Outside Inn Part 11

The road-house of his choice, when they reached it, proved to have deteriorated sadly since his last visit. The cool interior that he remembered had been inopportunely opened to the hottest blast of the day's heat, and hermetically sealed again, or at least so it seemed to d.i.c.k; and the furniture was all red and thickly, almost suffocatingly, upholstered. Nancy had no comment on the torrid air of the dining-room,--she rarely complained about anything. Even the presence of a fly in her bouillon jelly scarcely disturbed her equanimity, but d.i.c.k knew that she was secretly sustained by the conviction that such an accident was impossible under her system of supervision at Outside Inn, and resented her tranquillity accordingly.

Caroline, behaving not so well, seemed to him a much more human and sympathetic figure, though her nose took on a high s.h.i.+ne unknown to Nancy's demurer and more discreetly served features; but Billy evidently preferred Nancy's deportment, which was on the surface calm and rea.s.suring.

"Nancy's a sport," he pointed out to Caroline enthusiastically, "no fly in the ointment gets her goat. She enjoys herself even when she's perfectly miserable."

"She doesn't feel the heat the way I do," Caroline snapped.

"I feel the heat," Nancy said, "but I--"

"She's got a system," d.i.c.k cut in savagely: "she stands it just as long as she can, and then she takes it out of me in some diabolical fas.h.i.+on."

Nancy's gray-blue eyes took on the far-away look that those who loved her had learned to a.s.sociate with her most baffling moments.

"Just by being especially nice to d.i.c.k," she said thoughtfully, "I can make him more furious with me than in any other way."

Nancy and Caroline finished their sloppy ices at the table together while d.i.c.k and Billy sought the solace of a pipe in the garage outside.

"I don't understand coming into Connecticut to-day," Nancy said as soon as they were alone; "it seems like such a stupid excursion for d.i.c.k to make. He's usually pretty good at picking out places to go. In fact, he has a kind of genius for it."

"He slipped up this time," Caroline said, "I'm so hot."

"So am I," said Nancy, slumping limply into the depths of her red velour chair. "I want to get back to New York. Oh! what was it you told me the other day that you had been saving up to tell me?"

Caroline brightened.

"Oh, yes! Why, it was something Collier Pratt said about you. You know Betty has sc.r.a.ped up quite an acquaintance with him. She goes and sits down at his table sometimes."

"She's going to be stopped doing _that_," Nancy said.

"Well, you remember the night when you went home early with a headache, and pa.s.sed by his table going out?"

"Yes, but I didn't know he saw me."

"He sees everything, Betty says."

"He didn't suspect me?"

"He didn't know you came out of the interior. He said to Betty, 'It's curious that Miss Martin never stays here to dine in the evening, though she so often drops in.' Betty is pretty quick, you know. She said, 'I think Miss Martin is a friend of the proprietor.'"

"So I am," said Nancy, "the best friend she's got. Go on, dear."

"Then he said slowly and thoughtfully, 'It's a crime for a woman like that not to be the mother of children. If ever I saw a maternal type, Miss Ann Martin is the apotheosis of it. Why some man hasn't made her understand that long ago I can not see.'"

Nancy's cheeks burned crimson and then white again.

"How dare Betty?" she said.

"Wait till you hear. You know Betty doesn't care what she says. Her reply to that was peculiarly Bettyish. She sighed and cast down her eyes,--the little imp! 'The course of true love never does run smooth,' she said; 'perhaps Ann has discovered the truth of that old saying in some new connection.' She didn't mean to be a cat, she was only trying to create a romantic interest in your affairs, doing as she would be done by. The effect was more than she bargained for though. Collier Pratt's eyes quite lit up. 'I can imagine no greater crime than frustrating the instincts of a woman like that,' he said.

Imagine that--the instincts--whereupon Betty, of course, flounced off and left him."

"She would," Nancy said. Then a storm of real anger surged through her. "I'll turn her out of my place to-morrow. I'll never look at her or speak to her again."

