“Thank you, Mortimore,” Lucius responded, nodding. “I’d been calculating a little on a new necktie — but probably it wouldn’t be much use if Henry Ledyard’s going to—”
“No, sir,” Mortimer interrupted to agree. “Henry buys ’em a couple or more at a time. Newt Truscom’s goin’ to be a rich man if Henry don’t quit. So long, Lu!”
Mr. Allen, turning in at the entrance to the stairway that led to his office, waved his left hand in farewell, his right being employed in an oddly solicitous protection of the parasol — though nothing threatened it. But Mortimer, having sauntered on a few steps, halted, and returned to the stairway entrance, whence he called loudly upward:
“Lu! Oh, Lu Allen!”
“What is it?”
“I forgot to mention it. You want to be lookin’ out your window along around three o’clock or halfpast, to-morrow afternoon.”
“What for?”
“Why, P. Borodino was talkin’ and all so much, about that buggy-ride, you know, so Rolfo Williams bet him a safety-razor against three dollars’ worth of accident insurance that he wouldn’t git her to go with him, and Bore’s got to drive around the Square, first thing after they start, to prove it. There’s quite a heap of interest around town in all this and that; and you better keep your eye out your window from three o’clock on!”
Thus, at three o’clock, the next afternoon, Mr. Allen was in fact looking — though somewhat crossly — out of his office window. Below, P. Borodino Thompson was in view, seated in his slowly moving phaeton, exuberantly clad for a man of his special reputation for “closeness,” and with his legs concealed by a new dust-robe, brilliantly bordered; but he was as yet unaccompanied.
A loud and husky voice ascended to the window: “On his way!” And Lucius marked the form and suspender of Mortimer upon the sidewalk below; whereupon Mortimer, seeing that Lucius observed him, clapped hand to mouth, and simulated a jocular writhing in mockery of P. Borodino. “Hay, Bore!” he bellowed. “Floyd Kilbert’s wife’s got a sewin’- machine she wants you to move fer her in that empty seat you’ll have in your phaeton when you git back here to the Square in a few minutes!”
Mr. Thompson waved his whip condescendingly, attempting no other retort; and turned into the maple shade of Pawpaw Street. Five minutes later, “General,” the elderly white horse, was nosing the-unyielding hand of the cast-iron darky boy, and the prophecy made by Mr. Allen on the preceding morning was fulfilled.
A neat young woman, descendant of vikings, but tamed in all except accent, showed Mr. Thompson into an Eighteen-Eighty parlour; went away, returned, and addressed him as “yentleman.” Mrs. Ricketts would be glad to see him, she reported, adding:— “Yust wait some minute.”
The visitor waited some minutes, then examined his reflection in the glass over the Eastlake mantel; and a slight rustling in the hall, near the doorway, failed to attract his attention, for he was engaged in a fundamental rearrangement of his tie.
“Wookin’ at himseff in the wookin’-gwass!”
This unfavourable comment caused him to tuck his tie back into the neck of his white waistcoat in haste, and to face the doorway somewhat confusedly. Two pretty little children stood there, starchy and fresh, and lustrously clean, dressed in white: a boy about seven and a girl about five — and both had their mother’s blue eyes and amber hair.
“He’s dressin’ himself,” said the boy.
“Wookin’ at himself in the wookin’-gwass!” the little girl repeated, and, pointing a curling forefinger, she asked:— “Who? Who that man?”
“Well, tots,” the visitor said, rather uncomfortably, but with proper graciousness, “who are you? What’s your name, little girl?”
“Maud,” the little girl replied, without any shyness.
“What’s yours, little man?”
“Bill,” said the boy. “Bill Ricketts. You got somep’m stickin’ out of your vest at the top.”
Mr. Thompson incautiously followed an impulse to turn again to the mirror, whereupon the child, Maud, instantly shouted:
“Wookin’ at himseff in the wookin’-gwass!”
Her voice was so loud, and the information it imparted so discomfiting, that the visitor felt himself breaking out suddenly into a light perspiration. Foolishly, he attempted to defend himself against the accusation. “Why, no, I wasn’t, little Maudie,” he said, with an uneasy laugh.
