting Bella to remain—there being nothing else to do—and by his magnanimously agreeing to keep her real identity from Aunt Selina and Mr. Harbison, and to break the news of her presence to Anne and the rest. It created a sensation beside which Anne’s pearls faded away, although they came to the front again soon enough.
Jim broke the news at once, gathering everybody but Harbison and Aunt Selina in the upper hall. He was palpitatingly nervous, but he tried to carry it off with a high hand.
“It’s unfortunate,” he said, looking around the circle of faces, each one frozen with amazement, and just a suspicion, perhaps of incredulity. “It’s particularly unfortunate for her. You all know how high-strung she is, and if the papers should get hold of it—well, we’ll all have to make it as easy as we can for her.”
With Jim’s eyes on them, they all swallowed the butler story without a gulp. But Anne was indignant.
“It’s like Bella,” she snapped. “Well, she has made her bed and she can lie on it. I’m sure I shan’t make it for her. But if you want to know my opinion, Mr. Harbison may be a fool, but you can’t ram two Bellas, both NEE Knowles, down Miss Caruthers’ throat with a stick.”
We had not thought of that before and every one looked blank. Finally, however, Jim said Bella’s middle name was Constantia, and we decided to call her that. But it turned out afterward that nobody could remember it in a hurry, and generally when we wanted to attract her attention, we walked across the room and touched her on the shoulder. It was quicker and safer.
The name decided, we went downstairs in a line to welcome Bella, to try to make her feel at home, and to forget her deplorable situation. Leila had worked herself into a really sympathetic frame of mind.
“Poor dear,” she said, on the way down. “Now don’t grin, anybody, just be cordial and glad to see her. I hope she doesn’t cry; you know the spells she takes.”
We stopped outside the door, and everybody tried to look cheerful and sympathetic, and not grinny—which was as hard as looking as if we had had a cup of tea—and then Jim threw the door open and we filed in.
Bella was comfortably reading by the fire. She had her feet up on a stool and a pillow behind her head. She did not even look at us for a minute; then she merely glanced up as she turned a page.
“Dear me,” she said mockingly, “what a lot of frumps you all are! I had hoped it was some one with my breakfast.”
Then she went on reading. As Leila said afterward, that kind of person OUGHT to be divorced.
Aunt Selina came down just then and I left everybody trying to explain Bella’s presence to her, and fled to the kitchen. The Harbison man appeared while I was sitting hopelessly in front of the gas range, and showed me about it.
“I don’t know that I ever saw one,” he said cheerfully, “but I know the theory. Likewise, by the same token, this tea kettle, set on the flame, will boil. That is not theory, however, that is early knowledge. ‘Polly, put the kettle on; we’ll all take tea.’ Look at that, Mrs. Wilson. I didn’t fight bacilli with boiled water at Chickamauga for nothing.”
And then he let out the policeman and brought him into the kitchen. He was a large man, and his face was a curious mixture of amazement, alarm and dignity. No doubt we did look queer, still in parts of our evening clothes and I in the white silk and lace petticoat that belonged under my gown, with a yellow and black pajama coat of Jimmy’s as a sort of breakfast jacket.
“This is Officer Flannigan,” Mr. Harbison said. “I explained our unfortunate position earlier in the morning, and he is prepared to accept our hospitality. Flannigan, every person in this house has got to work, as I also explained to you. You are appointed dishwasher and scullery maid.”
The policeman looked dazed. Then, slowly, like dawn over a sleeping lake, a light of comprehension grew in his face.
“Sure,” he said, laying his helmet on the table. “I’ll be glad to be doing anything I can to help. Me and Mrs. Wilson—we used to be friends. It’s many the time I’ve opened the carriage door for her, and she with her head in the air, and for all that, the pleasant smile. When any one around her was having a party and wanted a special officer, it was Mrs. Wilson that always said, Get Flannigan, Officer Timothy Flannigan. He’s your man.’”
My heart had been going lower and lower. So he knew Bella, and he knew I was not Bella, although he had not grasped the fact that I was usurping her place. The odious Harbison man sat on the table and swung his feet.
