The Adventures of a Suburbanite

by Ellis Parker Butler

  V. THE NEW MR. PRAWLEY

  THE new Mr. Prawley (by this time a family, but we still clung to thename Prawley, just as all coloured waiters are called "George") was amost unusual man.

  For a month before we hired him he had been trying to undermine Isobel'sfaith in the Mr. Prawley from East Westcote. He had called at the housetwo or three times a week. At first he merely asked for the job ofman-of-all-work, as any applicant might have asked for it, but he soonbegan speaking of our Prawley in the most damaging terms. I believethere was hardly a crime or misdemeanour that he did not lay at the doorof our Mr. Prawley, and so insistent was he that Isobel and I had ceasedto speak of him as living in our attic.

  Isobel decided the two men must be deadly enemies, and that thisfellow was set on hounding our Mr. Prawley from pillar to post, like anavenging angel. She concluded that this man must have been frightfullywronged by our Mr. Prawley, and that he had sworn to dog his footstepsto the grave.

  But when she let our Mr. Prawley go and hired this new Mr. Prawley,his interest in his predecessor ceased entirely. In place of the eager,longing look his face had worn, he now wore a thin, satisfied look,which I can best describe as that of a hungry jackal licking his chops.Mr. Prawley--his name, he told us, was Duggs, Alonzo Duggs, but wecalled him Mr. Prawley--was a tall, lean, villanous-looking fellow, witha red, pointed beard, and at times when he leaned on the division fenceand looked into Mr. Millington's yard I could see his fingers openingand shutting like the claws of a bird of prey. He seemed to hate Mr.Millington With a deep but hidden hatred, and often, when Mr. Millingtonwas preparing to take Isobel and me to Port Lafayette, Mr. Prawley wouldstand and grit his teeth in the most unpleasant manner. When I spoketo Mr. Prawley about it he said, "It isn't Mr. Millington. It is theautomobile. I hate automobiles!"

  For that matter, I was beginning to hate them myself. Many a pleasantride behind Bob did I have to sacrifice because Millington insisted thatwe take a little run up to Port Lafayette with him and Mrs. Millington.We would all get into his car, and Millington would pull his cap downtight, and begin to frown and cock his head on one side to hear signs ofasthma or heart throbs or whatever the automobile might take a notion tohave that day. And off we would go!

  I tell you, it was exhilarating. After all there is nothing likemotoring. We would roll smoothly down the street, with Millingtonfrowning like a pirate all the way, and then suddenly he would hear thenoise he was listening for, and he would stop frowning, and jerk a leverthat stopped the car, and hop out with a satisfied expression, and beginto whistle, and open the car in eight places, and take out an assortedhardware store, and adhesive tape, and blankets, and oil cans, andhatchets, and axes, and get to work on the car as happy as a babe; andMrs. Millington and Isobel and I would walk home.

  The sight of an automobile seemed to madden Mr. Prawley, but otherwisehe was the meekest of men, and a good example of this was the manner inwhich he behaved at our Christmas party.

  The idea of having a good, old-fashioned Christmas house party for ourcity friends was Isobel's idea, but the moment she mentioned it I adoptedit, and told her we would have Jimmy Dunn out. Jimmy Dunn is one ofthose rare men that have acquired the suburban-visit habit. Usually whenwe suburbanites invite a city friend to spend the week-end with us, thecity friend balks.

  Into his frank eyes comes a furtive, shifty look as he tries to thinkof an adequate lie to serve as an excuse for not coming, but Jimmy wastaken in hand when he was young and flexible, and he has become meek anddocile under adversity, as I might say. When any one invites Jimmy tothe suburbs he hardly makes a struggle. I suppose it is because of thegradual weakening of his will power.

  "Good!" I said. "We will have Jimmy Dunn out over Christmas."

  "Oh! Jimmy Dunn!" scoffed Isobel gently. "Of course we will have Jimmy,but what I mean is to have a lot of people--ten at least--and we musthave at least two lovers, because they will look so well in that littlealcove room off the parlour, and we can go in and surprise them oncein a while. And we will have a Santa Claus, and lots of holly andmistletoe, and a tree with all sorts of foolish presents on it for everyone, and--"

  "Splendid!" I cried less enthusiastically.

  "Now as for the ten--"

  "Well," said Isobel, "we will have Jimmy Dunn--"

  "That is what I suggested," I said meekly. "We will have Jimmy Dunn,"repeated Isobel, "and then we will have--we will have--I wonder who wecould get to come out. Mary might come, if she wasn't in Europe."

