Ptomaine Street: The Tale of Warble Petticoat

CHAPTER VIII

The Restless Sexteen was the record altitude of Butterfly Center. It was the elect and select of the intellect; it was the whole show—the very Wholly of Whollies. To belong to it was canonization. Though some of its members also belonged to the Toddletopsis Club, it meant their leading a double life.

The Restless Sexteen were mostly young married women with their husbands as nonresident members.

They studied higher psychology and broader psychopathy. The wrestled with and threw Einstein and let themselves dream again with Freud. Psychoanalysis was their washpot, and over the fourth dimension did they cast their shoes.

Their afternoon digest was held at Faith Loveman’s and Warble went.

The Loveman home was an abstract bungalow, which showed rather plainly the iron hand in the velvet glove influence of the Japanese.

The large light hall had a built-in abstract table, and on this was an enormous bronze plaque which held a thin layer of water on which rested one pansy.

Faith’s devotion to the Doctrine of Elimination allowed nothing else in the hall, but in the living room there were three whole pieces of furniture besides, of course, the caterer’s gilt chairs brought in to hold the restless sex as they tried to rest from their restlessness.

Faith Loveman looked curiously at Warble.

“You can’t be very restless,” she observed, “you’d be thinner.”

Warble smiled engagingly.

“I do want to be thinner,” she conciliated, “how can I?”

And, somehow, that started them all off. They restlessly gave advice, recommended certain exercises, uncertain drugs and most unattractive diets.

They told their own experiences, extolled or berated their masseuses, scribbled addresses of corsetieres for one another, and in their interest and restless excitement they forgot all about Warble and she wanted to go home.

But she had her mission to perform, and she waited until they restlessly changed the subject.

They discussed current plays and seemed to get out of them far more than the author ever put in. They talked of a picture exhibit at the Gauguin Galleries, but this was as Choctaw to Warble; not a word could she understand.

“Are you of the cognoscenti?” asked Faith Loveman of Warble. “I know all about art but I don’t know what I like,” she returned, blushing prettily.

“Oh, we’ll teach you that. That’s what this club is for, to help us to find ourselves, to give our restlessness an outlet to express the ego in our cosmos and illumine the dark patches of our souls. We’re riding the pace that kills, living at the tension that snaps, blowing the bubble that breaks. We need an outlet—a vent—you understand?”

“Yop,” said Warble, “your soul pressure is too high.”

“But we want it high—we love it high—we’re restless—we’re keyed up, taut-strung, and hungry for soul food.”

“I s’pose that’s the only kind you have at these meetings.”

Faith Loveman stared so hard that Warble made a face at her and went home.

She reflected.

“It was my fault. I might have known restless people wouldn’t eat. And I knew I couldn’t bite on their restless sex problems. A big one seems to be how to get thin and how to stay so. They were all ready to drop the high sign babble for that! But all women are. They took it up again.

“Can I reform them? Or shall I be sucked in, like Italians eat spaghetti, and my personality absorbed by the Butterflies, till I forswear all I stand for—all my utilitarian ideals shattered, all my prosaic hopes dashed, all my common sense wrenched from me, and my poor little brain-pan filled with the soul-mash of these high-strung sexaphones?”

She ignored Beer’s offer to undress her, she ran upstairs to an unfrequented bathroom, and flinging off her clothes, she got into the tub and wept in terror, her body a round pink blob in the briny water.

But, thought the poor child, it’s the most sensible place to cry.

When Petticoat came home she said:

“Honeybunch, let me in on your professional secrets. Tell me more about your most interesting cases. It might make me restless.”

“Nothing much to tell. Life just one ptomaine after another. Cases all alike except for the primal cause.”

“Well, tell me something. Where’ve you been just now?”

“Over to Iva’s. She had ‘em again. Ripe olives. Getting better. Where you been?”

“To the Restless Sexteen Club.”

“Like it?”

“I don’t get it. They talk about things that aren’t there. But I think I could make them see—”

“Oh, cut it out, Warble. You’d dust books so hard, you’d dust off the gilt edges. They’re deep-sea thinkers, that bunch—let ‘em alone. What’d they talk about?”

“About a book called ‘Painted Shawls’ or something, and about Thyco-Serapy, and about a play called ‘The Housebroke Heart.’ Take me to see it, will you, Bill?”

