Ma Pettengill Part 7

It was when we got up to go that Vernabelle told me things about Cousin Egbert. She said he must have great reserve strength in his personality.

She said he fairly frightened her, he was so superbly elemental.

"It is not so much Mr. Floud that frightens me," says she, "as the inevitability of him--just beautifully that! And such sang fraw!"

Poor Egbert was where he had to overhear this, and I had never seen him less sang fraw--if that's the word. He looked more like a case of nettle rash, especially when Vernabelle gripped his hand at parting and called him comrade!

We finally groped our way through the smoke of the door and said what a lovely time we'd had, and Metta said we must make a practice of dropping in at this hour. Vernabelle called us all comrade and said the time had been by way of being a series of precious moments to her, even if these little studio affairs did always leave poor her like a limp lily. Yep; that's the term she used and she was draped down a bookcase when she said it, trying to look as near as possible like a limp lily.

The awestruck group split up outside. Nothing like this had ever entered our dull lives, and it was too soon to talk about it. Cousin Egbert walked downtown with me and even he said only a few little things. He still called the lady a gla.s.s blower, and said if she must paint at all why not paint family pictures that could be hung in the home. He said, what with every barroom in the state closed, there couldn't be much demand for them Grinitch paintings. He also said, after another block, that if he owned this lady and wanted to get her in shape to sell he'd put her out on short sand gra.s.s, short almost to the roots, where she'd wear her teeth down. And a block later he said she hadn't ought to be calling everyone comrade that way--it sounded too much like a German.

Still and all, he said, there was something about her. He didn't say what.

So now the Latin Quarter had begun, and in no time at all it was going strong. It seemed like everybody had long been wanting to get away from it all but hadn't known how. They gathered daily in Metta's studio, the women setting round in smocks, they all took to wearing smocks, of course, while hungry-eyed Vernabelle got the men to tell her all about themselves, and said wasn't it precious that a few choice spirits could thus meet in the little half-lighted hour, away from it all, and be by way of forgetting that outer world where human souls are bartered in the market place.

Of course the elderberry wine was by way of giving plumb out after the second half-lighted hour, but others come forward with cherished offerings. Mrs. Dr. Percy Hailey Martingale brought round some currant wine that had been laid down in her cellar over a year ago, and Beryl Mae Macomber pilfered a quart of homemade cherry brandy that her aunt had been saving against sickness, and even Mrs. Judge Ballard kicked in with some blackberry cordial made from her own berries, though originally meant for medicine.

Lon Price was a feverish Bohemian from the start, dropping in almost every day to tell Vernabelle all about himself and get out of convention's sh.e.l.l into the raw throb of life, as it was now being called. Lon always was kind of light-minded, even after the state went dry. He told Vernabelle he had a treasured keepsake hid away which he would sacrifice to Bohemia at the last moment, consisting of one quart bottle of prime old rye. And he was going to make over to her a choice building lot in Price's Addition, right near the proposed site of the Carnegie library, if Vernabelle would put up something snappy on it in the way of a Latin Quarter bungalow.

Lon also added Jeff Tuttle to the Bohemians the day that old horned toad got down from his ranch. After going once Jeff said darned if he hadn't been a Bohemian all his life and never knew what was the matter with him.

Vernabelle had him telling her all about himself instantly. She said he was such a colourful bit, so virile and red-blooded, and she just knew that when he was in his untamed wilderness he put vine leaves in his hair and went beautifully barefoot. She said it wasn't so much him as the inevitability of him. She'd said this about Cousin Egbert, too, but she was now saying of this old silly that he had a nameless pathos that cut to her artist's heart. It seems Cousin Egbert had gone round a couple times more looking for gla.s.s blowing and getting disappointed.