“I wonder if you know,” he said, looking around him, “how good it is to see a white woman so perfectly at home in a civilized kitchen again, after two years of food cooked by a filthy Indian squaw over a portable sheet-iron stove!”
SO PERFECTLY AT HOME? I stood in the middle of the room and stared around at the copper things hanging up and the rows of blue and white crockery, and the dozens and hundreds of complicated-looking utensils, whose names I had never even heard, and I was dazed. I tried with some show of authority to instruct Flannigan about gathering up the soiled things, and, after listening in puzzled silence for a minute, he stripped off his blue coat with a tolerant smile.
“Lave em to me, miss,” he said. The “miss” passed unnoticed. “I mayn’t give em a Turkish bath, which is what you are describin’, but I’ll get the grease off all right. I always clean up while the missus is in bed with a young un.”
He rolled up his sleeves, found a brown checked gingham apron behind the door, and tied it around his neck with the ease of practice. Then he cleared off the plates, eating what appealed to him as he did so, and stopping now and again for a deep-throated chuckle.
“I’m thinkin’,” he said once, stopping with a dish in the air, “what a deuce of a noise there will be when the vaccination doctor comes around this mornin’. In a week every one of us will be nursin’ a sore arm or walkin’ on one leg, beggin’ your pardon, miss. The last time the force was vaccinated, I asked to be done behind me ear; I needed me legs and I needed me arms, but didn’t need me head much!”
He threw his head back and laughed. Mr. Harbison laughed. Oh, we were very cheerful! And that awful stove stared at me, and the kettle began to hum, and Aunt Selina sent down word that she was not well, and would like some omelet on her tray. Omelet!
I knew that it was made of eggs, but that was the extent of my knowledge. I muttered an excuse and ran upstairs to Anne, but she was still sniffling over her necklace, and said she didn’t know anything about omelets and didn’t care. Food would choke her. Neither of the Mercer girls knew either, and Bella, who was still reading in the den, absolutely declined to help.
“I don’t know, and I wouldn’t tell you if I did. You can get yourself out, as you got yourself in,” she said nastily. “The simplest thing, if you don’t mind my suggesting it, is to poison the coffee and kill the lot of us. Only, if you decide to do it, let me know; I want to live just long enough to see Jimmy Wilson WRITHE!”
Bella is the kind of person who gets on one’s nerves. She finds a grievance and hugs it; she does ridiculous things and blames other people. And she flirts.
I went downstairs despondently, and found that Mr. Harbison had discovered some eggs and was standing helplessly staring at them.
“Omelet—eggs. Eggs—omelet. That’s the extent of my knowledge,” he said, when I entered. “You’ll have to come to my assistance.”
It was then that I saw the cook book. It was lying on a shelf beside the clock, and while Mr. Harbison had his back turned I got it down. It was quite clear that the domestic type of woman was his ideal, and I did not care to outrage his belief in me. So I took the cook book into the pantry and read the recipe over three times. When I came back I knew it by heart, although I did not understand it.
“I will tell you how,” I said with a great deal of dignity, “and since you want to help, you may make it yourself.”
He was delighted.
“Fine!” he said. “Suppose you give me the idea first. Then we’ll go over it slowly, bit by bit. We’ll make a big fluffy omelet, and if the others aren’t around, we’ll eat it ourselves.”
“Well,” I said, trying to remember exactly, “you take two eggs—”
“Two!” he repeated. “Two eggs for ten people!”
“Don’t interrupt me,” I said irritably. “If—if two isn’t enough we can make several omelets, one after the other.”
He looked at me with admiration.
“Who else but you would have thought of that!” he remarked. “Well, here are two eggs. What next?”
“Separate them,” I said easily. No, I didn’t know what it meant. I hoped he would; I said it as casually as I could, and I did not look at him. I knew he was staring at me, puzzled.
“Separate them!” he said. “Why, they aren’t fastened together!” Then he laughed. “Oh, yes, of course!” When I looked he had put one at each end of the table. “Afraid they’ll quarrel, I suppose,” he said. “Well, now they’re separated.”
“Then beat.”
“First separate, then beat!” he repeated. “The author of that cook book must have had a mean disposition. What’s next? Hang them?” He looked up at me with his boyish smile.