  "That would make two," I said cheerfully, "if she wasn't in Europe.""And we must have a Yule-log!" exclaimed Isobel. "A big, blazingYule-log, to drink wassail in front of, and to sing carols around."I told Isobel that, as nearly as I could judge, the fireplaces in ourhouse had not been constructed for big, blazing Yule-logs. I remindedher that when I had spoken to the last owner about having a grate firehe had advised us, with great excitement, not to attempt anything sorash. He had said that if we were careful we might have a gas-log,provided it was a small one and we did not turn on the gas full force,and were sure our insurance was placed in a good, reliable company. Hehad said that if we were careful about those few things, and kept apail of water on the roof in case of emergency, we might use a gas-log,provided we extinguished it as soon as we felt any heat coming from it.I had not, at the time, thought of mentioning a Yule-log to him, butI told Isobel now that perhaps we might be able to find a small,gas-burning Yule-log at the gas company's office. Isobel scoffed at theidea. She said we might as well put a hot-water bottle in the grate andtry to be merry around that.

  "I don't see," she said, "why people build chimneys in houses if it isgoing to be dangerous to have a fire in the fireplace."

  "They improve the ventilation, I suppose," I said, "and then, what wouldSanta Claus come down if there were no chimneys?"

  I frequently drop these half-joking remarks into my conversations withIsobel, and not infrequently she smiles at them in a faraway manner, butthis time she jumped at the remark and seized it with both hands.

  "John!" she cried, "that is the very, very thing! We will have SantaClaus come down the chimney! And you will be Santa Claus!" I remainedcalm. Some men would have immediately remembered they had priorengagements for Christmas. Some men would have instantly declared thatSanta Claus was an unworthy myth. But not I! I dropped upon my hands andknees and gazed up the chimney. When I withdrew my head, I stood up andgrasped Isobel's hand.

  "Fine!" I cried with well-simulated enthusiasm. "I'll get an automobilecoat from Millington, and sleigh bells and a mask with a long whitebeard--"

  "And a wig with long white hair," Isobel added joyously.

  "And while our guests are all at dinner," I cried, "I will steal awayfrom the table--"

  "John!" exclaimed Isobel. "You can't be Santa Claus! Can't you see thatit would never, never do for you to leave the table when your guestswere all there? You cannot be Santa Claus, John!"

  "Oh, Isobel!"

  "No," she said firmly, "you cannot be Santa Claus. Jimmy Dunn must beSanta Claus!"

  We had Jimmy Dunn out the next Sunday and broke it to him as gently aswe could, and explained what a lot of fun it would be for him, and howI envied him the chance. For some reason he did not become wildlyenthusiastic. Instead he kneeled down, as I had done, and put his headinto the fireplace, in his usual slow-going manner, and looked up towhere the small oblong of blue sky glowed far, far above him.

  When he withdrew his head, he began some maundering talk about, an uncleof his in Baltimore who was far from well, and who was likely to beextremely dead or sick or married about Christmas time, but I had hadtoo much experience with such excuses to pay any attention to him.Isobel and I gathered about him and talked as fast as we could, withmerry little laughs, and presently Jimmy seemed more resigned, and saidhe supposed if he had to be Santa Claus there was no way out of it ifhe wanted t o keep our friendship. So when he suggested getting anautomobile coat to wear, we hailed it as a splendidly original idea,and patted him on th
e back, and he went away in a rather good humour,particularly when we told him he need not come all the way down from thetop of the chimney, but could get into the chimney from the room abovethe parlour. I told him it would be no trouble at all to take out theiron back of the fireplace, for it was almost falling out, and that wewould have a ladder in the chimney for him to come down.

  It was Mrs. Rolfs who changed our plans.

  As soon as she heard we were going to have a Santa Claus, she broughtover a magazine and showed Isobel an article that said Santa Claus waslacking in originality, and that it was much better to have two littlegirls dressed as snow fairies distribute the presents from the tree,and Mrs. Rolfs said she was willing to lend us her two daughters, if weinsisted. So we had to insist.

  99]

  By the merest oversight, such as might occur in any family excited overthe preparations for a Christmas party, Isobel forgot to tell Jimmy Dunnthat the plan was changed. She had enough to think of without thinkingof that, for she found, at the last moment, that she could not pick up aregularly constituted pair of lovers for the little alcove room, andshe had to patch up a temporary pair of lovers by inviting Miss Seiler,depending on Jimmy Dunn to do the best he could as the other half of thepair. Of course Jimmy Dunn does not talk much, and it was apt to be asurprise to him to learn he was scheduled to make love, but Miss Seilertalks enough for two. When Jimmy arrived, about four o'clock Christmaseve, Isobel let him know he was to be a lover, but he was then in thehouse, and it was too late for him to get away.