And there was new Bohemians every day. Otto Gashwiler, that keeps books for the canning factory, and Hugo Jennings, night clerk of the Occidental Hotel, was now prominent lights of the good old Latin Quarter pa.s.sing their spare moments there where they could get away from it all, instead of shaking dice at the Owl cigar store, like they used to. And Oswald c.u.mmings of the Elite Bootery, was another. Oswald is a big fair-haired lummox that sings tenor in the Presbyterian choir and has the young men's Bible cla.s.s in the Sabbath School. Vernabelle lost no time in telling him that he was oh, so frankly a pagan creature, born for splendid sins; and Otto seemed to believe it for a couple of weeks, going round absent like as if trying to think up some sins that would be splendid, though if any one but a Bohemian had told him this he'd have blushed himself to death. It shows you what a hold Vernabelle was by way of getting on Red Gap.

It was sure one season of triumph for Metta Bigler, who lurked proudly in the background as manager. Metta's mother wasn't near so thrilled as Metta, though. She confided to me that Bohemians was a messy lot to clean up after, raining cigarette ashes over everything; and also it was pretty hard to have raised a child to Metta's age only to see her become a cigarette fiend overnight, and having these mad revels with currant wine and other intoxicants--and Metta was even using a lip stick!

And Metta's mother wasn't the only one in town looking sidewise at these Bohemian doings. There was them that held aloof from the beginning and would give their bitter reasons at every opportunity. These was the ultra-conservative element of the North Side set, and what they said about the new Latin Quarter was a plenty. They said it was mostly an excuse for drunken orgies in which all sense of decency was cast aside, to say nothing of cigarettes being brazenly smoked by so-called ladies.

They said this here talk about getting away from it all meant the ruin of the home upon which all durable civilization must be built; and as for wives and mothers going round without their stockings look at what befell proud Rome! And it was time something was done to stem this tide of corruption.

Mrs. Cora Wales and Mrs. Tracy Bangs, president and vice-president of our anti-tobacco league, was the leaders of this movement and sent in a long complaint to the chamber of commerce urging instant action or a foul blot would be splashed on the fair name of our city, to say nothing of homes being broken up. They was ably backed up in this move by a committee from the civic purity league.

And of course this added to the attractions of the Latin Quarter, giving each Bohemian a new thrill. Vernabelle said it was by way of being ancient history; that from time immemorial these little groups of choice spirits who did things had been scorned and persecuted, but that every true Bohemian would give a light laugh and pursue his carefree way, regardless of the Philistine And so it went, venomous on both sides, but with Vernabelle holding the bridge. She'd brought new stuff to town and had a good working majority in favour of it.

Downtown one day I met Metta in the Red Front grocery buying olives and sardines in an excited way. I suppose it's for one of her unspeakable orgies, but she tells me it's something special and I must be sure to come.

"Dear Vernabelle," she says, "has consented to give an evening cycle of dance portrayals for just a few of the choicer spirits. I know there has been dreadful talk about our little group, but this will be a stunning bit and you are broad-minded, so do come."

I could just see Vernabelle consenting, almost peevishly; but it sounded like it might be disorderly enough, so I says I'll come if she promises to leave at least one window down at the top, me not having a gas mask.

Metta thinks a minute, then says she guesses she can leave one window down a mite; not much, on account of the nature of Vernabelle's dance costume. I says if such is to be the nature of her costume I'll come anyway and risk being ga.s.sed. Metta chides me gravely. She says the costume is perfectly proper to the artist eye, being a darling little early Greek thing; built on simple lines that follow the figure, it is true, yet suggest rather than reveal, and if the early Greeks saw no harm in it why should we? I tell her to say no more, but reserve me a ringside seat, though near a window if one can be opened; say, as far as the early Greeks would have done at such a time, on account of the punk sticks.

And of course I wouldn't miss it. I'm there at eight-thirty and find quite a bunch of Latin Quarter denizens already gathered and full of suppressed emotion. The punk sticks, of course, are going strong.