“Separate and beat,” I repeated. If I lost a word of that recipe I was gone. It was like saying the alphabet; I had to go to the beginning every time mentally.
“Well,” he reflected, “you can’t beat an egg, no matter how cruel you may be, unless you break it first.” He picked up an egg and looked at it. “Separate!” he reflected. “Ah—the white from the—whatever you cooking experts call it—the yellow part.”
“Exactly!” I exclaimed, light breaking on me. “Of course. I KNEW you would find it out.” Then back to the recipe—“beat until well mixed; then fold in the whites.”
“Fold?” he questioned. “It looks pretty thin to fold, doesn’t it? I—upon my word, I never heard of folding an egg. Are you—but of course you know. Please come and show me how.”
“Just fold them in,” I said desperately. “It isn’t difficult.” And because I was so transparent a fraud and knew he must find me out then, I said something about butter, and went into the pantry. That’s the trouble with a lie; somebody asks you to tell one as a favor to somebody else, and the first thing you know, you are having to tell a thousand, and trying to remember the ones you have told so you won’t contradict yourself, and the very person you have tried to help turns on you and reproaches you for being untruthful! I leaned my elbows despondently on the shelf of the kitchen pantry, with the feet of a guard visible through the high window over my head, and waited for Mr. Harbison to come in and demand that I fold a raw egg, and discover that I didn’t know anything about cooking, and was just as useless as all the others.
He came. He held the bowl out to me and waved a fork in triumph.
“I have solved it,” he said. “Or, rather, Flannigan and I have solved it. The mixture awaits the magic touch of the cook.”
I honestly thought I could do the rest. It was only to be put in a pan and browned, and then in the oven three minutes. And I did it properly, but for two things: I should have greased the pan (but this was the book’s fault; it didn’t say) and I should have lighted the oven. The latter, however, was Mr. Harbison’s fault as much as mine, and I had wit enough to lay it to absent-mindedness on the part of both of us.
After that, Aunt Selina or no Aunt Selina, we decided to have boiled eggs, and Mr. Harbison knew how to cook them. He put them in the tea kettle and then went to look at the furnace. And Officer Timothy Flannigan ground the coffee and gave his opinion of the board of health in no stinted terms. As for me, I burned my fingers and the toast, and felt myself growing hot and cold, for I was going to be found out as soon as Flannigan grasped the situation.
Then, of course, I did the thing that caused me so much trouble later. I put down the toaster—at least the Harbison man said it was a toaster—and went over and stood in front of the policeman.
“I don’t suppose you will understand—exactly,” I said, “but—but if anything occurs to—to make you think I am not—that things are not what they seem to be—I mean, what I say they are—you will understand that it is a joke, won’t you? A joke, you know.”
Yes, that was what I said. I know it sounds like a raving delirium, but when Max came down and squizzled some bacon, as he said, and told Flannigan about the robbery, and how, whether it was a joke or deadly earnest, somebody in the house had taken Anne’s pearls, that wretched policeman winked at me solemnly over Max’s shoulder. Oh, it was awful!
And, to add to my discomfort, the most unpleasant ideas WOULD obtrude themselves. WHAT was Mr. Harbison doing on the first floor of the house that night? Ice water, he had said. But there had been plenty of water in the studio! And he had told me it was the furnace.
Mr. Harbison came back in a half hour, and I remembered the eggs. We fished them out of the tea kettle, and they were perfectly hard, but we ate them.
The doctor from the board of health came that morning and vaccinated us. There was a great deal of excitement, and Aunt Selina was done on the arm. As she did not affect evening clothes this was entirely natural, but later on in the week, when the wretched things began to take, nobody dared to limp, and Leila made a terrible break by wearing a bandage on her left arm, after telling Aunt Selina that she had been vaccinated on the right.
The following letters were found in the house post box after the lifting of the quarantine, and later were presented to me by their writers, bound in white kid (the letters, not the authors, of course).
FROM THOMAS HARBISON, LATE ENGINEER OF BRIDGES, PERUVIAN TRUNK LINES, SOUTH AMERICA, TO HENRY LLEWELLYN, CARE OF UNION NITRATE COMPANY, IQUIQUE, CHILI.
