Ptomaine Street: The Tale of Warble Petticoat

CHAPTER XI

Petticoat had five hobbies. Ptomaines, his collection of pieplates, Warble, his personal appearance and his Aunt Dressie.

The last was one of the old Cotton-Petticoats, and in her younger days had been a flibbertigibbet. Was still, for that matter, but she flibbered differently now.

She appeared unannounced, took up her favorite quarters in the N.N.W. wing, and permeated the household.

Tall. Slender. Smart. Sport suits. Bobbed hair. Smoked cigars.

About fifty-five, looked forty, acted thirty.

Fond of boxing and immediately on her arrival hunted up the butler to spar with him, being a bit off condition.

“I’ve no use for Bill,” she would say, “with his custard pie ideals, his soft-bosomed rooms and his purple and fine lingerie.”

Then she’d embrace her nephew wildly, and promise to make him her heir.

She looked at Warble appraisingly.

“You’re a tuppenny, ha’penny chit, with eyes like two holes burnt in a blanket, and a nose Mr. Micawber might have waited for, but you’ll do. You get everything you want, without effort, and that’s a rare trait. What do you think of me?”

Warble made a face at her. “Corking!” screamed Aunt Dressie, “you come straight from heaven and you’ve slid into my soul. Does Bill love you?”

“Not adequately.”

“H’m. You love him?”

“Oh, yeth!”

“All right—love and grow thin, and then he’ll come round. Or get a case of ptomaine poisoning—that’d help. But don’t take the matter too lightly. If you want your husband, get him, if you don’t, then let him go.

“I’ve just let mine go. You see we had a place—a sort of Vegetarian and Free Love Community proposition, but it didn’t work out so we sold it.”

“And your husband?”

“Oh, he’s on his own for a while. I’m deciding what to fly at next. I always ask nephew Bill’s advice so as to know what not to do.”

“Forgot to mention it,” said Petticoat, strolling in, “but a few people are coming to-night to help me plan for my new Color Organ.”

“What’s that?” asked Warble, gazing at Petticoat in azure-eyed adoration.

“Oh, Lord, don’t you know anything? Tell her, Aunt Dressie!” and turning on his French heel, Petticoat walked delicately out of the room.

“Treat him rough, Warble, you’re an awful fool,” commented the older woman. “Why, a Color Organ is that marvelous new invention that plays color instead of sound.”

“Color—instead of—sound—”

“Yes—now don’t try to understand, for you can’t possibly. Go and play with the children.”

“I won’t. Tell me more about this thing.”

“I won’t. You can hear it to-night, when they all talk about it.”

“What use is it?”

Aunt Dressie stared at her. “What use are you?” she said.

Warble’s brain stopped beating.

Bump.

What use was she—she, the utilitarian, the efficient, the practical! What use? Grrrhhh!

She’d show ‘em! The silly bunch! Not one of them could put together the dissected beef picture in the cook-book if the cuts were separated!

“I don’t care! I won’t endure it!

“What’s Aunt Dressie anyhow? A military blonde, with glazed chintz undies! What’s Marigold Leathersham? A smart party who wears a hat!

“What’s Iva Payne? Nothing but a backbone—a shad! She’s about the shape of a single rose vase! Damn her! Damn Lotta Munn and Daisy Snow, yes and May Young! They think they can charm my Bill off his perch with their revolting artistic propaganda, and their schools and non-schools and neo-schools! Rubbish!”

And when they came—came and talked wise and technical jargon about being endlessly enveloped in a toneless sound, about being drowned in an overwhelming sea of blue, pure and singing, and a moment later dropped into pale amethyst which in turn deepens to a threatening purple then plunges you into a turmoil of passionate red, always and constantly swirling and whirling and twisting and untwisting, gliding, approaching and retreating in that haunted and inexplicable color space—

There was more—much more—but at this point Warble rose, made a comprehensive, all-embracing and very outspoken face at them and went down to the pantry.

“It’s no use—” she groaned, “perpetual waste motion—and now waste color! What to do—what to do!