  Isobel had done nobly in securing guests. Jimmy and Miss Seiler were theonly guests from the city, but she had captured some suburbanites. Tenof us made merry at the table--that is, all ten except Jimmy. I waspositively ashamed of Jimmy. There we were at the culminating hours ofthe merry Yule-tide, gathered at the festive board itself, with a bowlof first-rate home-made wassail with ice in it, and Jimmy was expectedto smile lovingly, and blush, and all that sort of thing, and what didhe do? He sat as mute as a clam, and started uneasily every time a newcourse appeared. Before dessert arrived he actually arose and asked tobe excused.

  Now, if _you_ intended making a fool of yourself in a friend's house byimpersonating Santa Claus and coming down a chimney in a fur automobilecoat, and nonsense like that, _you_ would have sense enough to rememberwhich room upstairs had the chimney that led down into the parlourfireplace, wouldn't you? So I blame Jimmy entirely, and so does Isobel.Jimmy says--of course he had to have some excuse--that we might havetold him we had given up the idea of having Santa Claus come down thechimney, and that if we had wanted him to come down any particularchimney we should have put a label on it. "Santa Claus enter here," Isuppose.

  Jimmy said he did the best he could; that he knew he did not have muchtime between the threatened appearance of the dessert and the timehe was supposed to issue from the fireplace--and so on! He was quiteexcited about it. Quite bitter, I may say.

  It seems--or so Jimmy says--that, when he left the table, Jimmy wentupstairs and got into his automobile coat of fur, and his felt boots,and his mask, and his fur gloves, and his long white hair, and hisstocking hat, and that about the time we were sipping coffee he wasready. He says it was no joke to be done up in all those things in anoverheated house, and he thought if he got into the chimney he mightbe in a cool draught, so he poked about until he found a fireplace andbacked carefully into it, and pawed with his left foot for the top rungof the ladder. That was about the time we arose from the table withmerry laughs, as nearly as Isobel and I can judge.

  No one missed Jimmy, except Miss Seiler, and she was so unused to beingmade love to as Jimmy made love that she thought nothing of a temporaryabsence. It was not until I took Jimmy's present from the tree and sentone of the Rolfs fairies to hand it to Jimmy that we realized he was notin the parlour, and then Isobel and I both felt hurt to think thatJimmy had selfishly withdrawn from among us when we had gone to all thetrouble of getting the other half of a pair of lovers especially on hisaccount. It was not fair to Miss Seiler, and I told Jimmy so the nexttime I saw him.

  When the Rolfs fairy had looked in all the rooms, upstairs and down, andhad not found Jimmy, she came back and told Isobel, and that was whenIsobel remembered she had forgotten to tell Jimmy we had given up theidea of having a Santa Claus. Isobel looked up the parlour chimney, buthe was not there, and then we all started merrily looking up chimneys.We found Santa Claus up the library chimney almost immediately. He wasstill kicking, but not with much vim--more like a man that is kickingbecause he has nothing else to do than like a man that enjoys it.

  I think we must have been gathering around the Christmas tree to thecheery music of a carol when Santa Claus put his foot on a loose brickin the fireplace and slipped. I claim that if Santa Claus had instantlythrown his body forward he would have been safe enough, but Santa Claussays he did not have time--that he slid down the chimney immediately, asfar as his arms would let him. He says that when he caught the edge ofthe hearth with his hands he did yell; that he yelled as loud as anyman could who was wrapped in a fur coat and had his mouth full of whitehorse-hair whiskers and his face covered by a mask. I say that proves heyelled just as we were singing the carol. He should have yelled a momentsooner, or should have waited half an hour, until the noise in theparlour abated. Santa Claus says he tried to stay there half an hour,but the two bricks he had grasped did not want to wait. They wanted tohurry down the chimney without further delay, and they had their own wayabout it. So Santa Claus went on down with them.

  I tell Santa Claus that even if we were singing carols we would haveheard him if he had fallen to the library floor with a bump, and that itwas his fault if he did not fall heavily, but he blames the architect.He says that if the chimney had been built large enough he would havedone his part and would have fallen hard, but that when he reached thenarrow part of the chimney he wedged there. I said that was the faultof wearing an automobile coat that padded him out so he could not fallthrough an ordinary chimney, and I asked him if he thought any man whomeant to fall down chimneys had ever before put on an automobile coat tofall in.

  Certainly I, the host, could not be expected to stop the laughter andmerriment when I was taking presents from the tree, and bid every one besilent and listen for the muffled tones of a Santa Claus in the librarychimney. I do not say Santa Claus did not yell as loudly as he could.Doubtless he did. And I do not say he did not try to get out of thechimney. He says he did, but that with his arms crowded above his headhe could do nothing but reach. He says he also kicked, but there wasnothing to kick. He says the most fruitless task in the world is to kickwhen wedged in a chimney with a whole fur automobile coat crowded upunder the arms and nothing below to kick but air.