“You wouldn’t like it. You’d prefer the movies.”

Four days later, Daisy Snow called and gave Warble a jolt or two.

“Huh, sizing me up, are they?” Warble sniffed. “Looking at me through the footle, distorted little microscope of their own silly scrubby little souls! Pooh, they couldn’t, one of them, make a decent puff paste!”

“But we can get cooks to do that. The Intelligentsia seek for the rare essence of thought, for colored words and perfumed cadences—”

“There, there, Daisy, don’t try me too far! What did Lotta Munn say about me?”

“Oh, she didn’t say much. Just that you’re too stout and you haven’t any ideals and you don’t know a picture from a hole in the wall, and she thinks a man like Dr. Petticoat is wasted on you.”

“Huh, she used to like Bill herself, didn’t she?”

“Does yet. She’s poisoned nearly as often as Iva Payne is.”

“H’m; anybody else after Bill?”

“Only May Young.”

“And you.”

“Oh, me! I’m just a débutante. I’m not after anybody yet.”

“Well, you keep off my Petticoat preserves! That Big Bill person is mine—and I won’t stand for any nonsense about that.”

“My goodness, Warble, I didn’t know you had so much spunk. Lotta says you haven’t any.”

“She’ll find out! Go on, what else did the cats say?”

“They made fun of your party—”

“Oh, my party! That I tried to make so nice and gay and festive!”

“They thought those bathing suits were—er—rather bizarre—”

“I didn’t get them out of the Bazar! I thought it all up myself. And they made fun of it! Go home, Daisy Snow, I’ve got to reflect.”

Like a very small, very spanked child, she crawled upstairs on her hands and knees.

It was not her father she wanted now, but an old Petticoat ancestor, dead these two hundred years. Petticoat was dawdling on a chaise longue, absorbed in a small mirror, and wondering whether one more hair out of each eyebrow would strengthen the arch from a purely architectural viewpoint.

“What’s the trouble?” Warble asked, “broken down arches?”

“Nope, guess they’re all right.”

“Say, Bill,” and she crept into the hollow of his chest, “are folks talking about me?”

“They sure are.”

“What do they say?”

“Well, I hate to stir up trouble, but since you began it, I may as well own up they think you’re just about as lowbrow as they come. And I s’pose you are.”

“Oh, well. And what about the girls? Are they jealous of me?”

“Sort of. Lotta says if you cut her out with Trymie Icanspoon, she’ll elope with me.”

“And will she?”

“Not if I reach the ticket office first. Besides, I like Iva better.”

“Oh, Bill, don’t you love me any more?”

“Course I do, Little Fudge Sundae. But a popular doctor has responsibilities.”

“I know. I don’t mean to be unreasonable. But let’s keep peace in the family as long as it’s convenient—see what I mean?”

“I see. Do you think I’d like my new pajims better trimmed with frilled malines, or just decorated with a conventional pattern of gold soutache braid?”

Warble, sitting on the other end of the now separated chaise longue made no reply, except to scratch her leg a little.

Petticoat yawned, took a stroll round the room, tried on a new dressing gown, mixed himself a highball, smoked three cigarettes, glanced through “What the Swell-dressed Man can Spare,” wound his watch, put out his Angora cat, yawned again, sneezed twice, stomped out in the hall and back, and then went and stood in front of the fireplace, teetering on his heels.

But until he bawled, “Aren’t you ever going to clear out?” she sat, unmoving.

CHAPTER IX

Lotta Munn ran in occasionally. She was of the anecdotal type. The stories she told made one gasp. They were always prefaced by an “Oh, my dear, I can’t tell you that one—it’s too awful!”

Warble didn’t care much for these tales, indeed, frequently missed the point, and laughed purely from a sense of duty.

As she observed to Petticoat, one day, in exasperation, “There are only two classes of women in this world—women who tell naughty stories, and women I have never met!”

Also Lotta Munn was by way of being complimentary. She told Warble that old Leathersham thought her a peach, and that Trymie Icanspoon declared he was going to make love to her.

That Mrs. Charity Givens had heard she was a great heiress, and meant to stick her for a new hospital. That Le Grand Paynter wanted to do her portrait, life size and full width, and that the Reverend Avery Goodman said she was very light on her feet for a fat woman.

