Ptomaine Street: The Tale of Warble Petticoat

CHAPTER VII

She had reached the peak of excitement in a confident decision that her party should be a success.

In the morning she interviewed the cook.

“You can spread yourself on the feast, François,” she said, “have any old menu you like so long as it’s edible and enough of it. But especially I want you to make for me one hundred custard pies.”

The French chef looked puzzled. He was an expensive chef and part of his duty was to look puzzled at any plain-named dish.

“But, Madame, I do not know ze custard pie. Is it a crême paté?”

“No, it isn’t a krame puttay, nor creamed potatoes, but cus-tard pie—see? Pie! Oh, don’t stand there looking like a whitewashed clown! Get out of my way, I’ll make them myself!”

Flinging on one of the chef’s jackets and aprons, Warble flew at the job and with a battalion of helpers breaking eggs and skimming cream, she herself tossed the flour and shortening together for the crust.

Efficiency scored and in an incredibly short space of time eight dozen custard pies were cooling their heels in the pantry windows.

“Not to be served with the supper,” Warble warned the butler, “when I want them brought in I’ll tell you.”

Beer dressed Warble for the party, Petticoat standing by and advising.

The gown was a few wisps of henna-colored chiffon which fitfully blew, half concealed, half disclosed a scant slip of jade green satin.

Flesh-colored stockings, Petticoat decreed, and henna slippers with carved jade buckles.

“Now, her hair—” he mused, leaning on his folded arms over the back of a chair.

He walked slowly round Warble.

“Oh, wopse it up anyway,” he said, “and tangle some jade beads in it. She’ll stand that.”

His orders were carried out and Beer clasped her hands in silent ecstasy at the result of the combined efforts of herself and her master.

“Some day, Warble,” Bill said, “I’ll teach you how to dress becomingly.”

“And I’ll teach you how to undress becomingly,” said Beer, not wanting to be outclassed in her own game.

Warble waved Petticoat out of the room, dismissed Beer with a simple “Get out!” and then quickly flung off the clothes she wore and hopped into a little frock of white organdie and cherries.

She wadded some hair over each ear, piled up the rest in a moppy coil and crowned it with a wreath of cherries.

The party came.

“Good Heavens!” Warble thought, as she looked at the smart, bored crowd, “have I got to bring these hifalutin creatures down to earth? I don’t know that I can make them laugh, but I’ll give them a jolt!”

She did.

Her cherries bobbing, two long-stemmed ones held between her teeth, she flew around like a hen with its head off.

“You see,” she explained, “it’s a Mack Sennett party, everybody puts things down everybody’s back. Like this—and here are the things.”

From a tray brought by a footman, Warble selected a fuzzy caterpillar and turning quickly dropped it down inside the soft collar of Trymie Icanspoon, a poet, who would dress as he pleased.

He went into amusing spasms and everybody took something from the tray. There were cold raw oysters, bits of ice, thistles, cooked spaghetti and plain granulated sugar. They had to put them down the backs of the men only, because the fashionably dressed ladies hadn’t any backs to put them down. You can’t put an oyster down two crossed strings of pearls.

It caused great hilarity to see the Reverend Goodman standing on his head, trying to lose a red-hot silver dollar; and Daisy Snow, whose débutante frock was available for the purpose, wriggled beneath the tickling crawling of a large but harmless spider.

Warble was almost in hysterics over the funny antics of Goldwin Leathersham down whose loose and ample collar she had herself poured a glass of water on two seidlitz powders.

“Next,” she cried, clapping her hands, “we’ll have an artistic game. Here it comes.”

Lackeys and minions brought in pails of kalsomine, of various tints, some of pale pastel shades, others of deep rich hues. One was given to each guest, and each was provided with a beautiful new whitewash brush.

“Now,” Warble explained, her blue eyes dimpling with delight, “you each make a splash on the wall—a big, hit-or-miss splash. Then we each try to evolve a lovely picture by few bold strokes.”

This was great fun.

Manley Knight, with a mighty splash of color that landed on a Fragonard panel, had quite a good start for a “Storm at Sea.” He worked it up with fine technique and you would have been surprised at the result.

