The Best American Humorous Short Stories Part 36

Suddenly her lips parted with a smile that revealed a double row of most beautiful teeth. He meditatively watched the curve of her lips.

"Isn't that rather a heavy load?" he suggested. "I'd be delighted to help you move the things, don't you know."

"It is quite kind of you, and what the men would call 'game,' I believe, under the circ.u.mstances," she answered, "but really it will not be necessary. We have hired Mr. Tutt and the driver to do the heavier part of the work, and the rest of it will be really a pleasant diversion."

"No doubt," agreed Ralph, with an appreciative grin. "By the way, you don't happen to know Maud and Dorothy Partridge, of Baltimore, do you?

Stunning pretty girls, both of them, and no end of swells."

"I know so very few people in Baltimore," she murmured, and tripped on down to the barn.

Ralph went out on the porch and smoked. There was nothing else that he could do.

VIII

It was growing dusk when the elder Ellsworths returned, almost hidden by great ma.s.ses of autumn boughs.

"You should have been with us, Ralph," enthusiastically said his mother. "I never saw such gorgeous tints in all my life. We have brought nearly the entire woods with us."

"It was a good idea," said Ralph. "A stunning good idea. They may come in handy to sleep on."

Mrs. Ellsworth turned cold.

"What do you mean?" she gasped.

"Ralph," sternly demanded his father, "you don't mean to tell us that you let the Van Kamps jockey us out of those rooms after all?"

"Indeed, no," he airily responded. "Just come right on up and see."

He led the way into the suite and struck a match. One solitary candle had been left upon the mantel shelf. Ralph thought that this had been overlooked, but his mother afterwards set him right about that. Mrs.

Van Kamp had cleverly left it so that the Ellsworths could see how dreadfully bare the place was. One candle in three rooms is drearier than darkness anyhow.

Mrs. Ellsworth took in all the desolation, the dismal expanse of the now enormous apartments, the shabby walls, the hideous bright spots where pictures had hung, the splintered flooring, the great, gaunt windows--and she gave in. She had met with snub after snub, and cut after cut, in her social climb, she had had the cook quit in the middle of an important dinner, she had had every disconcerting thing possible happen to her, but this--this was the last _bale_ of straw.

She sat down on a suitcase, in the middle of the biggest room, and cried!

Ralph, having waited for this, now told about the food transaction, and she hastily pushed the last-coming tear back into her eye.

"Good!" she cried. "They will be up here soon. They will be compelled to compromise, and they must not find me with red eyes."

She cast a hasty glance around the room, then, in a sudden panic, seized the candle and explored the other two. She went wildly out into the hall, back into the little room over the kitchen, downstairs, everywhere, and returned in consternation.

"There's not a single mirror left in the house!" she moaned.

Ralph heartlessly grinned. He could appreciate that this was a characteristic woman trick, and wondered admiringly whether Evelyn or her mother had thought of it. However, this was a time for action.

"I'll get you some water to bathe your eyes," he offered, and ran into the little room over the kitchen to get a pitcher. A cracked shaving-mug was the only vessel that had been left, but he hurried down into the yard with it. This was no time for fastidiousness.

He had barely creaked the pump handle when Mr. Van Kamp hurried up from the barn.

"I beg your pardon, sir," said Mr. Van Kamp, "but this water belongs to us. My daughter bought it, all that is in the ground, above the ground, or that may fall from the sky upon these premises."

IX

The mutual siege lasted until after seven o'clock, but it was rather one-sided. The Van Kamps could drink all the water they liked, it made them no hungrier. If the Ellsworths ate anything, however, they grew thirstier, and, moreover, water was necessary if anything worth while was to be cooked. They knew all this, and resisted until Mrs.

Ellsworth was tempted and fell. She ate a sandwich and choked. It was heartbreaking, but Ralph had to be sent down with a plate of sandwiches and an offer to trade them for water.

Halfway between the pump and the house he met Evelyn coming with a small pail of the precious fluid. They both stopped stock still; then, seeing that it was too late to retreat, both laughed and advanced.

"Who wins now?" bantered Ralph as they made the exchange.

"It looks to me like a misdeal," she gaily replied, and was moving away when he called her back.

"You don't happen to know the Gately's, of New York, do you?" he was quite anxious to know.

"I am truly sorry, but I am acquainted with so few people in New York.

We are from Chicago, you know."

"Oh," said he blankly, and took the water up to the Ellsworth suite.

Mrs. Ellsworth cheered up considerably when she heard that Ralph had been met halfway, but her eyes snapped when he confessed that it was Miss Van Kamp who had met him.

"I hope you are not going to carry on a flirtation with that overdressed creature," she blazed.

"Why mother," exclaimed Ralph, shocked beyond measure. "What right have you to accuse either this young lady or myself of flirting?

Flirting!"

Mrs. Ellsworth suddenly attacked the fire with quite unnecessary energy.

X

Down at the barn, the wide thres.h.i.+ng floor had been covered with gay rag-rugs, and strewn with tables, couches, and chairs in picturesque profusion. Roomy box-stalls had been carpeted deep with clean straw, curtained off with gaudy bed-quilts, and converted into cozy sleeping apartments. The mow and the stalls had been screened off with lace curtains and blazing counterpanes, and the whole effect was one of Oriental luxury and splendor. Alas, it was only an "effect"! The red-hot parlor stove smoked abominably, the pipe carried other smoke out through the hawmow window, only to let it blow back again. Chill cross-draughts whistled in from cracks too numerous to be stopped up, and the miserable Van Kamps could only cough and s.h.i.+ver, and envy the Tutts and the driver, non-combatants who had been fed two hours before.

Up in the second floor suite there was a roaring fire in the big fireplace, but there was a chill in the room that no mere fire could drive away--the chill of absolute emptiness.

A man can outlive hards.h.i.+ps that would kill a woman, but a woman can endure discomforts that would drive a man crazy.

Mr. Ellsworth went out to hunt up Uncle Billy, with an especial solace in mind. The landlord was not in the house, but the yellow gleam of a lantern revealed his presence in the woodshed, and Mr. Ellsworth stepped in upon him just as he was pouring something yellow and clear into a tumbler from a big jug that he had just taken from under the flooring.

"How much do you want for that jug and its contents?" he asked, with a sigh of grat.i.tude that this supply had been overlooked.