The last made Warble mad and she made a face at Lotta and sent her home.

A rose-colored June day. Meringues of cloud floating on a sky of cerulean custard.

She crawled out for a walk. It was ninety-eight in the shade, too hot to run much.

She walked down Ptomaine Street, her nose shining, and pearly drops chasing each other down her back like rain on a car window pane.

In her tucked white dimity and ankle-ties, her pink sunbonnet and her tiny, frilled parasol, she was as much out of place in the aesthetic town as whipped cream on a grapefruit.

She circled the outskirts of the town, and noted the massive and imposing gateways to the great estates. She knew the grandeur inside, she had been there. Cubist landscapes, some of them, others were Russian steppes, and in one instance a magnate was having the ruins of an Egyptian temple excavated on his grounds, which he had previously with difficulty and at great expense had buried there.

She did not know what to do about it.

She felt, intuitively, that these men would resent her criticism of their homes. Yet she couldn’t let it go on—this gigantic inutility, this mammoth lack of practical, efficient management.

Why, the ground sunk in a sunken garden would raise crops enough to feed an army—and Lord knew how soon they might be needed.

And then she happened to think that reform, like charity should begin at home, and she decided to start in on Petticoat.

She did.

They were sitting in their home-like Tower of Jewels, and, a bit timidly, Warble said, “Let’s pote quoetry to each other.”

Poor child, nervousness or emotion always made her reverse her initial letters.

“All right,” Petticoat returned, good naturedly, “you begin.”

Just what Warble wanted! Fate was always good to her.

“I will, because I hope to reform your tastes, dear, and teach you to see the beauty of simple beautiful poetry. Listen to this:

“That’ll do, Warb. Don’t go too far. Now it’s my turn. But, you know, dear, quoting isn’t everything. You must learn to dissect, to interpret, and above all to trace the influences that swayed the poet.

“Now I’ll read you a poem picked at random, and then I’ll trace the influences for you.”

Petticoat reached out a languid arm, picked up a current magazine and read:

Noting that Warble was still awake, Petticoat discoursed:

“In the first line, we note the influence of Swinburne. There could be no better start out. The Swinburne collocation of delicate bosom and death is both arrestive and interesting. The third and fourth lines denote the influence of Poe. To be sure, ‘a warm Elysium’ sounds like a new and appetizing soft drink, but that is not what is meant; and the sea is indubitably the one that sounded around the tomb of Miss Annabel Lee.

“The second stanza opens under pure Tennysonian influences. This may not be clear at first to the beginner in influence tracing, but it is unmistakably so to the expert. The recurring sibilants, the sound without sense, the fine architectural imagery, all point to the great Lady Alfred. The latter half of this stanza is due entirely to the strong influence of D. W. Griffith. The poem was, without doubt, written after the poet had been to see ‘Broken Blossoms,’ and the liberal hand from which that production was flung to a waiting world left its ineffaceable finger-prints on his polished mind.

“Now we come to stanza three. The first line shows the influence of Mother Goose; the second is an unconscious echo of Solomon’s Song; the ever-brimming cup owes itself to Omar; and the rest of the stanza to Rupert Brooke.

“Thus we see the importance of widespread reading, and a catholicity of influences.

“Influence is wonderful! To invent a new simile, it is like a pebble dropped into a placid lake; the ripples form ever-widening circles, and the influence of an influence is never wholly lost.

“Perhaps—and this is quite as it should be—the final stanza is the finest of all. It starts out under the influences of Walt Whitman. Had Walt been omitted, the whole structure would have tumbled to the ground! No self-respecting poet now-a-days writes without being influenced by Whitman. It isn’t done. It would be as indiscreet as to appear in one’s shirt-sleeves. The influence of the good, gray Poet must be felt, must be shown, or the budding bard is out of the running. Only a dash of Whitman is needed—‘my well-loved earth’ and ‘prodigal’ are quite sufficient.

“‘The sweet fulfilment of the flesh’ is a final roundup that gracefully blends Whitman’s and Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s influential powers—and, incidentally, justifies the magnificent title of the poem.