Dear Old Man:
I think I was fully a week trying to drive out of my mind my last glimpse of you with your sickly grin, pretending to be tickled to pieces that the only white man within two hundred miles of your shack was going on a holiday. You old bluffer! I used to hang over the rail of the steamer, on the way up, and see you standing as I left you beside the car with its mule and the Indian driver, and behind you a million miles of soul-destroying pampa. Never mind, Jack; I sent yesterday by mail steamer the cigarettes, pipes and tobacco, canned goods and poker chips. Put in some magazines, too, and the collars. Don’t know about the ties—guess it won’t matter down there.
Nothing happened on the trip. One of the engines broke down three days out, and I spent all my time below decks for forty-eight hours. Chief engineer raving with D.T.‘s. Got the engine fixed in record time, and haven’t got my hands clean yet. It was bully.
With this I send the papers, which will tell you how I happen to be here, and why I have leisure to write you three days after landing. If the situation were not so ridiculous, it would be maddening. Here I am, off for a holiday and congratulating myself that I am foot free and heart free—yes, my friend, heart free—here I am, shut in the house of a man I never saw until last night, and wouldn’t care if I never saw again, with a lot of people who never heard of me, who are almost equally vague about South America, who play as hard at bridge as I ever worked at building one (forgive this, won’t you? The novelty has gone to my head), and who belong to the very class of extravagant, luxury-loving, non-producing parasites (isn’t that what we called them?) that you and I used to revile from our lofty Andean pinnacle.
To come down to earth: here we are, six women and five men, including a policeman, not a servant in the house, and no one who knows how to do anything. They are really immensely interesting, these people; they all know each other very well, and it is “Jimmy” here, and “Dal” there—Dallas Brown, who went to India with me, you remember my speaking of him—and they are good natured, too, except at meal times. The little hostess, Mrs. Wilson, took over the cooking, and although luncheon was better than breakfast, the food still leaves much to the imagination.
I wish you could see this Mrs. Wilson, Hal. You would change a whole lot of your ideas. She is a thoroughbred, sure enough, and of course some of her beauty is the result of the exquisite care about which you and I—still from our Andean pinnacle—used to rant. But the fact is, she is more than that. She has fire, and pluck, no end. If you could have seen her this morning, standing in front of a cold kitchen range, determined to conquer it, and had seen the tilt of her chin when I offered to take over the cooking—you needn’t grin; I can cook, and you know it—you would understand what I mean. It was so clear that she was paralyzed with fright at the idea of getting breakfast, and equally clear that she meant to do it. By the way, I have learned that her name was McNair before she married this would-be artist, Wilson, and that she is a daughter of the McNair who financed the Callao branch!
I have not met the others so intimately. There are two sisters named Mercer, inclined to be noisy—they are playing roulette in the next room now. One is small and dark, almost Hebraic in type, named Leila and called Lollie. The other, larger, very blonde and languishing, and with a decided preference for masculine society, even, saving the mark, mine! Dallas Brown’s wife, good looking, smokes cigarettes when I am not around—they all do, except Mrs. Wilson.
Then there is a maiden aunt, who is ill today with grippe and excitement, and a Miss Knowles, who came for a moment last night to see Mrs. Wilson, was caught in the quarantine (see papers), and, after hiding all night in the basement, is sulking all day in her room. Her presence created an excitement out of all proportion to the apparent cause.
From the fact that I have reason to know that my artist host and his beautiful wife are on bad terms, and from the significant glances with which the announcement of Miss Knowles’ presence was met, the state of affairs seems rather clear. Wilson impresses me as a spineless sort, anyhow, and when the lady of the basement shut herself away from the rest today and I happened on “Jimmy,” as they call him, pleading with her through the door, I very nearly kicked him down the stairs. Oh, yes, I’ll keep out, right enough; it isn’t my affair.
By the way, after the quarantine and with the policeman locked in the furnace room, a pearl necklace and a diamond bracelet were stolen! Just ten of us to divide the suspicion! Upon my word, Hal, it’s the queerest situation I ever heard of. Which of us did it? I make a guess that not a few of us are fools, but which is the knave? The worst of it is, I am the only unaccredited member of the household!