To his horror, she responded by shouting at an even higher pitch than before:
“Wookin’ at himseff in the wookin’-gwass!”
She did not stop at that, for children in such moods are terrible, and they have no pity. P. Borodino Thompson, substantial citizen, of considerable importance financially, not only in Marlow but throughout the county, and not without dignity to maintain, found himself at the mercy of this child who appeared to be possessed (for no reason whatever) by the old original Fiend of malice. She began to leap into the air repeatedly; leaping higher and higher clapping her hands together, at arms’-length above her head, while she shrieked, squealed, and in all ways put pressure upon her lungs and vocal organs to distribute over the world the scandal that so horridly fascinated her: “Caught him! Wookin’ at himseff in the wookin’- gwass! Caught him wookin’ at himseff in the wookin’-gwass! Wookin’ at himseff in the wookin’- GWASS!”
Meanwhile, her brother did not escape infection. He, likewise, began to leap and to vociferate, so that it was not possible to imagine any part of the house, or of the immediate neighbourhood, to which the indictment was not borne.
“Stickin’ out of his vest!” shouted Bill. “Got somep’n stickin’ out of his vest! Out of his vest, vest, vest! Out of his vest, vest, VEST!”
Then, without warning, he suddenly slapped his sister heartily upon the shoulder. “Got your tag!” he cried; darted away, and out through the open front door to the green sunshiny yard, whither Maud instantly pursued him.
Round and round the front yard they went, the two little flitting white figures, and round the house, and round and round the old back yard with its long grape-arbour and empty stable. By and by, when each had fallen separately four or five times, they collided and fell together, remaining prone, as by an unspoken agreement. Panting, they thus remained for several minutes; then Bill rose and walked into the stable, until now unexplored; and Maud followed him.
When they came out, two minutes later, Bill was carrying, to the extreme damage of his white blouse, a large can of red paint, while Maud was swinging a paint-brush that had been reposing in the can; and the look upon their two flushed faces was studious but inscrutable.
Maud applied the brush to the side of the house, leaving a broad red streak upon the gray weather-boarding; but Bill indignantly snatched the brush from her hand.
“Shame!” he said. “You know what you got once!”
“When?” Maud demanded. “When did I got it?”
“You know!” her brother responded darkly. “For markin’ on the nurs’ry wall with my little box o’ paints.”
“She did not!”
“She did, too!”
“Not!”
“Did!” said Bill. “And you’ll get one now if she finds out you stuck paint on the house. You will!”
“I won’t!”
“Will, too! You know it’s wrong to stick paint on a house.”
“’Tisn’t!” Maud insisted. “She spanks you more’n she spanks me.”
“You wait an’ see!”
He shook his head ominously, and for a moment Maud was depressed, but the signs of foreboding vanished from her angelic brow, and she made the natural inquiry:
“What we gain’ to paint?”
To Bill also, it was evident that something had to be painted; but as he looked about him, the available material seemed sparse. As a being possessed of reason, he understood that a spanking applied to his sister in order to emphasize the immunity of houses, might well be thought to indicate that stables and fences were also morally unpaintable. Little appeared t
o remain at the disposal of a person who had just providentially acquired a can of red paint and a brush. Shrubberies were obviously impracticable, and Bill had his doubts about the trunks of trees: they were made of wood, he knew, like many houses and fences and stables.
As he stood, thinking profoundly, there came loudly through the still afternoon the sound of General, shaking his harness and stamping the ground, as a May fly persisted in annoying him.
Maud pointed with her curling forefinger. “Wet’s paint that,” she said.
“That” was the horse; Maud was pointing at General. And immediately Bill’s eyes showed his relief from a great strain, and became eager and confident: nobody had ever told him not to paint a horse.
Hand-in-hand, the brother and sister approached General. The kind old horse, worried by the fly and the heat, was pleased to have the fly chased away; and after the first stroke of the cool wet brush on his right foreleg, he closed one eye in hushed ecstasy and stood motionless, lest he break the spell.
