Read Ebook: Imperfectly Proper by Donovan Peter Johnston R E Illustrator

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Ebook has 884 lines and 71657 words, and 18 pages

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.

The expression of intense eagerness with which every lady's face was turned to the door as we stepped in, caused a flush of pride and modest confusion to mantle our Grecian features. Not that we are entirely unused to such manifestations of feminine approval--but thirty-seven all at once!

When they saw it was only us--that is, when they saw it was only we--O Lord, we mean when they saw who it was, thirty-six of the ladies turned around again and began talking to the nearest person in loud, casual tones, with a unanimity that we can only describe as unpleasantly marked. The thirty-seventh was our hostess. She, poor woman, had to look at us, and she came forward with a wan smile and her hand stretched out.

So that was why they all looked at the door when we first came in--they thought we were the priestess herself. And we were going to be uplifted. Also we were to be psyched--a hilarious prospect for a healthy, single man! We told our hostess, however, that we were sure we would adore Mrs. De Hyphen-Jones, as we always liked 'em psychic. We were about to explain that as a rule we preferred psychic blondes, but that a good psychic brunette with a neat ankle--our hostess, however, turned and addressed the company at large.

"Just to show you how wonderful she is," she warbled ecstatically, "the very first time she honored our little home with her presence, she simply telephoned to say she was coming, and when I began to tell her the address and how to get here, she stopped me at once. 'Don't tell me,' she said, 'don't even tell me the number. For when I come down the street, I will know at once the house where you dwell by its emanation of your personality, its you-ness, so to speak.' And she did! She came straight to the door."

On every side were heard gurgles of wonder and delight--"Marvellous!" "Isn't she just too wonderful?" "Extraordinary creature of genius!" And right in the midst of that liquid chorus of enthusiasm, we had to break in with one of those inept and devastating remarks which have time and again blasted our hopes of social preferment.

"But if she telephoned to you," we said in a loud voice like the imbecile we are, "she must have seen your address in the telephone book."

There was a chilling pause of indignation and a universal glassy stare. We felt the finger of scorn burning a hole in our shirt-bosom just above our heart. It was a hideous situation for us. We glanced about anxiously for a nice, low sofa to crawl under, when there was a sudden diversion to the right.

Mrs. De Frizac-Jones!--we were a lot gladder to see her than we had ever expected to be. She stood in the doorway, a middle-aged vision in powder-blue . She carried her head slightly on one side, and a pensive smile lit up the shadows under her blue hat with a blue-and-black ostrich-mount . She held out her hand to the hostess as though it were an orchid.

"So sorry to be late," we heard her say. And then the phalanx of ladies charged as one woman, leaving us four men stranded in the middle of the floor. We looked furtively at one another, but no one winked. We were all gentlemen. Besides, we were all badly scared.

"I am so utterly exhausted," Mrs. De Frizac-Jones explained languidly, when the first wild enthusiasm of welcome had somewhat subsided. "I have been lecturing to a class of dear girls on rhythm and deportment, you know, and it takes so much out of one. But their sweet sympathy and intelligence are very reviving. I was teaching them how they must walk--stooping slightly forward, with the face gracefully uptilted. The mannish swagger of most girls nowadays is so very frightful. I told them that when they glide across a room, they must say to themselves, 'I am a lily swaying in the breeze.' And they understood at once--they are so exquisitely plastic."

All the ladies, talking together, said it was really miraculous how she thought of such lovely metaphors. And it brought the idea home to one so beautifully--a lily swaying in the breeze! Personally, we recalled that the last time we saw anyone trying to walk like a lily swaying in the breeze, was about 1.35 a.m. on a down-town thoroughfare. The person in question was trying to carry a most splendiferous slosh past a watchful guardian of the law without affording an excuse for police intervention. The result was something like a lily, and also something like a wrecking-crane that had got out of control. But we didn't tell the company this bright thought of ours. We didn't tell anybody--we had had enough of telling.

A few minutes later we were presented to the great woman. Our hostess did it with the air of one consciously heaping coals of fire on our head. She murmured something about our being a literary critic--as a matter of fact, the Managing-Editor makes us review such books as come in, because the stenographer has too much other work to do, and the last office-boy he tried it on quit.

"Ah-h-h!" said the prophetess giving us her hand, and promptly dismissing that limb from her thoughts--we nearly put it in our vest-pocket we were so embarrassed. "Ah-h-h! And where is your centre?"

Just casually like that--just as though she were asking us where was our favorite hotel. In fact, for a wild moment we did think she might mean where did we usually hang out socially, and we almost said that we could generally be found after office-hours in the Press Club playing poker or waiting for a friendly boot-legger. But the slight vestige of sanity remaining to us prevented this final catastrophe, and we managed to stammer out that we were not aware of possessing any centre at all--none to speak of.