“Yet I must reform them somehow. That Iva Payne! Like a pure, pale lily—but I bet her soul has got its rubbers on! Lotta Munn—spinster in name only—with her foolish pleasures and palaces—Daisy Snow, little innocent-making saucer eyes at my husband—oh, Bill, dear, I love you so—I wish I was pale and peakéd and wise and—yes, and artistic! So there now!

“Well, there’s only two alternatives. I must reform this toy town, or be dragged down to their terrible depths myself!

“Aunt Dressie says, love and grow thin. I surely love Bill enough, but if he doesn’t love me—maybe I’d better try somebody else. It’s done here.

“But not Trymie Icanspoon! No, he makes me sick. I guess I’ll eat pickles.”

In the pantry she found the under scullery maid screaming with an earache.

“You poor child,” she said, sympathetically, “I’ll run and get my husband and he’ll cure it.”

She flew back to the room where the eager group had their heads together over the blue prints and wash drawing of the new color organ. Pushing in between Iva and Lotta she seized Bill by the arm and said, “hurry up now—matter of life or death—Polly, the maid—dying—urgent case—”

By that time they were down in the servant’s pantry where Polly was moaning and groaning and wailing like a banshee.

“What is it, my dear?” Big Bill asked, gently, for Polly was a very pretty girl. “Oh, my ear! It aches and stings and burns and smarts and—”

“That’ll do for a beginning,” Dr. Petticoat said, rolling up his sleeves and calling for basins of sterilized water and various antiseptics and disinfectants.

“Can you do anything, Bill?” Warble asked anxiously, “it isn’t ptomaines, you know.”

“That’s the devil of it! Why couldn’t the silly thing have had a decent bit of ptomaine poisoning instead of this foolish earache. But, it’s more than an earache! The bally ear has been stung—or something—anything bite you, Polly?”

“Yes, sir, a wasp.”

“She says a wathp!” exclaimed Warble. “Oh, Bill, it may mean blood poisoning!”

“Yes, that’s true—it is—the ear will have to come off. Guess I’d better call in old Grandberry to operate—he’s an ear specialist—”

“Oh, no, there won’t be time! She may die!”

Warble was dancing about in her excitement. “You can do it, Bill.”

“All right. Get her up on the pastry table—there—that’s all right. Now we’ll take her blood pressure—here, Warb, you be taking her temperature, and send somebody for my stethoscope, and my case of instruments—and my X-ray apparatus. Now, my girl, don’t cry. We’ll fix you up.” Petticoat lighted a cigarette and sat down to take Polly’s pulse.

“That’s right,” he said to the men who brought the things he had sent for, “scuttle back for my rubber gloves, and the chloroform outfit. Tell my man and his helpers to come down—I may need them—and bring me a clean handkerchief.”

“Now for an X-ray,” he said, a little later, as he adjusted his portable X-razor.

“Oh, it’s all done,” said Warble, “While you were taking her plood bressure, I cut off her ear—”

“What with?”

“Oh, I had a boning knife and the sardine scissors. It’s all right. And I’ve fixed her hair lovely—in a big curly earmuff, so it will never show at all. Be quiet for a day or so, Polly, and then you’ll be all right. The only trouble is, after this, orders will probably go in one ear and out the other—”

“You’re a hummer, Warble,” Petticoat said, as they went back up stairs.

“Yes, it had to be done quickly, you see. And it was out of your line, so I duffed in. But one thing bothered me a little. You see, the fire was out, and the cook lighted it with kerosene, and she used such a lot—something might of blew up.”

“And you knew that! You knew that two Petticoats might have been blown up—”

“Sure. Didn’t you? Don’t faint, pleathe!”

CHAPTER XII

Cave man. Brute.

Hulking, enormous, shaggy-haired, prognathous jawed, a veritable Cro-magnard type. Bluely unshaven and scowling.

Warble saw him first across the room at a picture exhibition in Manley Knight’s gallery.

His nose startled her. It was like an alligator pear—and his complexion was like those cactus fruits that likewise infest fancy grocers’ shops. A visitor from the South Sea Islands? No, he wasn’t that sort. He was a Fossil. Vikings were in his face, and Beef Eaters and Tarzan.

Warble flew at him.

“Do you like me?” she whispered.

“No,” he growled, and she kissed his hand which was like a hand by Rodin.

