The Life of the Party

XII

He stopped where he was, in the middle of the room, with his eyes and his hands seeking for the seams of the closing of his main garment. Then he remembered what in his stress he had forgotten – the opening or perhaps one should say the closing was at the back. He twisted his arms rearward, his fingers groping along his spine.

Now any normal woman has the abnormal ability to do and then to undo a garment hitching behind. Nature, which so fashioned her elbows that she cannot throw a stone at a hen in the way in which a stone properly should be thrown at a hen, made suitable atonement for this articular oversight by endowing her joints with the facile knack of turning on exactly the right angle, with never danger of sprain or dislocation, for the subjugation of a back-latching frock. Moreover, years of practice have given her adeptness in accomplishing this achievement, so that to her it has become an everyday feat. But man has neither the experience to qualify him nor yet the bodily adaptability.

By reaching awkwardly up and over his shoulder Mr. Leary managed to tug the topmost button of his array of buttons out of its attendant buttonholes, but below and beyond that point he could not progress. He twisted and contorted his body; he stretched his arms in their sockets until twin pangs of agony met and crossed between his shoulder blades, and with his two exploring hands he pulled and fumbled and pawed and wrenched and wrested, to make further headway at his task. But the sewing-on had been done with stout thread; the buttonholes were taut and snug and well made. Those slippery flat surfaces amply resisted him. They eluded him; defied him; outmastered him. Thanks be to, or curses be upon, the passionate zeal of Miss Rowena Skiff for exactitudes, he, lacking the offices of an assistant undresser, was now as definitely and finally inclosed in this distressful pink garment as though it had been his own skin. Speedily he recognised this fact in all its bitter and abominable truth, but mechanically, he continued to wrestle with the obdurate fastenings.

While he thus vainly contended, events in which he directly was concerned were occurring beneath that roof. From within his refuge he heard the sounds of slamming doors, of hurrying footsteps, of excited voices merging into a distracted chorus; but above all else, and from the rest, two of these voices stood out by reason of their augmented shrillness, and Mr. Leary marked them both, for since he had just heard them he therefore might identify their respective unseen owners.

"There's something – there's somebody in the house!" At the top of its register one voice was repeating the warning over and over again, and judging by direction this alarmist was shrieking her words through a keyhole on the floor below him. "I saw it – him – whatever it was. I opened my door to look out in the hall and it – he – was right there. Oh, I could have touched him! And then it ran and I didn't see him any more and I slammed the door and began screaming."

"You seen what?"

The strident question seemed to come from far below, down in the depths of the house, where the caretaker abided.

"Whatever it was. I opened the door and he was right in the hall there glaring at me. I could have touched it. And then he ran and I – "

"What was he like? I ast what was he like – it's that I'm astin' you!" The janitress was the one who pressed for an answer.

For the moment the question, pointed though it was, went unanswered. The main speaker – shrieker, rather – was plainly a person with a mania for details, and even in this emergency she intended, as now developed, to present all the principal facts in the case, and likewise all the incidental facts so far as these fell within her scope of knowledge.

"I was awake," she clarioned through the keyhole, speaking much faster than any one following this narrative can possibly hope to read the words. "I couldn't sleep. I never do sleep well when I'm in a strange house. And anyhow, I was all alone. My nephew by marriage – Mr. Edward Braydon, you know – had gone out with the gentleman who lives on the floor above to play cards, and he said he was going to be gone nearly all night, and my niece – I'm Mrs. Braydon's unmarried aunt from Poughkeepsie and I'm down here visiting them – my niece was called to Long Island yesterday by illness – it's her sister who's ill with something like the bronchitis. And he was gone and so she was gone, and so here I was all alone and he told me not to stay up for him, but I couldn't sleep well – I never can sleep in a strange house – and just a few minutes ago I heard the bell ring and I supposed he had forgotten to take his latchkey with him, and so I got up to let him in. And I called down the stairs and asked him if it was him and he answered back. But it didn't sound like his voice. But I didn't think anything of that. But, of course, it was out of the ordinary for him to have a voice like that. But all the same I went back to bed. But he didn't come in and I was just getting up again to see what detained him – his voice really sounded so strange I thought then he might have been taken sick or something. But just as I got to the door a plank creaked and I opened the door and there it was right where I could have touched him. And then it ran – and oh, what if – "

"I'm astin' you once more what it was like?"

"How should I know except that – "

"Was it a big, fat, wild, bare-headed, scary, awful-lookin' scoundrel dressed in some kind of funny pink clothes?"

"Yes, that's it! That's him – he was all sort of pink. Oh, did you see him too? Oh, is it a burglar?"

"Burglar nothin'! It's a ravin', rampagin' lunatic – that's what it is!"

"Oh, my heavens, a lunatic!"

"Sure it is. He tried to git me to let him in and – "

"Oh, whatever shall we do!"

XIII

"Hey, what's all the excitement about?"