Iva Payne took a splash from several different pails thereby achieving a Cubist landscape. It was entitled “High Tide off the Three-mile Limit,” and was a startling success.

Daisy Snow, timid little dear, made but a tiny daub and worked it up carefully.

“That,” she said, “is a miniature of Big Bill.”

All in all, it was gay sport, and even Mrs. Charity Givens took part, though she protested she was no artist and couldn’t even draw a straight line.

The next performance was a contest between Adam Goodsport and Avery Goodman.

Bets were made on the two contestants before the betters knew what the scrap was to be.

“It’s a character sketch,” Warble explained. “Mr. Goodsport tries to blacken Mr. Goodman’s character, while the Rector tries to whiten Mr. Goodsport’s character.”

Avery Goodman was then presented with a bag of flour and Adam Goodsport was handed a bag of soot.

They went at it hand over fist, and in a few moments the blacking and whiting process was so complete that both were pronounced perfect transformations and all bets were off.

Faces, hands and clothes were alike befloured and besooted, until Goodman was a veritable Blackamoor while Adam Goodsport looked like a Marcelline.

A few eyebrows indicated a suspicion that Big Bill Petticoat’s bride was a Little Mischief, but nobody said anything about it.

“If I can only reform them,” Warble thought to herself, “if I can only make them like and enjoy this innocent fun instead of wearing their poor brains out over capitalled Art and Literature.”

“Now,” she said, briskly, “we’re going to play a game I learned in Shanghai. All take off your shoes and stockings. No one excused—come on—off with them.”

Beer and a few other maids came in to assist the ladies, the men were properly valeted, and the barefooted crowd sat waiting further orders.

Daisy Snow made a remark about being a maiden with reluctant feet, but nobody noticed it.

Several seemed rather relieved than otherwise at the condition imposed upon them.

“Now,” said Warble, but before she could go further, Adam Goodsport butted in with:

“Oh, please, Mrs. Petticoat—oh, please! Such an opportunity! May never occur again! Oh, can’t I—may I not—oh, dear lady, do say yes—”

“Lordy, what do you want to do? Speak out, man!”

“Why, you see, I am a solist—like a palmist you know—but as to feet. I studied solistry in Asia Minor and I know it from the ground up. Oh, please, Mrs. Petticoat, let me read your sole!”

“Do,” cried Warble, “love to have you.”

She plumped herself into a pillowed divan, and held her little pink feet straight out in front of her.

Goodsport, sitting on a cushion at her feet, took one and scrutinized the sole.

“The Solar system,” he began, “is interesting in the extreme. It was invented by Solon, though Platoe also theorized on the immortality of the sole. His ideas, however have been discarded by modern footmen.

“Locke, is his treatise On the Human Understanding, discusses the subject fully and with many footnotes, and old Samuel Foote himself cast footlights on the subject.”

“Now, looky here,” Warble objected, “I won’t have a lecture in my house! I object to anything of an intellectural nature.”

“This has nothing to do with the intellect,” Adam assured her. “Quite the reverse, now, you listen. It’s really interesting. The palmist may claim to read the true character from the lines of the hand, but it is only by solistry that the real sole is laid bare and the character of a subject in any walk of life is exposed. The lines of the sole are greatly indicative of character, for all traits must draw the line somewhere. Now, Mrs. Petticoat, this line extending from the Mount of Trilby to the outer side of the sole is the life line. If that appears to be broken it indicates future death. If more pronounced on one sole than the other, it implies that the subject has one foot in the grave. You haven’t, don’t be alarmed. Here is the headline, straight and continuous, showing a long and level head.”

“Ouch,” remarked Warble, “you tickle. Try somebody else,” and she drew her feet under her.

“Me,” exclaimed Daisy Snow, coming over and holding out her dainty right foot.

“H’m,” said Goodsport. “This line running from the Mount of Cinderella to the heel is the clothes line and denotes love of dress. This line crossing it is the fish line and shows you are incapable of telling the truth.”

Daisy flounced away, mad, and Mrs. Charity Givens, with some trepidation, offered her ample and generous foot for dissection.

“A thorough, broad understanding and a friendly footing toward all,” declared the solist, “and no danger of misunderstanding. However, your broken headline indicates pugnacity.”