General’s owner, meanwhile, in the quiet parlour, had not quite recovered his usual pallor; but the departure of the children mightily relieved him, and he found time to complete the bestowal of his tie. Thereafter, Mrs. Ricketts still not making her appearance, he had leisure to acquaint himself with the design of romantic musical instruments inlaid in pearl upon the top of the centre-table; and with the two tall alabaster pitchers upon the mantelpiece, each bearing the carved word “Souvenir;” and with the Toreador burnt upon a panel of wood and painted, but obscure with years of standing in an empty house — though nothing was dusty, for plainly the daughter of vikings had been “over” everything thoroughly. Altogether, Mr. Thompson considered the room (which spoke of Lucy Cope’s mother rather than of Lucy) a pleasant and comfortable one — that is, if those children —
A step descending the stair, a whispering of silk — and Mr. Thompson, after a last settling of his neck into his collar, coughed reassuringly, and faced the door with a slight agitation. More would have been warranted by the vision that appeared there.
She came quickly toward him and gave him her hand. “How kind of you to remember me and come to see me!” she said. “And how inhospitable you’re thinking me to have kept you waiting so long in such a stuffy room!” She turned to the nearest window as she spoke, and began to struggle delicately with the catch of the old-fashioned “inside shutters.”
“We’ll let some air in and some light, too; so that we can both see how little we’ve changed. The children were the reason I was so long: they were washed and dressed like little clean angels, but they’re in rather high spirits — you know how children are for the first few days after coming to a new place — and they slipped down into the cellar, which we haven’t had time to get put in order yet, and they found an old air-passage to the furnace, and crawled through it, and so they had to be all washed and dressed over again; and when I got through doing it, I had to be all washed and dressed over again! I hope they didn’t annoy you, Mr. Thompson: I thought I heard them romping down here, somewhere. They’re really not so wild as they must seem; it’s only that coming to a place altogether strange to them has upset them a little, and — There!” The catch yielded, and she spread the shutters wide. “Now we can have a little more li—”
She paused in the middle of the word, gazing fixedly out of the window.
But the caller did not follow the direction of Mrs. Ricketts’s gaze; he was looking at her with concentrated approval, and mentally preparing the invitation it was his purpose to extend. After coughing rather formally, “I have called,” he said, “or, rather, I have stopped by on my way to take a drive, because I thought, perhaps, as the weather was warm, it might be cooler than sitting indoors to take a turn around the Square first and then drive out toward the Athens City Pike, and return by way of—”
“Mercy!” exclaimed Mrs. Ricketts in a tone so remarkable that he stopped short; and then his eyes followed the direction of hers.
He uttered a stricken cry.
All four of General’s legs had been conscientiously painted, and Maud, standing directly under his stomach, so to speak, was holding the can of paint clasped in her arms, while the older artist began work on the under side of General’s ribs. General’s expression was one of dreamy happiness, though his appearance, and that of the children’s clothes, hands, cheeks, and noses suggested a busy day at the abattoir.
“Don’t move!” Mrs. Ricketts called suddenly, but not alarmingly, as she raised the window. “Stand still, Maud! Now walk straight this way — walk toward me. Instantly!”
And as Maud obeyed, her mother jumped out of the window, a proceeding that both children recognized as extraordinary and ill-omened. Bill instinctively began to defend himself.
“You never told us we couldn’t paint horses!” he said hotly. “We haven’t painted him much, we’ve only—”
“March!” said his mother in the tone that meant the worst. “Round to the kitchen — not through the house! Both of you! Quick!”
Bill opened his mouth to protest further, but, almost to his own surprise, a wail came forth instead of an argument, and at that sound, Maud dropped the sanguinary can and joined him in loud dole. Shouting with woe, holding their unspeakable hands far from them, with fingers spread wide, they marched. Round the corner of the house went the dread pageant, and the green grass looked like murder where it passed. But when Mrs. Ricketts returned, after delivering Maud and Bill into the hands of a despairing servitress, General and the phaeton were gone.