"Oh, but you must have a centre," she persisted brightly. "We who are engaged in the sacred service of the arts and muses must have a centre, a guiding beacon leading us ever onward and upward to the stars. Have you no star?"

We hadn't the heart to tell the dear lady that the star to which we generally turned our longing eyes in the service of the arts and muses was the hope that the Business Office of the journal on which we work would increase the weight and thickness of our weekly envelope--. We did not care to introduce these mercenary considerations, so we said nothing and blushed. We may be a benighted newspaperman, but we retain certain rudiments of delicacy. She smiled on us in imitation of a Pre-Raphaelite madonna, and floated away.

Then we had tea--not right away, but after half an hour or so of pained wonder whether or not we were going to get anything at all, and where the dickens the people were all drifting away to. They disappeared, two or three at a time, and none of them came back. We began to suspect that we were being ostracized, when our hostess came up and collected us.

"Oh, you naughty, naughty man," she said in that mischievous and knowing tone which some married ladies love to adopt towards bachelors, "you don't deserve that I should bother about you at all, but you really must have something to eat. Come out to the dining-room."

We went out to the dining-room, disguising as well as we could our extreme eagerness for vittles of some sort or other; and there we found that assemblage of giant intellects wandering about picking sandwiches and little cakes and cups of tea off the mantel, off the side-board, off the window-sill, off chairs, and even off the stairs in the hall. They were taking their food the way the Twentieth Century Limited takes water, scooping it up on the run. We must have looked a little amazed, for our hostess deigned to explain.

"That is the way we eat now," she said. "We do it spontaneously and almost unconsciously. Mrs. De Frizac-Jones suggested it. She said there was something so gross and premeditated about sitting down deliberately to food. One should eat as the bees sip honey, flitting about from flower to flower."

We said we thought it a very delightful idea--no doubt, the cook does, too. Then we walked six miles and a half around the place trying to get enough to sustain the vital forces till supper-time. We finished up by nearly sitting in a plate of angel-cake. And we were still hungry. It may be a good system for humming-birds, but it has its drawbacks for people gifted with the usual thirty-two feet of internal equipment.

When the sandwiches had at last been all tracked down and destroyed spontaneously and unconsciously, there was a general demand that Mrs. De Frizac-Jones should read something to us. After the usual amount of ah-do-pleasing on our part and no-I-rully-can'ting on hers, she suddenly remembered that she had Maeterlinck's "Death of Tintagiles" with her, and if they rully insisted--and, of course, they rully did.

The company draped itself in attitudes more or less graceful all over the furniture and the window-ledges, and assumed expressions of gloomy concentration. Mrs. De Frizac-Jones cleared her throat two or three times in a silvery way, and then began to read in a deadly monotone of the soul-freezing sort which villains used to employ in the "ten-twenty-thirt's" before the movies killed the spoken drama.

Personally, we feared the worst from the very moment that the name of Maeterlinck was mentioned. It acts like a spell. We have seen big, bouncing matrons, accustomed to bully their husbands and run large families, turn pale and tremble at the sound of it. We have known it to reduce to silence even the sort of prosperous business person who talks continually in a loud voice about his new car, and the cost of its tires, and the number of its cylinders, and the oceans of gasoline it consumes every time it runs around the block. The word makes them feel like a greenhorn at a Spiritist sceance watching a visitor from another plane materialize in the corner of the room.

The only people who seem to thrive on a diet of Maeterlinck are the aesthetes like Mrs. De Frizac-Jones. The gloomier the twilight of his scene, the more mournful the voices that float down the wind, the more the real enthusiasts expand and burgeon. Just give them a nice poetic strangling or something like that, and they are perfectly happy. Certainly, Mrs. De Frizac-Jones seemed to get a lot of fun out of "The Death of Tintagiles."

It was a cheerful little piece, all about a dear child and a black castle and a vampire queen. His young sisters try to shield him in their arms, but the queen's servants tear him away, and she slowly strangles him to death behind a big iron door while his sisters beat in despair upon it.

The reader will recognize at once how much better and stronger one feels when a play like this is over. Personally we almost gave three cheers when the poor little beggar was finally and completely killed. It put him out of pain--us, too. But fortunately Mrs. De Frizac-Jones checked us in time.

"No applause!" she commanded the company. "No applause! Silence is best."

We heroically restrained our desire to clap with our hands and pound with our feet on the rug; and everyone else sat still and frowned in intense thought. While they were wrestling with their souls, we slipped out into the hall. There we found one of the other men slipping away, too. Neither spoke a word, till we were both safely out on the sidewalk. Then he turned and pointed with his thumb to the house.

"Don't they beat hell!" he said.

Somehow we enjoy going to the bank nowadays far more than we used to. It isn't that we are more solvent than heretofore--our solvency does not seem to increase with our years--but the banks are much more interesting resorts than in the old days before the war filled them up with young ladies. The banks now have more color and animation, so to speak--especially since the girls have taken to wearing those gaudy pull-over sweaters.