  Luckily I was able to send for Mr. Rolfs and Mr. Millington, whoseadvice is always valuable, since when I know what they advise I knowwhat not to do. Mr. Rolfs rushed in and was of the opinion that we mustget a chisel and chisel a hole in the library wall as near as possibleto where Santa Claus was reposing, but when Mr. Millington arrived,breathless, he said this would be simple murder, for as likely as notthe chisel would enter between two bricks and perforate Santa Clausbeyond repair. Mr. Millington said the thing to do was to get aclothesline and attach it to Santa Claus's feet and pull him down. Hesaid it was logical to pull him downward, because we would then be aidedby the law of gravitation. Mr. Rolfs said this was nonsense, and thatit would only wedge Santa Claus in the chimney more tightly, and that wewould, in all probability, pull him in two, or at least stretch him outso long that he would never be very useful again.

  Mr. Rolfs and Mr. Millington became quite heated in their argument. Mr.Rolfs said that if a rope was to be used it should be used to pull SantaClaus upward, but they compromised by agreeing to cut the clotheslinein two, choose up sides, and let one side pull Santa Claus upward,while the other pulled him downward. Then Santa Claus would move inthe direction of least resistance. So they got the clothesline, and Mr.Rolfs was about to cut it, when Miss Seiler screamed.r />
  I was doubly glad she screamed just at that juncture, for we had allbecome so interested in the Rolfs-Millington controversy that we hadforgotten how perishable a human being is, and, with two such stubbornmen as Rolfs and Millington urging us on, we might have pulledSanta Claus in two while our sporting instincts were aroused by thetug-of-war. That was one reason I was glad Miss Seiler screamed. Theother reason was that it showed she was doing her share of representingone half of a pair of lovers. She had done rather poorly up to thattime, but she saw that when her lover was about to be pulled asunder wasthe time to scream, if she was ever going to scream, so she screamed.So we all went upstairs and let the rope down to Santa Claus, and theentire merry Christmas house party pulled, and after we had jerked a fewtimes up came Santa Claus with a sudden bump.

  At that moment Miss Seiler screamed again, and when we turned we sawthe reason, for the glass door to the little upper porch had opened andJimmy Dunn was entering the room.

  We laid Santa Claus on the floor and let him kick, for he seemed to haveacquired the habit, but after awhile he slowed down and only jerked hislegs spasmodically. Mr. Millington explained that it was only the reflexaction of the muscles, and that probably Santa Claus would kick likethat for several months, whenever he lay down. He said if we hadfollowed his advice and pulled downward we would have yanked all thereflex action out of the legs.

  As soon as I pulled the mask from his face I recognized Mr. Prawley.Jimmy slipped out of the room and walked all the way to the station, andMiss Seiler stood around, not knowing whether she was to be half ofa pair of lovers with Mr. Prawley as the other half, or stop being alover, or weep because Jimmy had gone. I felt sorry for her, because Mr.Prawley was not a good specimen of a Christmas lover just then. Whenwe stood him on his feet his trousers were still pushed up around hisknees, and his fur coat was around his neck. He was so weak we had tohold him up.

  "What I want to know," said Mr. Millington, "is what you were doing inthat chimney in my automobile coat?"

  "Doing?" said Mr. Prawley. "Why, I'm jolly old Santa Claus. I come downchimneys."

  "Well, my advice to you, Mr. Prawley," I said, "is to stop it. You don'tdo it at all right. Don't try it again. I've had enough of this jollyold Santa Claus business. Who told you to do it?"

  "The little gentleman with the scared look," said Mr. Prawley, lookingaround for Jimmy Dunn. "He isn't here."

  "And what did he give you for doing it?" I asked.

  "Nothing!" said Mr. Prawley. "He just--"

  "Just what?" I asked when he hesitated. Mr. Prawley drew me to one sideand whispered.

  "He said I might wear an automobile coat. And I couldn't resist thetemptation," said Mr. Prawley. "I've been hankering to get inside anautomobile coat for weeks and weeks, sir. I couldn't resist."

  Of course, I could make nothing of this at the time, so I merely said afew words of good advice, and ordered Mr. Prawley never to try the SantaClaus impersonation again.

  "Of course, I'm only an amateur at it," said Mr. Prawley apologetically,and then he brightened, "but I made good speed as far as I got. I'll betI broke the world's speed record for jolly old Santa Clauses!"