This is more scandal than I ever wrote in my life. Lay it to circumscribed environment, and the lack of twenty miles over the pampa before breakfast. We have all been vaccinated, and the officious gentlemen from the board of health have taken their grins and their formaldehyde and gone. Ye gods, how we cough!
The Carlton order will go through all right, I think. Phoned him this morning. If it does, old man, we will take a month in September and explore the Mercator property.
Do you know, Hal, I have been thinking lately that you and I stick too close to the grind. Business is right enough, but what’s the use of spending one’s best years succeeding in everything except the things that are worth while? I’ll be thirty sooner than I care to say, and—oh, well, you won’t understand. You’ll sit down there, with the Southern Cross and the rest of the infernal astronomical galaxy looking down on you, and the Indians chanting in the village, and you will think I have grown sentimental. I have not. You and I down there have been looking at the world through the reverse end of the glass. It’s a bully old world, Hal, and this is God’s part of it.
Burn this letter after you read it; I suspect it is covered with germs. Well, happy days, old man.
Yours, Tom
P.S. By the way, can’t you spare some of the Indian pottery you picked up at Callao? I told Mrs. Wilson about it, and she was immensely interested. Send it to this address. Can you get it to the next steamer?—T.
FROM MAXWELL REED TO RICHARD BURTON BAGLEY, UNIVERSITY CLUB, NEW YORK.
Dear Dick:
Enclosed find my check for five hundred, as per wager. Possibly you were within your rights in protecting your bet in the manner you chose, but while I do not wish to be offensive, your reporters are damnably so.
Yours, Maxwell Reed
FROM OFFICER FLANNIGAN TO MRS. MAGGIE FLANNIGAN, ERIN STREET.
Dear Maggie:
As soon as you receive this, go down to Mac and tell him the story as I tell you hear. Tell him I was walkin my beat, and I’d been afther seein Jimmy Alverini about doin the right thing for Mac on Monday, at the poles, when I seen a man hangin suspicious around this house, which is Mr. Wilson’s, on Ninety-fifth. And, of coorse, afther chasin the man a mile or more, I lose him, which was not my fault. So I go back to the Wilson house, and tell them to be careful about closin up fer the night, and while I’m standin in the hall, with all the swells around me, sparklin with jewels, the board of health sends a man to lock us all in, because the Jap thats been waiter has took the smallpox and gone to the hospitle. I stood me ground. I sez, sez I, you cant shtop an officer in pursute of his duty. I rafuse to be shut in. Be shure to tell Mac that.
So here I am, and like to be for a month. Tell Mac theres four votes shut up here, and I can get them for him, if he can stop this monkey business.
Then go over to the Dago Church on Webster Avenue and put a dollar in Saint Anthony’s box. He’ll see me out of this scrape, right enough. Do it at once. Now remember, go to Mac first; maybe you can get the dollar from him, and mind what you tell him.
Your husband, Tim Flannigan
FROM ME TO MOTHER—MRS. THEODORE McNAIR, HOTEL HAMILTON, BERMUDA.
Dearest Mother:
I hope you will get this before you read the papers, and when you DO read them, you are not to get excited and worried. I am as well as can be, and a great deal safer than I ever remember to have been in my life. We are quarantined, a lot of us, in Jim Wilson’s house, because his irreproachable Jap did a very reproachable thing—took smallpox. Now read on before you get excited. HIS ROOM HAS BEEN FUMIGATED, and we have been vaccinated. I am well and happy. I can’t be killed in a railway wreck or smashed when the car skids. Unless I drown myself in my bath, or jump through a window, positively nothing can happen to me. So gather up all your maternal anxieties and cast them to the Bermuda sharks.
Anne Brown is here—see the papers for list—and if she can not play propriety, Jimmy’s Aunt Selina can. In fact, she doesn’t play at it; she works. I have telephoned Lizette for some clothes—enough for a couple of weeks, although Dallas promises to get us out sooner. Now, dear, do go ahead and have a nice time, and on no account come home. You could only have the carriage to stop in front of the house, and wave to me through a window.
