The Gentle Grafter
Page 7
A MIDSUMMER MASQUERADE
"Satan," said Jeff Peters, "is a hard boss to work for. When otherpeople are having their vacation is when he keeps you the busiest. Asold Dr. Watts or St. Paul or some other diagnostician says: 'He alwaysfinds somebody for idle hands to do.'
"I remember one summer when me and my partner, Andy Tucker, tried totake a layoff from our professional and business duties; but it seemsthat our work followed us wherever we went.
"Now, with a preacher it's different. He can throw off hisresponsibilities and enjoy himself. On the 31st of May he wrapsmosquito netting and tin foil around the pulpit, grabs his niblick,breviary and fishing pole and hikes for Lake Como or Atlantic Cityaccording to the size of the loudness with which he has been called byhis congregation. And, sir, for three months he don't have to thinkabout business except to hunt around in Deuteronomy and Proverbs andTimothy to find texts to cover and exculpate such little midsummerpenances as dropping a couple of looey door on rouge or teaching aPresbyterian widow to swim.
"But I was going to tell you about mine and Andy's summer vacationthat wasn't one.
"We was tired of finance and all the branches of unsanctifiedingenuity. Even Andy, whose brain rarely ever stopped working, beganto make noises like a tennis cabinet.
"'Heigh ho!' says Andy. 'I'm tired. I've got that steam up the yachtCorsair and ho for the Riviera! feeling. I want to loaf and indict mysoul, as Walt Whittier says. I want to play pinochle with Merry delVal or give a knouting to the tenants on my Tarrytown estates or doa monologue at a Chautauqua picnic in kilts or something summery andoutside the line of routine and sand-bagging.'
"'Patience,' says I. 'You'll have to climb higher in the professionbefore you can taste the laurels that crown the footprints of thegreat captains of industry. Now, what I'd like, Andy,' says I, 'wouldbe a summer sojourn in a mountain village far from scenes of larceny,labor and overcapitalization. I'm tired, too, and a month or so ofsinlessness ought to leave us in good shape to begin again to takeaway the white man's burdens in the fall.'
"Andy fell in with the rest cure at once, so we struck the generalpassenger agents of all the railroads for summer resort literature,and took a week to study out where we should go. I reckon the firstpassenger agent in the world was that man Genesis. But there wasn'tmuch competition in his day, and when he said: 'The Lord made theearth in six days, and all very good,' he hadn't any idea to whatextent the press agents of the summer hotels would plagiarize fromhim later on.
"When we finished the booklets we perceived, easy, that the UnitedStates from Passadumkeg, Maine, to El Paso, and from Skagway to KeyWest was a paradise of glorious mountain peaks, crystal lakes, newlaid eggs, golf, girls, garages, cooling breezes, straw rides, openplumbing and tennis; and all within two hours' ride.
"So me and Andy dumps the books out the back window and packs ourtrunk and takes the 6 o'clock Tortoise Flyer for Crow Knob, a kind ofa dernier resort in the mountains on the line of Tennessee and NorthCarolina.
"Dumps the books out of the back window."]
"We was directed to a kind of private hotel called Woodchuck Inn, andthither me and Andy bent and almost broke our footsteps over the rocksand stumps. The Inn set back from the road in a big grove of trees,and it looked fine with its broad porches and a lot of women in whitedresses rocking in the shade. The rest of Crow Knob was a post officeand some scenery set an angle of forty-five degrees and a welkin.
"Well, sir, when we got to the gate who do you suppose comes downthe walk to greet us? Old Smoke-'em-out Smithers, who used to be thebest open air painless dentist and electric liver pad faker in theSouthwest.
"Old Smoke-'em-out is dressed clerico-rural, and has the mingled airof a landlord and a claim jumper. Which aspect he corroborates bytelling us that he is the host and perpetrator of Woodchuck Inn. Iintroduces Andy, and we talk about a few volatile topics, such as willgo around at meetings of boards of directors and old associates likeus three were. Old Smoke-'em-out leads us into a kind of summer housein the yard near the gate and took up the harp of life and smote onall the chords with his mighty right.