“Then, as a crowning triumph, note the splendid last line, a masterpiece brought about by the influence of Sir Oliver Lodge and his spiritistic ilk! Could anything be finer? What imagery for a last line! What a break-off, leaving the gasping reader in a state of choking suspense, of avid, ungratified curiosity! A great poem indeed, and influenced by a noble army of writers.

“Nor is the manner of the thing all that matters. The theme—the great idea of the whole affair—is a marvelous example of influence. The New York State Legislature recently passed a bill making attempted suicide no longer a punishable offense. If successful, it is, like virtue, its own reward. Indeed, it has to be, for as the Penal Code distinctly states, owing to the impossibility of reaching the successful perpetrator no forfeiture is imposed. But the new law lifts the ban from futile efforts in the matter of self-destruction, and one need not pay the hitherto exacted fine of a thousand dollars by way of a luxury tax on such diversion.

“Can it be doubted, then, that our Poet read of this new law, and—it may be unconsciously—was so influenced by it that he devoted sixteen lines of his precious verse to the expression of his willingness to let death come to him?”

“I don’t blame him for being willing, and I wouldn’t put a straw in Death’s way,” said Warble, earnestly. “I’m glad you read me that, Bill, for that is just the sort of thing I mean to eradicate from your system. It’s like a disease, this aestheticism of yours—it’s the Culture Ptomaine.”

“Now, hold on, Dumpling Dear, do you know a culture from a ptomaine?”

“Oh, I don’t mean the cultures you take, I mean Culture with a big C. It’s a poison, and as you cure ptomaine poisoning, I’m going to cure this town of its deadly art poisoning. I’m in revolt.”

“That’s right, everybody who is anybody is in revolt against something nowadays, because our knowledge of the truth is too great for our existing conditions, and it bursts—”

Warble interrupted.

“Yes, or as Gertrude Stein puts it: ‘It is a gnarled division, that which is not any obstruction, and the forgotten swelling is certainly attracting. It is attracting the whiter division, it is not sinking to be growing, it is not darkening to be disappearing, it is not aged to be annoying. There cannot be sighing. This, is bliss.’ There you see how art is greater than life—how—”

“Do you think I’m too fat?” Warble again interrupted him.

“I do, my dear. You weren’t, I think you are, I know you will be.”

“Would you love me more if I were—didn’t weigh so much?”

“Yes, in exact inverse ratio.”

Warble made an awful face at him, and then she went quietly around behind him, and dropped down his back a little fuzzy caterpillar, which she had tied in her handkerchief for that very purpose.

It was her last effort to cure her husband of culture poisoning, but she was not yet ready to give up her big idea of reforming Butterfly Center.

Warble was a determined little person, and, too, fate often gave her a good boost, and she thought one was about due.

She went to the Toddletopsis Club, at Lotta Munn’s.

Lotta had inherited eight or ten town and country houses, and for the moment was perched like a bird of passage, on her Roman villa, called Seven Hills.

Warble’s little electric Palanquin rolled through the arch of Constantine and she ascended the dazzling flight of marble steps to the entrance patio.

“Hello, Pot Pie,” screamed Lotta, by way of greeting, “come on in, the firewater’s fine.”

It was, and there was lots of it, and a group of long silk-legged Butterflies were sprawled on the Roman couches, smoking and chatting as they spun the Toddletops.

Warble was unfamiliar with the teetotum-like things, but the others kindly instructed her. Moreover, there was a roulette wheel and some other devices of which our litle heroine didn’t even know the name.

Also, there were tables, where those who chose played high-staked bridge, poker or rum.

Warble wasn’t a born gambler. Games of chance had no appeal for her. She wanted to make faces at everybody and run away. But she scolded herself for being too superior and forced herself to stay with the bunch.

In a way, she was rewarded, for she won all the money from the others. Her luck was monumental. Every different game she tried she took all the stakes, and at last having broken the bank, she was forced to go home for lack of occupation.

She was a proud and stuck-up chit all the evening.

Trymie Icanspoon called and flirted something fierce. But it didn’t mean a thing to Warble, for the man was so saturated with art that it oozed forth in his conversation and she had no idea what he was driving at.

He went home thinking she was the most deliciously tempting morsel he had ever seen and the biggest fool.

“No, I couldn’t fall in love with him. I like him, as a gift-book, but he’s no man. Could I kiss him? Not with a real movie kiss.