Mother, I want you to do something for me. You know who is down there, and—this is awfully delicate, Mumsy—but he’s a nice boy, and I thought I liked him. I guess you know he has been rather attentive. Now, I DO like him, Mumsy, but not the way I thought I did, and I want you to—very gently, of course—to discourage him a little. You know how I mean. He’s a dear boy, but I am so tired of people who don’t know anything but horses and motors.
And, oh, yes,—do you remember a girl named Lucille Mellon who was at school with you in Rome? And that she married a man named Harbison? Well, her son is here! He builds railroads and bridges and things, and he even built himself an automobile down in South America, because he couldn’t afford to buy one, and burned wood in it! Wood! Think of it!
I wired father in Chicago for fear he would come rushing home. The picture in the paper of the face at the basement window is supposed to be Mr. Harbison, but of course it isn’t any more like him than mine is like me.
Anne Brown mislaid her pearl collar when she took it off last night, and has fussed herself into a sick headache. She declares it was stolen! Some of the people are playing bridge, Betty Mercer is doing a cake walk to the RHAPSODIE HONGROISE—Jim has no every-day music—and the telephone is ringing. We have received enough flowers for a funeral—somebody sent Lollie a Gates Ajar, only with the gates shut.
There are no servants—think of it, Mumsy. I wish you had made me learn to cook. Mr. Harbison has shown me a little—he was a soldier in the Spanish War—but we girls are a terribly ignorant lot, Mumsy, about the real things of life.
Now, don’t worry. It is more sport than camping in the Adirondacks, and not nearly so damp.
Your loving daughter, Katherine.
P.S.—South America must be wonderful. Why can’t we put the Gadfly in commission, and take a coasting trip this summer? It is a shame to own a yacht and never use it. K.
THIS NOTE, EVIDENTLY DELIVERED BY MESSENGER, WAS FOUND AMONG OTHER LITTER IN THE VESTIBULE AFTER THE LIFTING OF THE QUARANTINE.
Mr. Alex Dodds, City Editor, Mail and Star:
Dear D.—Can’t get a picture. Have waited seven hours. They have closed the shutters.
McCord.
WRITTEN ON THE BACK OF THE ABOVE NOTE.
Watch the roof.
Dodds.
The most charitable thing would be to say nothing about the first day. We were baldly brutal—that’s the only word for it. And Mr. Harbison, with his beautiful courtesy—the really sincere kind—tried to patch up one quarrel after another and failed. He rose superbly to the occasion, and made something that he called a South American goulash for luncheon, although it was too salty, and every one was thirsty the rest of the day.
Bella was horrid, of course. She froze Jim until he said he was going to sit in the refrigerator and cool the butter. She locked herself in the dressing room—it had been assigned to me, but that made no difference to Bella—and did her nails, and took three different baths, and refused to come to the table. And of course Jimmy was wild, and said she would starve. But I said, “Very well, let her starve. Not a tray shall leave my kitchen.” It was a comfort to have her shut up there anyhow; it postponed the time when she would come face to face with Flannigan.
Aunt Selina got sick that day, as I have said. I was not so bitter as the others; I did not say that I wished she would die. The worst I ever wished her was that she might be quite ill for some time, and yet, when she began to recover, she was dreadful to me. She said for one thing, that it was the hard-boiled eggs and the state of the house that did it, and when I said that the grippe was a germ, she retorted that I had probably brought it to her on my clothing.
You remember that Betty had drawn the nurse’s slip, and how pleased she had been about it. She got up early the morning of the first day and made herself a lawn cap and telephoned out for a white nurse’s uniform—that is, of course, for a white uniform for a nurse. She really looked very fetching, and she went around all the morning with a red cross on her sleeve and a Saint Cecilia expression, gathering up bottles of medicine—most of it flesh reducer, which was pathetic, and closing windows for fear of drafts. She refused to help with the house work, and looked quite exalted, but by afternoon it had palled on her somewhat, and she and Max shook dice.
Betty was really pleased when Aunt Selina sent for her. She took in a bottle of cologne to bathe her brow, and we all stood outside the door and listened. Betty tiptoed in in her pretty cap and apron, and we heard her cautiously draw down the shades.