Thus does the law of compensation get in its fine work. Warble remembered the little boy at the public school, and she wished she could give Sproggins a red balloon.

“What is he?” she asked of Trymie.

“A miniature painter,” Icanspoon replied, “and a wonder! He does portraits that fairly make the eyes pop out of your head! He’s got the world agog.”

Warble drifted back to the attraction.

“Do like me,” she said, and shot him a glance that was a bolt from the blue.

Warble was of the appealing sex, and hardly a man was yet alive who could resist her.

Sproggins turned on her fiercely. He grasped her by the shoulders, pressing them back as if he would tear her apart.

“Let me see your soul!” he demanded, and his great face came near to peer down through her eyes.

“Ugh, merely blocked in,” and he flung her from him.

“It isn’t block tin!” she retorted, angrily, “it’s pure gold—as you will find out!”

He gave her another glance and two more grunts and turned away to devote himself to Daisy Snow.

Bing! That was the way things came to Warble.

Fate, Kismet, Predestination—whatever it was, it came zip! boom! hell-for-leather!

“It’s not only his strength but his crudeness—like petroleum or Egyptian art.

“He can control—

“Amazingly impertinent!

“He wasn’t—

“But I wish he had been—

“He will be!”

She went to see him—in his studio.

A bijou studio, fitted for a painter of miniatures. French gilt gimcracks. Garlands of fresh pink roses, tied with blue ribbons.

“Get out,” he said, staring at her a second and then returning to his niggling at a miniature.

Warble made a face at him.

“Do that again,” he commanded, reaching for a clean slice of ivory.

A few tiny brushmarks.

A wonder picture of Warble—made face, and all.

“Pleathe—Pleathe—” she held out her hand, and he dropped the miniature into it.

“Why don’t you hit it off better with your husband?” he demanded.

“Don’t ask me things when you know everything yourself.”

“I do. I paint a miniature of a face, and I get a soul laid bare.”

“Your name? Your silly first name—”

“It’s a nickname.”

“For what?”

“Areopagitica.”

“Sweet—sweet—” cooed Warble, dimpling.

“Oh, you popinjay! I wish you and I were ragpickers—”

“What!”

“It’s my ambition. I don’t want to be a miniature painter all my life. But to be a ragpicker—ah, there’s something to strive for! A rattlebanging cart, with jangling bells on a string across the back, a galled jade of a horse, broken traces, mismated lines—whoa!—giddap, there! oh—Warble, come with me!”

He swooped her up in one gigantic arm, but she slipped through and running around, faced him impishly.

“Would you really like me to go ridy-by in your wagon, and curl up in the rags and watch the stars shoot around overhead?”

“No, better stay here—” he patted her shoulder gently, leaving a deep purple bruise.

“Why?”

“Better not stay here—better go home.”

“Why?”

“Goodby.”

He took her up—it seemed to her between his thumb and forefinger—and set her outside his door, promptly closing and locking it.

She heard him return to his work. She trotted home. Her husband, as she paused to look in at his door, greeted her:

“Had a good time?”

She could not answer.

He yawned, delicately. He was seated at his mirror, arranging his wringing wet permanent in serried rows by means of tiny combs.

“Gooooo—oooo—oo—d night,” he said.

That was all. Yet she was kinda mad.

A footle, twaddly love affair! No art. A silly little dumpling smattering with a brute beast.

“No, he is not! He has noble impulses—ragpicking—inspired! His eyes were misty when he spoke of it—

“A way out of Butterfly Thenter!

“A ragpicker’s cart—

“A way out—”

Petticoat held her up.

“You seem a bit gone on that tin-type fellow, Sproggins.”

“Yop. Maybe I’d better go to Atlantic Thity for a while.”

“Oh, no, you stay here. A lady’s place is in the home.”

So she was fairly thrown at Porgie.

Another downpour of fate. And Warble, caught without an umbrella or rubbers.

The night came unheralded.

Petticoat had gone to Iva Payne’s on an urgent summons—over-ripe sardines—and Warble had wandered out into the moonlight.

Petticoat, out of his new wealth, had, like Kubla Khan in Xanadu, a stately pleasure dome decreed, and in this new architectural triumph, where water lilies and swans floated on the surface of a deep black pool, Warble restlessly tossed in a welter of golden cushions, changing her position every ten seconds.

