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IMPERFECTLY PROPER

Illustrated by R. E. JOHNSTON

PRINTED IN CANADA

PETER DONOVAN.

Toronto, Sept. 1920.

That Motor Boat of Algie's Aesthetics and Some Tea Beauty in the Bank Koncerning Kosmetics Clurks and Clarks Ventilation City Chickens Porters, Pullmans and Patience Helping Our Friends to Economize Refreshments at Five Manners for the Masses Raiment and Mere Clothes That Fur Coat Spring in the City Moving Day Vacation Vagaries Lawnless Tennis That Glorious First Drive That Awful First Game On Keeping Cool Back to Nature in a Limousine Stringencies and How to Stringe in Them Taming the Furnace Mike Dogs On Being Handy with Tools Bumps and a Brogue

His name really isn't Algie. It wouldn't do to use his real name--he has a very nice wife, you know. So we shall call him Algie, partly as a disguise, and partly because we wish to be offensive. We want to hurt his feelings. It is our earnest desire that he should read this account and writhe painfully. We claim to be as patient and forgiving as the next one, but there are some subjects--and that motor-boat picnic is one of them. When, in addition to being made sea-sick, being scared into acute heart-disease, and being banged about in a locoed launch like a bean in a coal-scuttle, a gentleman is forced to ruin his second-best pair of--but we anticipate.

For two or three weeks prior to the fatal invitation and the fatal day on which he perpetrated the picnic, Algie had been coming down to the office late every morning--so late in fact that his coming amounted to an afternoon call. Furthermore, his face and shirt bore mysterious smudges of train-oil. And though Algie was never what is known as a "swell dresser," he was always a very neat sort of chap in the matter of his personal adornment.

As soon as he arrived he would immediately begin calling up all sorts of mechanics, plumbers, boiler-makers, painters, boat-builders, and electricians. Lengthy conferences would ensue in which frequent references would be made to cylinders and hulls and carburetors and propellers, and the time when certain jobs should have been done, and what a helluva nerve they had to ask any such price. The language was usually very technical. But it was occasionally quite lucid and human, though not of a nature to bear repetition in print which is intended to go into Christian homes.

During the two or three hours in the afternoon when Algie was with us, he would run out every few minutes and come back with a coil of lead pipe, or a dry battery, or a can of gasoline. And then he would slip away at about four o'clock with an intensely preoccupied air.

We all knew where he was going and what he was going to do. He had bought a motor-boat from a friend, and he was trying to put it in such condition that he could go out in it without having to wear a life-belt. Of course, the friend had guaranteed it as the safest, speediest, staunchest, and trimmest little craft that ever got in front of a ferry-boat on the Bay. But one should never buy a motor-boat from a friend. Better buy it from a deadly enemy. Then you may discover a big hole in the bottom of it, or a dynamite bomb stowed away forward with a clock attachment. But that is all. Once you have patched up the hole or thrown the bomb overboard, you are all right. But when you buy a motor-boat from a friend you are never done with trouble.

After Algie had had the Gladiolus--his wife christened it--for about a week, he realized that he had to put a new engine in it. He put the engine in, got the thing started, and headed for the Island. He got there just in time--to save his life, that is. The Gladiolus sank gently to rest on a sand-bar in three feet of water. The liquid composing the Bay is admittedly rather thick, but it managed to ooze into that boat in about four hundred and forty different places. Algie said afterwards that it had looked to him as though the boat were being invaded by an army of angle-worms.

With a marine derrick they enticed the Gladiolus out of the bosom of the sand-bar, and got her back to dry-dock. Then Algie started in to put a new hull around the engine. It amounted to that by the time he got all the repairs made. Then she had to be painted. Also she had to have a new propeller, ditto some chairs, ditto lanterns and a search-light, ditto a set of cushions. But at last the work was done. Algie was tired but happy; and he wanted to share his bliss.