"'Gents,' says he, 'I'm glad to see you. Maybe you can help me outof a scrape. I'm getting a bit old for street work, so I leased thisdogdays emporium so the good things would come to me. Two weeks beforethe season opened I gets a letter signed Lieut. Peary and one fromthe Duke of Marlborough, each wanting to engage board for part of thesummer.
"'Well, sir, you gents know what a big thing for an obscure hustleryit would be to have for guests two gentlemen whose names are famousfrom long association with icebergs and the Coburgs. So I prints alot of handbills announcing that Woodchuck Inn would shelter thesedistinguished boarders during the summer, except in places where itleaked, and I sends 'em out to towns around as far as Knoxville andCharlotte and Fish Dam and Bowling Green.
"'And now look up there on the porch, gents,' says Smoke-'em-out, 'atthem disconsolate specimens of their fair sex waiting for the arrivalof the Duke and the Lieutenant. The house is packed from rafters tocellar with hero worshippers.
"'There's four normal school teachers and two abnormal; there's threehigh school graduates between 37 and 42; there's two literary oldmaids and one that can write; there's a couple of society women anda lady from Haw River. Two elocutionists are bunking in the corncrib, and I've put cots in the hay loft for the cook and the societyeditress of the Chattanooga _Opera Glass_. You see how names draw,gents.'
"'Well,' says I, 'how is it that you seem to be biting your thumbs atgood luck? You didn't use to be that way.'
"'I ain't through,' says Smoke-'em-out. 'Yesterday was the day forthe advent of the auspicious personages. I goes down to the depot towelcome 'em. Two apparently animate substances gets off the train,both carrying bags full of croquet mallets and these magic lanternswith pushbuttons.
"I compares these integers with the original signatures to the letters--and, well, gents, I reckon the mistake was due to my poor eyesight.Instead of being the Lieutenant, the daisy chain and wild verbenaexplorer was none other than Levi T. Peevy, a soda water clerk fromAsheville. And the Duke of Marlborough turned out to be Theo. Drake ofMurfreesborough, a bookkeeper in a grocery. What did I do? I kicked'em both back on the train and watched 'em depart for the lowlands,the low.
Instead of the Lieut. and the Duke.]
"'Now you see the fix I'm in, gents,' goes on Smoke-'em-out Smithers.'I told the ladies that the notorious visitors had been detained onthe road by some unavoidable circumstances that made a noise like anice jam and an heiress, but they would arrive a day or two later. Whenthey find out that they've been deceived,' says Smoke-'em-out, 'everyyard of cross barred muslin and natural waved switch in the house willpack up and leave. It's a hard deal,' says old Smoke-'em-out.
"'Friend,' says Andy, touching the old man on the aesophagus, 'whythis jeremiad when the polar regions and the portals of Blenheim areconspiring to hand you prosperity on a hall-marked silver salver. Wehave arrived.'
"A light breaks out on Smoke-'em-out's face.
"'Can you do it, gents?' he asks. 'Could ye do it? Could ye play thepolar man and the little duke for the nice ladies? Will ye do it?'
"'Can ye do it, gents?' he asks."]
"I see that Andy is superimposed with his old hankering for the oraland polyglot system of buncoing. That man had a vocabulary of about10,000 words and synonyms, which arrayed themselves into contrabandsophistries and parables when they came out.
"'Listen,' says Andy to old Smoke-'em-out. 'Can we do it? You beholdbefore you, Mr. Smithers, two of the finest equipped men on earth forinveigling the proletariat, whether by word of mouth, sleight-of-handor swiftness of foot. Dukes come and go, explorers go and get lost,but me and Jeff Peters,' says Andy, 'go after the come-ons forever. Ifyou say so, we're the two illustrious guests you were expecting. Andyou'll find,' says Andy, 'that we'll give you the true local color ofthe title roles from the aurora borealis to the ducal portcullis.'