“Oh, oh, oh!” she murmured, and, overcome by the dreadful picture that rose before her imagination, she went droopingly into the house. In her mind’s eye she saw Mr. Thompson in all his special dressiness and lemon-yellow tie, driving through the streets and explaining to people: “Yes, Lucy Ricketts has come back and her children did this!” She saw him telling Lucius — and she remembered what Lucius had said: “I’m afraid to meet Maud and Bill!”
She began to feel strickenly sure that Lucius would return her parasol by a messenger. If he did that (she thought) what was the use of coming all the way from California to live in a town like Marlow!
But the parasol was not sent, nor did Lucius bring it. It remained, as did Mr. Allen himself, obscured from her sight and from her knowledge. Nor was there brought to her any account of P. Borodino’s making a dreadful progress through the town as she had imagined. Mr. Thompson had, in fact, led General as hastily as possible into the nearest alley — so Mortimer Fole explained to Lucius one week later, almost to the hour.
Mortimer had dropped into Mr. Allen’s office and had expressed surprise at finding its tenant in town. “I been up here two three times a day fer a week, Lu,” he said, seating himself. “Where on earth you been?”
“Argument before the Federal court in Springfield,” Lucius answered. “What did you want to see me about, Mortimore?”
“Well, they’s been some talk about our pension goin’ out the family,” said Mortimer, “in case it happened my wife’s step-mother was to die. It comes through that branch, you know, Lu.”
“Is she ailing?”
“No,” said Mortimer. “She gits the best of care. We were only talkin’ it over, and some of ’em says, ‘Suppose she was to go, what then?”’
“I wouldn’t worry about it until she did,” his legal adviser suggested. “Anything else?”
Mortimer removed his hat, and from the storage of its inner band took hall of a cigar, which, with a reflective air, he placed in the corner of his mouth. Then he put his hat on again, tilted back against the wall, and hooked his heels over a rung of his chair. “Heard about Henry Ledyard yet?” he inquired.
“No.”
“Well, sir, he went up there,” said Mortimer. “He only went oncet!”
“What was the trouble?”
Mr. Foie cast his eyes high aloft, an ocular gesture expressing deplorable things.
“Maud and Bill,” he said.
“What did they do?”
“Henry was settin’ in the parlour talkin’ to their mother, and, the way I heard it, all of a sudden they heard somep’n go ‘Pop!’ outside, in the hall, and when they come to look, it was that new, stiff, high-crowned straw hat he went and ordered from New York and had shipped out here by express. They got a woman up there cookin’ and a Norwegian lady to do extra work, and I hear this here Norwegian tells some that the way it happened was Maud was settin’ on it, kind of jouncin’ around to see if it wouldn’t bounce her up and down. Seems this Norwegian she says spankin’ and shuttin’ up in the closet don’t do neither of ’em one little bit o’ good. Says there ain’t nothin’ in the world’ll take it out of ’em. Them two chuldern have just about got this town buffaloed, Lu!”
“Oh, only breaking a straw hat,” said Lucius. “I don’t see how that’s—”
“The two of ’em come up-town,” Mortimer interrupted firmly. “They come up-town to the Square, the next afternoon after they busted Henry’s twelve-dollar hat, and they went into E. J. Fuller’s store and Ed says they come mighty near drivin’ him crazy, walkin’ up and down behind him singin’
‘Gran’ mammy Tipsytoe.’ Then they went on over to Milo Carter’s, and they had a dollar and forty cents with ’em that they’d went and got out of their little bank. They et seven big ice-cream sodies apiece and got sick right in the store. Milo had to telephone fer their mother, and her and the Norwegian come and had to about carry ’em home. And that ain’t half of it!”
“What’s the other half?” Lucius asked gravely.
“Well, you heard about Bore, of course.”
“No, I haven’t.”
Mortimer again removed his hat, this time to rub his head. “I reckon that might be so,” he admitted.
“I guess you must of left town by the time it leaked out.”
“By the time what leaked out?”
“Well, you remember how he started off, that day,” Mortimer began, “to git her to go out buggy-ridin’ in his phaeton with ole General?”
Collected Works of Booth Tarkington Page 511