“Nothing of the sort!” she snapped at him, and waddled away.

Goldwin Leathersham, greatly interested, insisted on having his pedal interpreted.

“Mount of Atalanta highly prominent,” said Goodsport, “that means you are a runner, either for office or for pleasure. Here is a line meeting—that indicates a railroad man. H’m. A well-developed football shows you have been to college. You seem to be inclined to solemates—”

But Leathersham had taken to his heels.

“Please,” said Iva Payne, gracefully offering her long psychic foot for perusal.

“Ah, the poetic foot!” the soloist exclaimed. “There are two kinds of poetic feet—the Iambic and the Trochaic. You have one of each. In poetic feet the heels are often found in French forms. But poets are a footloose class and are often found with lame and halting feet. You don’t seem to be a poet.”

“Never said I was,” retorted Iva, shortly, and Warble said, “Stop this nonsense, it makes too much kicking. Now we’re going to play the game I learned in Buda Pesth.”

She led them to the picture gallery which had been prepared for the game by having many sheets of fly-paper placed on the floor, sticky side up.

“It’s Fly-paper Tag,” she said.

It was Fly-paper Tag—she was quite right.

“You’re it!” screamed Mrs. Givens as she pushed the minister over onto a sheet of fly-paper.

“It yourself,” shrieked Leathersham adroitly shoving a sheet where he saw Mrs. Givens would light next.

Warble was certain she was a great reformer.

Yet would these reformed people stay reformed?

True, they were now in the spirit of her party, Mack Sennett himself couldn’t have asked a better interpretation of his own vital principles. But had they come to realize that this after all was the real thing, the true ideal?

Warble feared.

They were a stuck-up lot. The fly-paper had intrigued them all. Not only were they all half-soled with it but the merry wags had decorated the ladies’ bare backs and the men’s coated backs, until all looked like sandwich men or peripatetic ragpickers.

Trymie Icanspoon crowned Mrs. Charity Givens with a fresh sheet of tanglefoot and Warble hilariously made a foolscap of another for the Rector’s bald head. Judge Drinkwater folded Daisy Snow’s two little hands together, then wrapped them tightly in fly-paper, and shook with laughter to see her futile attempts to get free.

“Naughty man!” she cried, “to make poor little me so helpless!” With a spring she flung her entangled hands over the Judge’s head, and hung round his neck like a pretty little millstone.

Warble relaxed, and found that she was shockingly tired and very hungry.

But she was the stuff of which true reformers are made and Martin Luther had nothing on her.

Then Beer came tripping in with a pile of varicolored garments which she held up to view.

“These,” Warble announced, “are the real Mack Sennett costumes. They are one-piece bathing suits, I got them from an importer of contraband goods. You are to put them on in place of your clothes. And please forget that you are Butterflies and turn into bathing beauties and champion swimmers.”

While they were shyly getting into the suits, she donned her own, a little scalloped apron effect, with cross-strapped sandals, and a silk bandanna knotted round her head.

She glanced about and saw Big Bill Petticoat beaming with proud glee at his wife’s social success, and looking lovely himself in a black satin one-piece, with jet shoulder straps.

For a second Warble could see only Petticoat’s pink cheeks and perfected eyebrows. Then she shook off the spell and keyed up.

“We’re going to have an obstacle race,” she announced, “all over the house. You must follow me, wherever I go. I shall lead you a dance! And then I shall come last to the lake in the front hall, and whoever is nearest me there, will be rewarded.”

Yet even as she spoke, she overheard Trymie whispering to Iva Payne, “Yes, I believe that the new art era into which we are now slipping, will worship beauty for itself alone, and that art, sublimated by—”

She turned away, sick at heart.

Why bother, her tortured soul cried out. Yet the irrepressible impulse of reform egged her on and it was a perfectly good egg.

She flew past Petticoat, only pausing to shout, “Like it all, my tramp? Yes, it is an expensive party.”

Then she led her followers a mad race. Sliding down banisters, squeezing into dumb waiters; crawling under beds and out the other side; jumping in and out again of bathtubs full of perfumed water. Out of windows, in at scuttles. Through booby-traps of half-open doors, on the lintel of which were perched pans full of live crabs or little boxes of mice.