"You simply got to come, old man," he said in a spirit of exuberant hospitality, "won't take no for an answer. Ten sharp, Sunday morning, at Sunnyside--the Missus and I will be right there as you get off the car. We'll run up beyond Port Credit and have lunch by the lakeside. Sharp at ten, mind!"

In a moment of weakness we consented. Nay, more, we looked forward to it. We had visions of ourself leaning back in one of the sumptuous deck-chairs of the Gladiolus, as that beauteous speed-devil ate up the watery miles on old Ontario. We could imagine the shores whizzing by, and the Hamilton boats being left hopelessly behind. So we prayed for fine weather. And when we say we prayed we don't mean that we issued an order to Divine Providence like a parson, but we made a timid and tentative appeal. It was answered. It was one of the finest Sundays we have ever seen. We don't suppose we were really the cause of it, you know, but we felt gratified. When a chap doesn't pray to excess, he naturally is surprised and delighted to get what he asks for. But, alas, we knew not what we did.

When we got off the car at Sunnyside--a popular local beach--there was Algie, sure enough, in white ducks and a stern expression of countenance. Just imagine the face of Admiral Sir David Beatty as he prepared to take the battle-cruisers into action off Jutland, and you will have a faint notion of the concentrated solemnity and sense of responsibility which sat upon Algie's features as he shook our hand in an absent-minded manner and told us to hustle aboard. We did hustle. We don't mind admitting that we were impressed. We felt that here was a seaman who entered upon the grave duties of his position in no frivolous spirit--a true sailor who loved and yet feared the mighty deep.

When we got to the wharf where the gasoline wonder reposed her graceful length, we found Mrs. Algie and two other guests. They were very nice people, very nice indeed. The husband was a clerical-looking chap--his facial make-up suggested a curate in an ineffectual disguise. But his conversation was at times decidedly unclerical--at least, it wasn't the sort of thing one gets from clergymen in their more professional moments. When that big wave came over and sloshed down his neck, he said--but again we anticipate.

Algie and his wife were in nautical costume as befitted the skipper and skipperess. Algie wore a nice pair of white ducks and a white shirt very open at the throat. Mrs. Algie was also in ducks--cut on a different pattern, of course. It was a very fetching little costume. We say "little" advisedly. The skirt had been made remarkably short, or it had grown that way from too long and too intimate association with steam-laundries. The effect, in any case, was to keep it hovering about midway between the nautical and the naughty.

The rest of us were in the ordinary Sunday garb of churchgoers who happen to be going somewhere else. Our clothes were sober and restrained, but natty. They expressed the sombre atmosphere of the Sabbath, with a dash of outing flavor. Personally, we wore that grey suit with the black-line pattern which everyone admired so much. You may have noticed it--two-button coat and cuff-bottom trousers. Really a very pretty thing. We don't mention this from any feeling of childish vanity, but merely because it has a bearing on later developments.

When we saw the Gladiolus we must confess we were disappointed. We had been hearing so much about it, and Algie had spoken with such enthusiasm, that we had formed an idea of a vessel combining the luxury and grace of the Astor family yacht with the rakishness and speed of a torpedo-destroyer. Instead of that gorgeous conception, here was a boat which looked like a very long and narrow packing-case, pointed at one end. It contained an engine that suggested a coffee-mill with a very chunky fly-wheel. Abaft--that, we believe is the technical term--abaft the engine were a couple of cane-chairs.

The Gladiolus, however, was very strong in the matter of decoration. There were stencilled flower-designs in every possible place, and a huge flag drooped over the stern. The cushions presented florid designs of young ladies in sailor-blouses. A large and highly polished search-light glared over the bow like the eye of an enraged Cyclops. There was no acetylene for the light, but it looked well, and it made one feel so much safer.

The party fitted itself into the boat as best it could. It was a very tight fit. Two people seated themselves on the little bench in the stern. They were jammed in so tight that when one was pulled out it made a noise like drawing an obstinate cork. And two sat on the cane-chairs, when they weren't sitting on the bottom of the boat to keep her steady. The skipper had a bench all to himself, so that he could get up and wrestle with the fly-wheel every time the engine paused to think.