Vernabelle in a pink kimono says they supply atmosphere; which is the only joke I ever heard her get off, if she knew it was one. Bohemians Lon Price and Jeff Tuttle are hanging over the punch bowl, into which something illegal has been poured. Jeff is calling Vernabelle little woman and telling her if worse comes to worst they might try being Bohemians on a mixture his men up on the ranch thought of for a New Year's celebration. He says they took a whole case of vanilla extract and mixed it with one dozen cans of condensed milk, the vanilla having a surprising kick in it and making 'em all feel like the good old days next morning.

Vernabelle says he reminds her of some untamed creature of the open, some woodsy monster of the dells, and Jeff says that's just what he feels like. He's going on to tell her some more about what he feels like, but Vernabelle is now greeting Oswald c.u.mmings, the pagan of splendid sins, from the Elite Bootery. She tells Oswald there is a cold cruelty in the lines of his face that reminds her of the emperor Nero.

Finally about twenty choice spirits who did things was gathered for this half-lighted hour, so everybody set down on chairs and the couch and the floor, leaving a clear s.p.a.ce for Vernabelle; and Professor Gluckstein, our music teacher, puts down his meerschaum pipe and goes to the piano and plays a soft piece. The prof is a German, but not a pro-German, and plays first rate in the old-fas.h.i.+oned way, with his hands. Then, when all the comrades get settled and their cigarettes lighted, the prof drifted into something quite mournful and Vernabelle appeared from behind a screen without her kimono.

The early Greeks must of been strong on art jewellery. Vernabelle clanked at every step with bracelets and anklets and necklaces. She had a priceless ruby weighing half a pound fastened to the middle of her bony forehead. Her costume was spangled, but not many spangles had been needed. The early Greeks couldn't of been a dressy lot. If Vernabelle had been my daughter I could of give her what she deserved with almost no trouble. The costume, as Metta had said, not only followed the lines of the figure, so far as it went anywhere at all, but it suggested and almost revealed that Vernabelle had been badly a.s.sembled. The Bohemians kind of gasped and s.h.i.+vered, all except Jeff Tuttle, who applauded loudly. They seemed to feel that Vernabelle was indeed getting away from it all.

Then came this here cycle-of-dance portrayals. The first one wasn't much dance; it was mostly slow, snaky motions with the arms and other things, and it was to portray a mother cobra mourning her first-born. At least that's the way I understood it. Another one was called "The Striving Soul," to which the prof played something livelier. Vernabelle went round and round, lifting her feet high. It looked to me like she was climbing a spiral staircase that wasn't there. Then she was a hunted fawn in a dark forest and was finally shot through the heart by a cruel hunter--who was probably nearsighted. And in the last one she was a Russian peasant that has got stewed on vodka at the Russian county fair. This was the best one. You couldn't see her so well when she moved quick.

Of course there was hearty applause when it was all over, and pretty soon Vernabelle come out again in her kimono. Panting like a tuckered hound she was when the comrades gathered to tell her how wonderful she had been.

"That music tears me," says Vernabelle, putting her hands to her chest to show where it tore. "That last maddening Russian bit--it leaves me like a limp lily!" So she was led to the punch bowl by Comrades Price and Tuttle, with the others pus.h.i.+ng after and lighting cigarettes for her.

It was agreed that the evening had been a triumph for Vernabelle's art.

Almost every Bohemian present, it seemed, had either been tore or maddened by that last Russian bit.

Vernabelle was soon saying that if she had one message for us it was the sacred message of beauty. Jeff Tuttle says, "You've certainly delivered it, little woman!" Vernabelle says, oh, perhaps, in her poor, weak way--she was being a limp lily against the piano then--but art is a terrible master to serve, demanding one's all. Comrade Price says what more could she give than she has to-night. And then, first thing I know, they're all talking about an intimate theatre.

This was another part of Vernabelle's message. It seems intimate theatres is all the rage in New York, and the Bigler barn is just the place to have one in. Vernabelle says they will use the big part where the hay used to be and paint their own scenery and act their own plays and thus find a splendid means of self-expression the way people of the real sort are doing in large cities.