A giant lumbered in.

“Porgie!”

“Saw your husband speeding away—couldn’t stand it, dropped in. Take me upstairs—I want to see your shoe cabinet.”

“Oh, don’t spoil everything. Be my gentleman friend. Tell me about your dreams and ideals—your rags—”

“Ah—rags—you do love me!”

“I don’t know—but I love rags—sweet—so sweet—”

“You’re a misfit here—as who isn’t. All misfits, frauds—fakes—liars—”

“All?” Warble looked interested.

“Yes, you little simpleton. I know!” He growled angrily. “Shall I tell you—tell you the truth about the Butterflies?”

“Pleathe—pleathe—”

“I will! You ought to know—you gullible little fool. Well, to start with, Avery Goodman—in his true nature, he’s a worldly, carnal man. His religion is a cloak, a raincoat, a mere disguise. Mrs. Charity Givens, now, she’s no more truly charitable than I am! She’s shrewd and stingy, her lavish gifts to the poor are merely made for the sake of the praise and eulogy heaped upon her by her admiring friends. Manley Knight, renowed for his bravery in the war, is an arrant coward. His soul is a thing of whining terror, his heroism but a mask. Oh, I know—I read these people truly, when they sit to me—off guard and unconsciously betraying themselves.

“Mrs. Holm Boddy! Pah! She’s far from domestic! She yearns for the halls of dazzling light, for gayety and even debauchery. Her devotion to home and children is the blackest of lies! And Iva Payne! She’s no invalid! It’s a pose to seem interesting and delicately fragile. You should see her stuff when no one’s looking!

“Judge Drinkwater is a secret drunkard. Lotta Munn is a pauper—an adventuress, pretending to wealth she doesn’t possess. Herman True and his wife! Zounds, if you could hear those two quarrel! Yet they pose as lovers yet, and folks fall for it!”

“May Young?” Warble asked, breathlessly.

“An old maid. Well preserved, but no chicken. And Daisy Snow! Angel-faced débutante! Huh, she knows more than her mother ever dreamed of! You should see her in my studio, at her sittings! Cocktails, cigarettes, snatches of wild cabaret songs and dances—oh, Daisy Snow is a caution!”

“The Leathershams?”

“He’s a profiteer—she—well, she was a cook—”

“Marigold! No!”

“Marigold, yes! You are a little numskull, you know. You can’t see through these people’s masks.”

“Can I reform them?”

“No, Baby Doll, you can’t do that. They’re dyed in the wool hypocrites—joined to their idols—let ‘em alone. And as to that husband of yours—”

“Stop! Stop! I can’t stand any more! Pleathe go—pleathe—”

“What’re you going to do about that Tertium Quid you’ve annexed?” Aunt Dressie inquired, casually.

“I don’t know,” Warble uncertained. “He has wonderful ambitions and aspirations. He wants to be a ragpicker—a real one.”

“Ambitions are queer things,” Aunt Dressie thoughtfuled. “Now, you mightn’t think it, but I want to be a steeple climber.”

“You take Porgie off my hands, and he’ll help you—”

“Oh, no, child, every lassie has her laddie—and you saw him first.”

Warble sighed. Thus was she always thrown at Porgie’s head.

Fate, like a sluicing torrent carried her ever on. Beware, beware, the rapids are below you!

Thus Conscience, Prudence, Wisdom, Policy, Safety First—all the deadly virtues called her.

Did she heed?

As the sea’s self should heed a pebble-cast.

On a June evening, when Petticoat was called to Iva Payne’s, Porgie came.

Bowed in by a thin red line of footmen, he found Warble in the moon-parlor. She wore a picture frock of point d’esprit and tiny pink rosebuds, and little pink socks and sandals.

“Come out on the Carp Pond,” he muttered, picking her up and stuffing her in his pocket. “Nobody will see us.”

He seated her in the stern of a shallop and took the golden oars. Three of his long sweeping strokes took them a mile up stream and they drifted back. Porgie talked steadily and uninterruptedly. He told her in detail of his ragpicking plans and how perfectly she would fit in.