When we were all in the boat, she settled down to within three inches of the water--or so it seemed to us personally. We made a hesitating comment on the subject to Algie. He smiled a wintry smile.

Hastily we disclaimed any desire for a grain-barge. We stated our entire agreement with him on the subject of low free-boards. Our concurrence was all the more enthusiastic that we didn't know the difference between a low free-board and a loose plank in the fence.

Soothed by our submission, Algie stepped gingerly forward, taking great care not to kick the engine over. He gazed sternly about. We watched anxiously. Algie bent down with dignity, grasped the fly-wheel with both hands, and gave a mighty heave. The engine coughed asthmatically and relapsed into silence. Algie heaved again. The engine cleared its throat--only that and nothing more. Algie smiled a sickly smile, muttered something about the sparker, toyed with a few cocks and levers--that engine seemed to possess more of them than any piece of mechanism we have ever seen--and then heaved that blessed wheel for fifteen minutes without stopping. Nothing doing! Algie was red in the face, his lovely ducks were all smudged with oil, and still the engine preserved the meditative silence of a paralyzed yogi.

It was very trying, very. We all started in to make suggestions, and Algie was so much at a loss that he even tried to carry some of them out, thus losing caste terribly in our eyes. No skipper should ever treat a suggestion with anything but withering contempt. At last he lost his temper and gave the engine a kick. We don't know what he struck, but he certainly struck something. The result was miraculous. The engine started with a roar like an express-train on a bridge, and before we knew we were shooting out into the Lake, just missing a canoe in which a young man sprawled with a double-bladed paddle and beamed at his "ladifren." As we whizzed by, nearly knocking the paddle out of his hand, that young man sat straight up, and while we were within range his conversation was of a character not countenanced by the Lord's Day Alliance.

Thus we started. Of course we didn't keep it up long. After about a hundred yards or so, the Gladiolus settled down to a steady clip of about three miles an hour--when she was going. There were frequent intervals when the engine stopped to get its breath. But we didn't mind. It was a lovely bright day, and there was very little wind. So with our one-lung engine we gayly coughed our way over the glassy waters. We made many jokes, and occasionally burst into song--all except Algie, of course. Algie insisted on preserving the best traditions of British seamanship. On shore he might relax, but while he was at sea and our lives depended on him, he stayed right there on the bridge, and his stern eyes swept the waste of waters and the rock-bound coast lest danger should lurk there. He must have seen a lot of dangers that no one else saw, for he kept zigzagging and tacking about in the most extraordinary manner.

Pleasantly the hours passed and the landmarks on shore--summer hotels, gaudy villas smirking coquettishly through the trees, boating establishments where gentlemen hire canoes for their ladies, or perhaps ladies for their canoes. Slowly we drew near to Mimico. There is an asylum at Mimico. We have heard friends of ours account for its presence there on the ground that one must be out of one's mind to live at Mimico; but as they had been fined for speeding through the village, it is possible that their opinion was not entirely unbiased.

Inch by inch Mimico slipped past the beautiful low free-board of the Gladiolus. And incidentally, that famous free-board began to seem lower than ever. For some little time the wind had been rising, and the waves kept growing bigger--"quite a sea kicking up," as Algie said--and now and then there was an unmistakeable slap of spray over the side. The original intention had been to go some miles further along the shore for lunch, but Algie finally decided to turn back to Mimico--not that he distrusted the seaworthy qualities of the Gladiolus or himself, but merely as a concession to the fears of the ladies in the party. He announced his intention of landing at the Asylum. He had been a visitor or a guest or something there, and professed to know the doctor quite well. Besides they had a good wharf, he said.

Algie managed to warp in the Gladiolus, after several determined efforts to knock the end off the concrete pier. Then we landed the grub. Each of the three gentlemen--we include Algie--assumed the white man's burden, while the ladies tripped on gracefully ahead. We advanced into the grounds of the Asylum. There were a number of the inmates strolling about, but they made no attempt to accost us. Evidently they thought we were new and more than usually weak-minded arrivals. There was much to support such a view.