“They say marriage is a lottery. I haven’t drawn much. I mean in the matter of love. I wish I had a Prince Charming. Bill would do, all right, but he thinks I’m too fat. I wish I could get thinner—all of them are. Lotta’s like a golf club and Daisy’s like a breadstick.

“I s’pose they were born that way.

“I wasn’t.

“I wonder when we’ll begin to keep a family.

“I’m crazy about Bill—I am—I am—

“Am I?

“All the girls are, too.

“Does he care for them? For any of them? For all of them?

“For that detestable Daisy? That disgusting Iva? That rotten Lotta!

“Oh, I may as well admit it—I just adore Bill!

“This frock is too tight—I must have it stretched.

“Yes, I’m mad over my husband—but—”

She sought Petticoat in his rooms.

She tumbled into his lap, and he pushed her out until he could set aside the Angora cat and the Airedale and his pet guinea pig, then he said politely, “Is this your seat?” and she perched on his knee.

“Do you love me, dear?” she asked, her voice full of a dumb pathos.

“Ooooooooooooooooooo! I’m sleepy,” he said, with a cavernous yawn and a Herculean stretch that threw her out on the floor. “Want any money?” She looked at him. He was not unlike John Barrymore in The Jest, and Warble fell for him afresh.

“You are so beautiful—” she wailed. “I wish you loved me—”

“I wish I did,” he returned, honestly, “but you are such a butter-ball.”

“Oh, Butterfly Thenter calls anybody Butter-ball who weights over ninety-five! If you’re so cut up about it I won’t live under this roof another minute! I can earn my own living, and all I want, too! You can get a divorce and marry some thread of a woman who has ptomaines all the time!”

“Pish, tush, Warb, don’t be a damfool! Lay off the melodrama. I do love you—at least, I love ninety-five pounds of you. Now, will you be good?”

“Yeth.”

“And will you try to think of me as a devoted and loving husband, even if I’m not one?”

“Oh, my dear, I am unjust to you! I will take what you give me—what you can spare from the little dog and the cat and the guinea pig. And I will be your own little Petty Warblecoat. And I won’t give you over to Iva Payne—I hate her!”

CHAPTER X

The Petticoats rarely received mail. It wasn’t done much in Butterfly Center. So unaesthetic.

On a tray, a lacquered lackey brought a letter to Warble.

A white letter. Large and square—ominously square.

Warble took tray and all and went with it to Petticoat’s rooms—the letter was addressed to him.

She tapped but there was no answer. Listening at the door, she could hear him splashing in his rock-hewn bath and leaping, chamois-like, from crag to crag of his quarried bathroom.

She sat down on the floor and waited. Petticoat’s toilets were like linked sweetness, long drawn out.

It was late afternon, before he emerged, fresh, roseate and smiling, and imprinted a kiss on Warble’s cheek that left the red stamp of a lip-sticked mouth. Warble sometimes thought if it could be arranged as a dating stamp, she could keep a record of when he had last kissed her.

Poor little Warble—she loved her Big Bill so fondly, and he only looked on her as something fatter than his dog, a little bigger than his cat. Timidly she proffered the trayed letter.

“Oh, my Heavens!” and Petticoat smote himself, hip and thigh. “Where did you get this? Why was I not told sooner of its arrival? To me! And postmarked Lake Skoodoow-abskoosis! Home of my ancestors! Woman! Why this delay? Why?”

“It came this morning,” said Warble, apologetically, “but you were in your bath, and the door was locked.”

“But this is a most important letter. Why didn’t you slip it under the door?”

“I couldn’t,” said Warble, simply, “it was on a tray.”

“As I hoped—I mean, feared—” exclaimed Petticoat, tearing the envelope from the sheet, “he is dead!”

It made Warble writhe to see the devastated envelope—she always slit them neatly with a paper-knife—but she was thrilled by Petticoat’s excitement.

“A fortune!” he exclaimed. “My revered ancestor, the oldest of the Cotton-Petticoats, has died and left all his wealth to me! A windfall! Now we can afford to have a baby and get over the Moorish Courtyard, too! Oh, Warble, ain’t we got fun!”

He danced about the room, in his blue burnous and red tarbush, looking more like a howling dervish than a tempestuous Petticoat.