A new and deeper voice here broke into the babel, and Mr. Leary recognising it at a distance, where he stood listening – but not failing, even while he listened, to strive unavailingly with his problem of buttons – knew he was saved. Knowing this he nevertheless retreated still deeper into the inner room. The thought of spectators in numbers remained very abhorrent to him. So he did not hear all that happened next, except in broken snatches.

He gathered though, from what he did hear, that Bob Slack and Mr. Edward Braydon were coming up the stairs, and that a third male whom they called Officer was coming with them, and that the janitress was coming likewise, and that divers lower-floor tenants were joining in the march, and that as they came the janitress was explaining to all and sundry how the weird miscreant had sought to inveigle her into admitting him to Mr. Slack's rooms, and how she had refused, and how with maniacal craft – or words to that effect – he had, nevertheless, managed to secure admittance to the house, and how he must still be in the house. And through all her discourse there were questions from this one or that, crossing its flow but in no-wise interrupting it; and through it all percolated hootingly the terrorised outcries of Mr. Braydon's maiden aunt-in-law, issuing through the keyhole of the door behind which she cowered. Only now she was interjecting a new harassment into the already complicated mystery by pleading that someone repair straightway to her and render assistance, as she felt herself to be on the verge of fainting dead away.

With searches into closets and close scrutiny of all dark corners passed en route, the procession advanced to the top floor, mainly guided in its oncoming by the clew deduced from the circumstances of the mad intruder having betrayed a desire to secure access to Mr. Slack's apartment, with the intention, as the caretaker more than once suggested on her way up, of murdering Mr. Slack in his bed. Before the ascent had been completed she was quite certain this was the correct deduction, and so continued to state with all the emphasis of which she was capable.

"He couldn't possibly have got downstairs again," somebody hazarded; "so he must be upstairs here still – must be right round here somewhere."

"Didn't I tell you he was lookin' for Mr. Slack to lay in wait for him and destroy the poor man in his bed?" shrilled the caretaker.

"Watch carefully now, everybody. He might rush out of some corner at us."

"Say, my transom's halfway open!" Mr. Bob Slack exclaimed. "And, by Jove, there's a light shining through it yonder from the bedroom. He's inside – we've got him cornered, whoever he is."

Boldly Mr. Slack stepped forward and rapped hard on the door.

"Better step on out peaceably," he called, "because there's an officer here with us and we've got you trapped."

"It's me, Bob, it's me," came in a wheezy, plaintive wail from somewhere well back in the apartment.

"Who's me?" demanded Mr. Slack, likewise forgetting his grammar in the thrill of this culminating moment.

"Algy – Algernon Leary."

"Not with that voice, it isn't. But I'll know in a minute who it is!" Mr. Slack reached pocketward for his keys.

"Better be careful. He might have a gun or something on him."

"Nonsense!" retorted Mr. Slack, feeling very valiant. "I'm not afraid of any gun. But you ladies might stand aside if you're frightened. All ready, officer? Now then!"

"Please come in by yourself, Bob. Don't – don't let anybody else come with you!"

XIV

If he heard the faint and agonised appeal from within Mr. Slack chose not to heed it. He found the right key on his key ring, applied it to the lock, turned the bolt and shoved the door wide open, giving back then in case of an attack. The front room was empty. Mr. Slack crossed cautiously to the inner room and peered across the threshold into it, Mr. Braydon and a grey-coated private watchman and a procession of half-clad figures following along after him.

Where was the mysterious intruder? Ah, there he was, huddled up in a far corner alongside the bed as though he sought to hide himself away from their glaring eyes. And at the sight of what he beheld Mr. Bob Slack gave one great shocked snort of surprise, and then one of recognition.

For all that the cowering wretch wore a quaint garment of a bright and watermelonish hue, except where it was streaked with transom dust and marked with ash-can grit; for all that his head was bare, and his knees, and a considerable section of his legs as well; for all that he had white socks and low slippers, now soaking wet, upon his feet; for all his elbow sleeves and his pink garters and his low neck; and finally for all that his face was now beginning, as they stared upon it, to wear the blank wan look of one who is about to succumb to a swoon of exhaustion induced by intense physical exertion or by acutely prolonged mental strain or by both together – Mr. Bob Slack detected in this fabulous oddity a resemblance to his associate in the practice of law at Number Thirty-two Broad Street.

"In the name of heaven, Leary – " he began.

But a human being can stand just so many shocks in a given number of minutes – just so many and no more. Gently, slowly, the gartered legs gave way, bending outward, and as their owner collapsed down upon his side with the light of consciousness flickering in his eyes, his figure was half-turned to them, and they saw how that he was ornamentally but securely buttoned down the back with many large buttons and how that with a last futile fluttering effort of his relaxing hands he fumbled first at one and then at another of these buttons.

"Leary, what in thunder have you been doing? And where on earth have you been?" Mr. Slack shot the questions forth as he sprang to his partner's side and knelt alongside the slumped pink shape.

Languidly Mr. Leary opened one comatose eye. Then he closed it again and the wraith of a smile formed about his lips, and just as he went sound asleep upon the floor Mr. Slack caught from Mr. Leary the softly whispered words, "I've been the life of the party!"