We found a nice spot for picnicking. It was on a low bluff overlooking the Lake. Sombre pines cast romantic shadows about us. And the lunch was excellent--just such a lunch as marooned sailors might dream to find awaiting them in heaven. We even had initialed napkins. And as the food went down our spirits rose. We felt that the perils of the deep were a myth, and we said ha-ha in our hearts and asked for another piece of pie. Then, having eaten and the chicken bones having been thrown over the cliff, we lay about in graceful postures, listening to what the wild waves were saying and quoting such verse as we remembered out of the fifth reader.

Suddenly it occurred to someone that the wild waves were saying a good deal and that they were talking in a big bass voice. We woke up to the fact that the wind had wakened up some time previously.

"Lord, but it's going to be rough!" said Algie:

But none of us realized just how rough it was going to be, or we would have all walked to town. Seen from above, waves are very different from what they are when seen from below--a truth which no member of that party will ever doubt again. We hastily packed up and made a run for the wharf and the boat. When we got there we found that another boat had also sought its shelter. Two sun-burned youths in extremely primitive costumes brooded in it and smoked cigarettes and cursed their engine. They had tried everything they could think of, including a lot of language they had never thought of before, and the darn thing wouldn't go. Thereupon Algie climbed into their boat and worked like an African slave for half an hour, in spite of our appeals and unveiled hints that he was an ass.

At last even Algie gave the task up and consented to get back into his own boat and begin a little Graeco-Roman with his own engine. Strangely enough, that temperamental machine was quite amenable this time. It took only twelve minutes and a few damns to start it. Promptly we backed into the other fellow's anchor rope and put several fancy stitches into it with our propeller. Naturally our propeller became somewhat involved in the process. The other gentlemen--and when we say "gentlemen!"--refused to let us cut the rope, so there was nothing for it but to land the ladies once more, shoo them away from the wharf, undress Algie, and put him into the water. We kept him there till he had untied the propeller, and then we dragged him in, half-frozen. When he recovered sufficiently to be able to speak, he used some expressions which we are personally treasuring up for an occasion of great mental stress.

We rounded the break-water, incidentally scraping all the paint off one side of the boat, and then everything happened at once. A great big wave with a white head saw us coming, gave a glad, wild shout, and jumped aboard. The Gladiolus shuddered and groaned, and we all shuddered and groaned. But it was only the beginning. The big wave was followed by a bigger, which also climbed playfully aboard and coiled up in our laps. And then all Lake Ontario seemed to crowd in on us at once. We were breathing, drinking, and absorbing water which we had intended using solely for purposes of navigation.

The way the Gladiolus acted would have been a revelation to a builder of submarines. That rakish craft, with the long, narrow lines and the lovely low freeboard, dived into every wave and shipped it gracefully all over the passengers. With a very little coaxing, she would have plunged down and run along the bottom. Now and then she came up to breathe, and then we all looked a mute farewell at one another and disappeared once more beneath the foam. None of us ever expected to see Yonge Street and the department-stores again.

The most extraordinary thing about the whole damp business was the way the engine kept going. A real engine would have stopped dead the first time a wave came in and lay down beside it. But this rheumatic and asthmatic old bunch of junk, which some heartless pirate had sold to Algie for an engine, kept coughing and sputtering through it all. There was no spray-hood, and the water was about a foot deep all around the machine, but it hammered away with a steadiness it would never have displayed in happier circumstances.

We would have turned back if we could, but we couldn't. Algie was in no condition of mind to steer, and the boat wouldn't answer the rudder anyway. So we just chug-chugged through the welter, holding our breaths when we were under water, and gasping for air when we could get any. Now and then we caught sight of Algie hanging on to the wheel, evidently prepared to go to his God like a sailor. It was noble but it wasn't seamanship.