"Old Smoke-'em-out is delig
hted. He takes me and Andy up to the inn byan arm apiece, telling us on the way that the finest fruits of the canand luxuries of the fast freights should be ours without price as longas we would stay.
"On the porch Smoke-'em-out says: 'Ladies, I have the honor tointroduce His Gracefulness the Duke of Marlborough and the famousinventor of the North Pole, Lieut. Peary.'
"The skirts all flutter and the rocking chairs squeak as me and Andybows and then goes on in with old Smoke-'em-out to register. And thenwe washed up and turned our cuffs, and the landlord took us to therooms he'd been saving for us and got out a demijohn of North Carolinareal mountain dew.
"I expected trouble when Andy began to drink. He has the artisticmetempsychosis which is half drunk when sober and looks down onairships when stimulated.
"After lingering with the demijohn me and Andy goes out on the porch,where the ladies are to begin to earn our keep. We sit in two specialchairs and then the schoolma'ams and literaterrers hunched theirrockers close around us.
"One lady says to me: 'How did that last venture of yours turn out,sir?'
"Now, I'd clean forgot to have an understanding with Andy which Iwas to be, the duke or the lieutenant. And I couldn't tell fromher question whether she was referring to Arctic or matrimonialexpeditions. So I gave an answer that would cover both cases.
"'Well, ma'am,' says I, 'it was a freeze out--right smart of a freezeout, ma'am.'
"And then the flood gates of Andy's perorations was opened and I knewwhich one of the renowned ostensible guests I was supposed to be. Iwasn't either. Andy was both. And still furthermore it seemed thathe was trying to be the mouthpiece of the whole British nobility andof Arctic exploration from Sir John Franklin down. It was the unionof corn whiskey and the conscientious fictional form that Mr. W. D.Howletts admires so much.
"'Ladies,' says Andy, smiling semicircularly, 'I am truly glad tovisit America. I do not consider the magna charta,' says he, 'or gasballoons or snow-shoes in any way a detriment to the beauty and charmof your American women, skyscrapers or the architecture of youricebergs. The next time,' says Andy, 'that I go after the North Poleall the Vanderbilts in Greenland won't be able to turn me out in thecold--I mean make it hot for me.'
"'Tell us about one of your trips, Lieutenant,' says one of thenormals.
"'Sure,' says Andy, getting the decision over a hiccup. 'It was inthe spring of last year that I sailed the Castle of Blenheim up tolatitude 87 degrees Fahrenheit and beat the record. Ladies,' saysAndy, 'it was a sad sight to see a Duke allied by a civil andliturgical chattel mortgage to one of your first families lost in aregion of semiannual days.' And then he goes on, 'At four bells wesighted Westminster Abbey, but there was not a drop to eat. At noon wethrew out five sandbags, and the ship rose fifteen knots higher. Atmidnight,' continues Andy, 'the restaurants closed. Sitting on a cakeof ice we ate seven hot dogs. All around us was snow and ice. Sixtimes a night the boatswain rose up and tore a leaf off the calendar,so we could keep time with the barometer. At 12,' says Andy, with alot of anguish on his face, 'three huge polar bears sprang down thehatchway, into the cabin. And then--'
"'What then, Lieutenant?' says a schoolma'am, excitedly.
"Andy gives a loud sob.
"'The Duchess shook me,' he cries out, and slides out of the chair andweeps on the porch.
"Well, of course, that fixed the scheme. The women boarders all leftthe next morning. The landlord wouldn't speak to us for two days, butwhen he found we had money to pay our way he loosened up.
"So me and Andy had a quiet, restful summer after all, coming awayfrom Crow Knob with $1,100, that we enticed out of old Smoke-'em-outplaying seven up."