We were reminded of this changed aspect of our sterner financial institutions the other day, when we caught ourself going in to have our bank-book made up for the third time in the week. Formerly it had been our custom to wait till we got a short and nasty note from the accountant asking us to call around and fix up that overdraught. But now we run right in every time we pass and have a little book-keeping done for us.

Instead of the gloomy young man who used to preside over the records of the savings department, they now have a bright young woman. This naturally introduces a very pleasing social atmosphere. We no longer chuck our bankbook in through the wicket with an air of weary nonchalance, or gaze coldly at the clerk as though daring him to make an insolent remark about the size of our balance and the amount of book-keeping it involves. Our account is still small and very lively, but we don't gaze coldly--on the contrary!

Now we take off our hat, and try to think up something sprightly to say about the weather. If it is a nice day in the summer, for instance, this leads naturally to a discussion of the best place to spend one's vacation, and whether or not one likes sailing, and does one do much dancing in the summer, and how good the roads are for motoring just now.

A great thing, too, about discussing film-favorites is that it furnishes a most useful index to character. Girls who like Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, for instance, are apt to be of the merry, hoydenish sort--fond of romping, you know, and caramels and practical jokes, and all that sort of jolly rot. The admirers of Clara Kimball Young or Mr. Bushman, on the other hand, are usually of the yearning, soulful type, the kind of girl who wants you to recite poetry to her in the twilight, and longs for some strong man to protect her--this sort of thing usually leads to solitaire-diamond rings. But the young ladies who enthuse over Theda Bara and Pauline Frederick--well, when we run across one of these we always look around for help. When one meets an amateur of vamping one had best not get too far from one's strategic reserves.

This conversational gambit, is all right, but the trouble in the banks is that they keep changing the young ladies around. Just as soon as we have got things moving along nicely, and have reached the point where we can talk about the young lady's preferences in the matter of supper, or can throw out general suggestions in the direction of an evening's paddle in the Island lagoon, they remove her to an inaccessible portion of the building--perhaps they confine her in the main vault--and we have to start all over again. It is a little discouraging, even though our heart is in the work. Bank managers and chief accountants certainly seem to be jealous devils.

"Say, what is this?" a wheezy voice asked at our ear. "Is this a bank or have I butted into a manicuring parlor?"

We looked at the person, a fat and clammy merchant with a bunch of colored cheques in his flabby fist, the sort of human hippo who wears a pink shirt with a Palm Beach suit, and perspires on the end of the nose. We looked coldly down him from the gaudy band on his Panama, to the gilded buckle of his belt--everything below that was concealed by the overhang--but we couldn't think of a darn thing to say. Nothing suitable for a bank, that is.

Fortunately the lady was more than equal to the occasion. She raised her eyebrows and looked at the cheques he held.

"Do you want to cash those?" she asked in silvery tones of hauteur.

"I do," he said with unabashed assurance, "if you can spare the time--and a hand."

"Well, then you had better run out and get someone to identify you--perhaps one of the other butchers might be willing."

We could see the ripples of rage run up the back of that fat financier's neck. He turned a rich magenta, and the diamond on his little finger wobbled about as though he were trying to send a distress message by heliograph.

"Where--where's the Manager?" he spluttered. "I want the Manager. I'll report you, that's what I'll do--you--you minx!"

"Second door at the left of the main entrance," she said sweetly, and reached for a ledger. She did not seem flustered in the least, but our little conversazione was over--this sort of interruption makes it so difficult to recapture the first fine careless rapture.

It was our own fault. We shouldn't have gone in at an hour when business men were likely to be shouldering their way up to the financial trough. In order to take advantage of the social possibilities of present-day banking, it is best to call early--say, around ten o'clock. Then the commercial machine has not got properly under way and little flowers of romance may be made to bloom in the arid paths of business.

But, of course, one mustn't go too early. One must give the girls a chance to exchange their little confidences with one another about the sort of time they had the night before, and what canoe club he belongs to, and how many fox-trots she had with him, and what she said to Reggie when Reggie objected to her going around with a former aviator--aviators presumably being men of flighty notions of morality--and the other vital topics that ladies discuss the morning after.

We made that mistake one morning two or three months ago. A fellow had given us a cheque--it was rather a surprise, we admit--and we were quite short of money, which is never a surprise to us. We needed it and we needed it quickly, so we were at the door of his bank just one minute and a half after it opened. We didn't want to give anyone else a chance to beat us to his bank-balance, so we were there at nine-thirty-six-and-a-half.

The young ladies were present all right--most of them, at any rate--but they had not yet turned their minds to the business of the day. About a dozen of them were gathered in chatty little groups, from which stray snatches of conversation reached our ears.

"I think I'd have frills on it, my dear," said one. "You know those net and muslin frills are all the rage. Gertie was over at Buffalo last week, and she said that the girls were wearing them all over."

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