"I think it would be more to the point," Caroline said, "to turn out Collier Pratt. That was certainly an extraordinary way for him to speak of you to a girl who is a stranger to him."

"Caroline, you're almost as bad as Betty is. You're both of you hopelessly--helplessly--provincially American. I don't think that was extraordinary or impertinent even," Nancy said. "I--I understand how that man means things."

The car drove up in front of the office of the justice of the peace in the town beyond that in which they had had their unauspicious luncheon party.

"Are we stopping here for any particular reason?" Caroline said.

Nancy had not spoken in more than a monosyllable since they had resumed their places in the car again.

"Not now," d.i.c.k said wearily. "I thought I'd point out the sights of the town. This place is called the Gretna Green of America, you know.

A great many runaway couples come out here to be married. The man inside that office, the one with whiskers and no collar, is the one that marries them."

"Does he?" Billy asked a trifle uncertainly.

Nancy turned to d.i.c.k with a real appeal in her voice. It was the first time during the day that she had addressed him with anything like her natural tenderness and sweetness.

"Oh! d.i.c.k, can't we start on?" she said.

CHAPTER VIII

SCIENCE APPLIED

Gaspard was ill--very ill. He lay in the little anteroom at the top of the stairs and groaned thunderously. He had a pain in his back and a roaring in his head, and an extreme disorder in the region of his solar plexus.

"Sure an' he's no more nor less than a human earthquake," Michael reported after an examination.

Nancy applied ice caps and hot-water bags to the afflicted areas without avail. The stricken man had struggled from his bed in the Twentieth Street lodging-house that he had chosen for his habitation, and staggered through the heavy morning heat to his post in the bas.e.m.e.nt kitchen of Nancy's Inn, there to collapse ignominiously between his cooking ranges. With Molly and Dolly and Hildeguard at his feet and herself and Michael and a dishwasher at his head they had managed to get him up the two short flights of stairs. It developed that it would be necessary to remove him in an ambulance later in the day, but for the time being he lay like a contorted Colossus on the fragile-looking cot that const.i.tuted his improvised bed of pain: "Like the great grandfather," to quote Michael again, "of all of them Zeus'es and gargoyles, and other cavortin' gentlemen in the yard down-stairs."

With the luncheon menu before her, Nancy decided that the hour had come for her to prove herself. She had a.s.sumed the practical management of the business of the Inn only to have the responsibility and much of the authority of her position taken from her by the very efficiency of her staff. She was far too good a business woman not to realize that this condition was distinctly to her advantage, and to encourage it accordingly, but there was still so much of the child in her that she secretly resented every usurpation of privilege.

With Gaspard ill she was able to manipulate the affairs of the kitchen exactly as she chose, and even in the moment of applying the "hot at the base of the brain and the cold at the forehead" that the doctor had prescribed as the most effective method for relieving the pressure of blood in the tortured temples of the suffering man, she had been conscious of that thrill of triumph that most human beings feel when the involuntary removal of the man higher up invests them with power.

Michael did the marketing, and the list went through as Gaspard had planned it, with some slight adaptations to the exigency, such as the subst.i.tution of twenty-five cans of tomato soup for the fresh vegetables with which Gaspard had planned to make his tomato bisque, and brandied peaches in gla.s.s jars instead of peach souffle.

"If I allow myself a little handicap in the matter of details," she said, "I know I can put everything else through as well as Gaspard;"

whereupon she enveloped herself in a huge linen ap.r.o.n, tucked her hair into one of the chef's white caps, and attacked the problem of preparing luncheon for from sixty-five to two hundred people, who were scheduled to appear at uncertain intervals between the hours of twelve and two-thirty. Later she must be ready to serve tea and ices to a problematical number of patrons, but she tried not to think beyond the immediate task.

She could make a very good tomato bisque by adding one cup of milk and a dash of cream to one half-pint can of MacDonald's tomato soup, enough to serve three people adequately, and she proceeded to multiply that recipe by twenty-five. She didn't think of getting large cans till Michael in the process of opening the half-pint tins made the belated suggestion, which she greeted with some hauteur.