On rushed the horde, Mrs. Givens panting from over exertion, Goldie Leathersham limping because of a crab hanging to his great toe.

On they went, and at last, as Warble drew up at the lake in the hall, she was closely followed by Trymie Icanspoon, and true to her promise she rewarded him by pushing him into the lake. It was but a shallow pool, he couldn’t drown, but the fun of it was, Warble had caused the water to be drained off and the tank filled with mayonnaise.

Wherefore Trymie’s soft plop into the oily depths was of a ludicrous nature.

Then the guests were allowed to resume their own clothes and supper was announced.

Conversation turned to art matters, and Leathersham who was a collector of many various rarities asked Petticoat how his new collection was progressing. The collection was one of early American Pieplates.

“Doing well,” Big Bill answered. “I have just achieved a yellow earthen John Adams, that is authentic and very rare. Except for my Barbara Frietchie tin one, it is perhaps the gem of my collection.”

“Good!” Leathersham exclaimed, interestedly, “may I see it?” Petticoat summoned a lackey and two minions and sent them to his curio room to fetch the plates. But they returned with the startling announcement that all the pieplate collection had disappeared!

“Heavens and earth!” Petticoat cried. “Lock the doors, search the pockets! Why, that collection is worth millions!”

“What’s the matter?” Warble inquired, seeing the hullaballoo. “Oh,” as she was told, “I used those plates, dear. I was making a lot of pies and our pieplates gave out.”

“Making a lot of pies?” Petticoat repeated, wonderingly, while Marigold Leathersharn murmured, “How quaint!” in a supercilious way.

“Yes,” went on Warble, unperturbed. “Want to see ‘em?”

They did, and all went to look at the eight dozen custard pies in the pantry windows.

“Whoopee!” shouted Petticoat, “here’s where I take the helm! Cut out the rest of the formal supper, and let’s have a pie eating contest.”

It warmed the cockles of Warble’s heart to see how they all fell in with this suggestion. Could it be? Was she really having some effect on their terrible aestheticism at last?

Absorbed in her thoughts, she ate her pies and when the contest was over the prize was awarded to Warble Petticoat. “Oh,” she cried, astounded. “I wasn’t in the game at all! The hostess never should be. I was just eating what I wanted.”

“You’re a dear,” Marigold Leathersham said to her. “I’m going to love you. How your husband must adore you, you pretty thing.”

“Yes, he does.” Warble stated. “At least, he says so.”

“He’s a truthful man,” Marigold declared, “you’d know that just to look at him. There’s something in his face just now—”

“It’s pie,” said Warble, “he’s very fond of it.”

To Warble’s great delight there were enough pies left for her final entertainment.

“Folks,” she said, “this is a Mack Sennett party, and it wouldn’t be complete without throwing custard pies. So we will choose sides.”

Judge Drinkwater and Goldwin Leathersham were made captains and they chose sides.

The party being thus divided, they bombarded each other with custard pies after the manner of certain comedians, till there wasn’t a round of ammunition left.

Then Iva Payne said she felt sick and wanted to go home and of course just for that they all had to go.

“The nicest party ever!” they chorused at parting. “So novel and naïve—so quite entirely out of the ordinary.”

As the last pied guest disappeared she turned wearily to her Petticoat.

“I tell you, Warb,” he said, “you are sure one corker! You put ‘em to sleep all right! Now you’ve shown ‘em how, you bet they won’t go on having their stupid highbrow intellectural old gatherings. Hop along to bed, little tired Lollipop.”

His long lithe arms gathered her forcefully to him, and her irritation at his strength was lost in her admiration of his grace and skill in imparting affection.

From The Butterfly Centerpiece:

The Mack Sennett party at the home of Dr. Bill Petticoat was a hundred per cent success. Little Lady Petticoat is nobody’s fool. She knows that a lucky punch is her only chance. A short, swift hook, straight from the shoulder. The pretty Warble is a perpetual promise of joy, yet she shows symptoms of curvature of the soul—and it is, so far, a toss-up whether she will have her passport viséd or be given the gate.