For years and years we kept plunging into huge waves that rose up from the nether abyss, towered over our heads, and then crashed down upon us like the side of the Woolworth Building. Once or twice we caught a fleeting glimpse of the shore, with peaceful cottages upon it, and we remembered that somewhere the sun was shining and somewhere hearts were light. But we had little time for reflection.

Suddenly, after a century or two of submarine existence, we found that we were at Sunnyside once more. We were very much at Sunnyside. We were on the beach, with huge waves breaking over us, and three hundred people yelling directions at us. Some noble life-savers stood on the end of a wharf and threw us a rope. Algie grabbed it and performed prodigies of pulling. But it was no use. There we stuck, and a lot more waves came tumbling in to play with us. That is where we personally saw our duty, and we did it. We got out and pushed. It sounds simple. Most heroic things do. But it took the eye that saw and the legs that dared. We clambered out in the bosom of a wave, got a firm toe-hold on the submerged soil of Sunnyside, laid our head lovingly against the polished side of the Gladiolus, and shoved her out into the Lake. Then we held her there and got in again, carrying about a barrel of water with us, like a Newfoundland dog coming back with a stick he has retrieved.

Far be it from us to dwell upon this part of the adventure, though we know men who have got their pictures into the paper and the pictures of their entire families for deeds no braver. And these men have been sailors, hardened to the perils of the splashy deep, while we are a raw amateur whose favorite exercise is running a typewriter. But let us pass on.

Little remains to be told. Algie finally managed to blunder into the shelter of the Humber River. There we fished the ladies out of the boat, wrung them out, and we all walked rapidly home. We walked to keep from being chilled to death--also because there wasn't the slightest chance of them letting us board a street-car in that condition. Fortunately, home wasn't more than a mile or so away--Algie's home. But it seemed farther. Our clothes stuck lovingly to our personalities, and passers-by made unfeeling remarks.

Algie and Mrs. Algie did their very best for us. They fed us, gave us old clothes while ours were drying, made us take a little something with hot water and lemon in it, and rendered all the first aids usual in such circumstances. When we came away we told them we had had a lovely time.

"You must come out again in her," said Algie, "when I have had her decked in, and a new four-cylinder engine...."

But that was a long time ago, and we are still resisting the temptation--tactfully, we trust, but firmly.

Why anyone should invite us to an aesthetic tea is one of those insoluble mysteries which Heaven alone can penetrate--supposing that Heaven would so far condescend as to notice the matter at all. We are not aesthetic, and we don't care a darn about tea.

What's more, we hate dressing up for it. There might be some sense in dressing up for a case of beer or a couple of bottles of Scotch. But why people should get into afternoon gowns and morning-coats for tea and postage-stamp sandwiches--well, it beats us, dear reader, it beats us.

Of course, nothing was stated in the invitation about it being an aesthetic tea. But we were asked to meet Mrs. De Frizac-Jones, and we knew what that meant. The reader may not know Mrs. De Frizac-Jones--at least, not by that name--but she is a very real person. She is the arch-priestess of the higher cultchaw in our town. And she makes it pay--about five thousand a year and unlimited kudos! But more of her anon.

So we shook the camphor out of our morning-coat, and put a little indelible ink on the places where the lining showed through the more recent moth-holes in the vest. We sewed a button or two on our striped trousers, took a spot off one leg, rectified the line of our shirt-bosom and cuffs by clipping the feathers off the edges, read a couple of chapters of a book of etiquette--all about leaving your hat and stick in the hall without fear, and making a bright, spontaneous remark to your hostess on entering and leaving --and we felt prepared for the massed attacks of the enemy, including gas.

When we arrived there was already a goodly company assembled--thirty-seven ladies and three men. The ladies were bubbling over with unsuppressed excitement, and the air was filled with extremely cultured badinage involving the frequent mention of Maeterlinck and Mrs. Inez Haynes Gilmore. The three men didn't seem excited. They weren't saying a word. Till we were introduced to them, we thought they were the hired help.

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