“Think of it!” he boomed. “No fetters of fashion, no gyves of convention. Free—free as air—free verse, free love, free lunch—ah, goroo—goroo!”

“Goroo—” agreed Warble, “sweet—sweet—”

“Sweet yourself!” roared Porgie, and grabbed her all up in his gorilla-like arms just as a ringing, musical, “Ship ahoy!” sounded on their ears.

“Hello there, Warbie!”

She knew then it was Petticoat.

“Having a walk?” he inquired, casually.

“Yop,” she casualed back.

He pulled his skiff up alongside, threw Porgie into the deep pool and snatched Warble in beside himself.

“Time to go home,” he said, cheerfully. “Good night, Sproggins.”

He took her into the house through the conservatory, paused to pluck and twine a wreath of tiny pink rosebuds for her, adjusted it on her rather touseled curls, and took her out to the Moorish Courtyard.

“Now, Warb, what about the baboon?”

“I want to go ragpick with him and be pag-rickers together. Can I? Pleathe—”

“Nixy. Now, you hark at me. I’m the real thing—a good old Cotton-Petticoat—birth, breeding and boodle. Your Porgie person has none of these—”

“But he loves me!” Warble wailed.

“Yes, ‘cause he can’t get you. Go along with him, and then see where you’ll be! No, my Soufflée, you hear me! Can the Porgie and stick to your own Big Bill—your own legit.”

“But you don’t love me—”

“Oh, I do—in my quaint married-man fashion. And—ahem—I hate to mention it—but—”

“I know—and I am banting—and exercising, and rolling downstairs and all that.”

“Well, we’re married, and divorces are not the novelty they once were—so let’s stay put.”

“Kiss me, then—”

He brushed a butterfly kiss across her left eyebrow, and together they strolled back into the house, and as he went up to bed, Warble went down to the pantry to see about something.

CHAPTER XIII

“I d-don’t belong to Butterfly Thenter,” Warble sobbed, “I don’t b-belong—and I-m g-going away—”

“All right,” Petticoat said, cheerfully, “how long’ll you be gone?”

“It may be four yearth and it may be eleven—”

“Oh, come, now, not all that time! It isn’t done.”

“You d-don’t underthtand—I’m going to find my plathe in the world—I don’t belong here.”

“All right. Can I go ‘long?”

“No; you stay here. I’m—oh, don’t you thee—I’m leaving you!”

“Oh, that’s it?”

“You’ll have the girls to amuse you—”

“What girls?”

“Iva and Lotta and Daisy and May Young—”

“They’re not girls—they’re married women—”

“What!”

“Sure they are. They don’t live with their husbands all the time—they’re pretty modern, you know. They have separate establishments, but they’re friendly, pally, and even a heap in love with each other.”

“I don’t believe it—”

“Fact, all the same. Where you going Warble—that is, if you care to tell.”

“I’m going where I can live a busy, useful life—not a Butterfly existence, with nothing to occupy my mind but art and hifalutin lingo! I can’t express myself with long candles and Oriental junk! I’m going—oh, I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m taking the next train out of Butterfly Thenter!”

“Warble—haven’t I treated you right? Haven’t you had enough to eat? The Cotton-Petticoats have always been called good providers—”

“It isn’t that, Bill, dear—it’s that—you don’t love me very much—”

Petticoat looked at her. His eyes traveled up and down from her golden curls to her golden slippers, and then crossways, from one plump shoulder to the other.

“Goodby, Warble,” he said.

That’s the way things came to Warble. Freedom! All at once, in unlimited measure—freedom!

Baffled in her attempts to reform Butterfly Center, having fallen down on the job of replacing Art by Utility, she went, undaunted and indomitable, on her way.

Hoboken.

Work in a pickle foundry. Cucumbers, small onions, green tomatoes, cauliflower, tiny string beans, red peppers, mustard, vinegar, cauldrons, boiling, seething fumes, spicy mists, pungent odors, bottles, jars, labels, chow-chow, picalilli, smarting tongue, burning palate, inflamed oesophagus, disordered stomach, enteritis.

That was the way things came to Warble. And she made good. Her position was that of a pickle taster.

At first, only of the little gherkins, then promoted through medium cucumbers, to the glory of full-fledged Dills.