“What are you doing that for?” Aunt Selina demanded. “I like the light.”
“It’s bad for your poor eyes,” Betty’s tone was exactly the proper bedside pitch, low and sugary.
“Sweet and low, sweet and low, wind of the western sea!” Dal hummed outside.
“Put up those window shades!” Aunt Selina’s voice was strong enough. “What’s in that bottle?”
Betty was still mild. She swished to the window and raised the shade.
“I’m SO sorry you are ill,” she said sympathetically. “This is for your poor aching head. Now close your eyes and lie perfectly still, and I will cool your forehead.”
“There’s nothing the matter with my head,” Aunt Selina retorted. “And I have not lost my faculties; I am not a child or a sick cow. If that’s perfumery, take it out.”
We heard Betty coming to the door, but there was no time to get away. She had dropped her mask for a minute and was biting her lip, but when she saw us she forced a smile.
“She’s ill, poor dear,” she said. “If you people will go away, I can bring her around all right. In two hours she will eat out of my hand.”
“Eat a piece out of your hand,” Max scoffed in a whisper.
We waited a little longer, but it was too painful. Aunt Selina demanded a mustard foot bath and a hot lemonade and her back rubbed with liniment and some strong black tea. And in the intervals she wanted to be read to out of the prayer book. And when we had all gone away, there came the most terrible noise from Aunt Selina’s room, and every one ran. We found Betty in the hall outside the door, crying, with her fingers in her ears and her cap over her eye. She said she had been putting the hot water bottle to Aunt Selina’s back, and it had been too hot. Just then something hit against the door with a soft thud, fell to the floor and burst, for a trickle of hot water came over the sill.
“She won’t let me hold her hand,” Betty wailed, “or bathe her brow, or smooth her pillow. She thinks of nothing but her stomach or her back! And when I try to make her bed look decent, she spits at me like a cat. Everything I do is wrong. She spilled the foot bath into her shoes, and blamed me for it.”
It took the united efforts of all of us—except Bella, who stood back and smiled nastily—to get Betty back into the sick room again. I was supremely thankful by that time that I had not drawn the nurse’s slip. With dinner ordered in from one of the clubs, and the omelet ten hours behind me, my position did not seem so unbearable. But a new development was coming.
While Betty was fussing with Aunt Selina, Max led a search of the house. He said the necklace and the bracelet must be hidden somewhere, and that no crevice was too small to neglect.
We made a formal search all together, except Betty and Aunt Selina, and we found a lot of things in different places that Jim said had been missing since the year one. But no jewels—nothing even suggesting a jewel was found. We had explored the entire house, every cupboard, every chest, even the insides of the couches and the pockets of Jim’s clothes—which he resented bitterly—and found nothing, and I must say the situation was growing rather strained. Some one had taken the jewels; they hadn’t walked away.
It was Flannigan who suggested the roof, and as we had tried every place else, we climbed there. Of course we didn’t find anything, but after all day in the house with the shutters closed on account of reporters, the air was glorious. It was February, but quite mild and sunny, and we could look down over Riverside Drive and the Hudson, and even recognize people we knew on horseback and in cars. It was a pathetic joy, and we lined up along the parapet and watched the motor boats racing on the river, and tried to feel that we were in the world as well as of it, but it was very hard.
Betty had been making tea for Aunt Selina, and of course when she heard us up there, she followed, tray and all, and we drank Aunt Selina’s tea and had the first really nice time of the day. Bella had come up, too, but she was still standoffish and queer, and she stood leaning against a chimney and staring out over the river. After a little Mr. Harbison put down his cup and went over to her, and they talked quite confidentially for a long time. I thought it bad taste in Bella, under the circumstances, after snubbing Dallas and Max, and of course treating Jim like the dirt under her feet, to turn right around and be lovely to Mr. Harbison. It was hard for Jim.
Max came and sat beside me, and Flannigan, who had been sent down for more cups, passed tea, putting the tray on top of the chimney. Jim was sitting grumpily on the roof, with his feet folded under him, playing Canfield in the shadow of the parapet, buying the deck out of one pocket and putting his winnings in the other. He was watching Bella, too, and she knew it, and she strained a point to captivate Mr. Harbison. Any one could see that.
And that was the picture that came out in the next morning’s papers, tea cups, cards and all. For when some one looked up, there were four newspaper photographers on the roof of the next house, and they had the impertinence to thank us!
Flannigan had seen Bella by that time, but as he still didn’t understand the situation, things were just the same. But his manner to me puzzled me; whenever he came near me he winked prodigiously, and during all the search he kept one eye on me, and seemed to be amused about something.
When the rest had gone down to dress for dinner, which was being sent in, thank goodness, I still sat on the parapet and watched the darkening river. I felt terribly lonely, all at once, and sad. There wasn’t any one any nearer than father, in the West, or mother in Bermuda, who really cared a rap whether I sat on that parapet all night or not, or who would be sorry if I leaped to the dirty bricks of the next door-yard—not that I meant to, of course.
The lights came out across the river, and made purple and yellow streaks on the water, and one of the motor boats came panting back to the yacht club, coughing and gasping as if it had overdone. Down on the street automobiles were starting and stopping, cabs rolling, doors slamming, all the maddening, delightful bustle of people who are foot-free to dine out, to dance, to go to the theater, to do any of the thousand possibilities of a long February evening. And above them I sat on the roof and cried. Yes, cried.
I was roused by some one coughing just behind me, and I tried to straighten my face before I turned. It was Flannigan, his double row of brass buttons gleaming in the twilight.
“Excuse me, miss,” he said affably, “but the boy from the hotel has left the dinner on the doorstep and run, the cowardly little divil! What’ll I do with it? I went to Mrs. Wilson, but she says it’s no concern of hers.” Flannigan was evidently bewildered.
“You’d better keep it warm, Flannigan,” I replied. “You needn’t wait; I’m coming.” But he did not go.
“If—if you’ll excuse me, miss,” he said, “don’t you think ye’d betther tell them?”
“Tell them what?”
“The whole thing—the joke,” he said confidentially, coming closer. “It’s been great sport, now, hasn’t it? But I’m afraid they will get on to it soon, and—some of them might not be agreeable. A pearl necklace is a pearl necklace, miss, and the lady’s wild.”
“What do you mean?” I gasped. “You don’t think—why, Flannigan—”
He merely grinned at me and thrust his hand down in his pocket. When he brought it up he had Bella’s bracelet on his palm, glittering in the faint light.
“Where did you get it?” Between relief and the absurdity of the thing, I was almost hysterical. But Flannigan did not give me the bracelet; instead, it struck me his tone was suddenly severe.
“Now look here, miss,” he said; “you’ve played your trick, and you’ve had your fun. The Lord knows it’s only folks like you would play April fool jokes with a fortune! If you’re the sinsible little woman you look to be, you’ll put that pearl collar on the coal in the basement tonight, and let me find it.”
“I haven’t got the pearl collar,” I protested. “I think you are crazy. Where did you get that bracelet?”
He edged away from me, as if he expected me to snatch it from him and run, but he was still trying in an elephantine way to treat the matter as a joke.
“I found it in a drawer in the pantry,” he said, “among the dirty linen. And if you’re as smart as I think you are, I’ll find the pearl collar there in the morning—and nothing said, miss.”
So there I was, suspected of being responsible for Anne’s pearl collar, as if I had not enough to worry me before. Of course I could have called them all together and told them, and made them explain to Flannigan what I had really meant by my delirious speech in the kitchen. But that would have meant telling the whole ridiculous story to Mr. Harbison, and having him think us all mad, and me a fool.
In all that overcrowded house there was only one place where I could be miserable with comfort. So I stayed on the roof, and cried a little and then became angry and walked up and down, and clenched my hands and babbled helplessly. The boats on the river were yellow, horizontal streaks through my tears, and an early searchlight sent its shaft like a tangible thing in the darkness, just over my head. Then, finally, I curled down in a corner with my arms on the parapet, and the lights became more and more prismatic and finally formed themselves into a circle that was Bella’s bracelet, and that kept whirling around and around on something flat and not over-clean, that was Flannigan’s palm.