Everyone is wild about this in a minute, and says how quaint and jolly Bohemian it will be. The Bigler barn is just the place, with no horse there since Metta bought one of the best-selling cars that ever came out of Michigan, and Vernabelle says she has written a couple of stunning little one-act pieces, too powerful for the big theatres because they go right to the throbbing raw of life, and it will be an inspiration and uplift to the community, of which all present can be proud. Lon Price says he will furnish a good drop curtain free, painted with a choice nine-room villa with just a line mentioning Price's Addition to Red Gap, Big Lots, Little Payments. And he's quite hurt when Vernabelle tells him no, that they must keep entirely out of the slime of commercialism. I don't think Lon ever again felt the same toward Vernabelle--calling his business slime, that way.

However, the party broke up full of plans for the new intimate theatre, leaving an empty punch bowl and a million cigarette ends.

And right here was where the Philistine opposition braided feathers in its hair and done a war dance. Members of the little group that did things spoke freely the next day of Vernabelle's art in the dance and her early Greek costume, taking a mean enjoyment in the horror they inspired among pillars of the church and the civic purity league. It is probable that in their artistic relish they endowed Vernabelle with even fewer clothes than she had wore. At any rate, they left a whole lot to be inferred, and it promptly was inferred.

The opposition now said this was no job for a chamber of commerce; it had become a simple matter for the police. The civic purity league had a special meeting at which the rind was peeled off Vernabelle's moral character, and the following Sabbath one of the ministers gave a hot sermon in which the fate of Babylon and a few other undesirable residence centres mentioned in the Bible was pointed out. He said that so-called Bohemia was the gateway to h.e.l.l. He never minced his words, not once.

And the Latin Quarter come in for some more shock a.s.saults when the talk about an intimate theatre in the Bigler barn got out. The regular theatre was bad enough, said the civic purity league; in fact, they had started a campaign against that the month before, right after a one-night engagement of the Jolly Paris Divorcees Burlesque Company, which, I gathered, had not upheld the very highest standards of dramatic art.

And if the town was going to stand for anything more intimate than this show had provided, why, it was time for drastic action if any wholesome family life was to be saved from the wreck.

Feeling ran high, I want to tell you, and a few of the younger set fell out of the ranks of good old Bohemia--or was yanked out. Luella Stultz's father, who is old-fas.h.i.+oned, it was said, had give Luella a good licking for smoking cigarettes, and old Jesse Himebaugh had threatened his daughter Gussie with the reform school if she didn't stop trying to get away from it all. Even Beryl Mae's aunt put her foot down. Beryl Mae met me in the post office one day and says auntie won't let her be a Bohemian any more, having threatened to take her new ukulele away from her if she goes to that Latin Quarter another single time; and poor Beryl Mae having hoped to do a Hawaiian dance in native costume for the intimate theatre, where it wouldn't be misunderstood!

Things was just in this shape, with bitterness on every side and old friends not speaking, and the opposition pa.s.sing the Bohemians on the street with the frown of moral disgust, and no one knowing how it would all end, when I hear that Cora Wales has a niece coming from New York to visit her--a Miss Smith. I says to myself, "My lands! Here's another Miss Smith from New York when it looks to me like the one we got is giving us a plenty of the big league stuff." But I meet Cora Wales and learn that this one's first name is Dulcie, which again seemed to make a difference.

Cora says this Dulcie niece is one of New York's society leaders and she's sorry she invited her, because what kind of a town is it in which to introduce a pure young girl that never smoked or drank in her life and whose people belong to one of the very most exclusive churches in the city. She had hoped to give Dulcie a good time, but how can she sully herself with any of our young people that have took up Bohemianism? She being fresh from her social triumphs in New York, where her folks live in one of the very most fas.h.i.+onable apartment houses on Columbus Avenue, right in the centre of things and next to the elevated railway, will be horrified at coming to a town where society seems to be mostly a little group of people who do things they hadn't ought to.

Dulcie is a dear girl and very refined, everything she wears being hand embroidered, and it would of been a good chance for Red Gap to get acquainted with a young society girl of the right sort, but with this scandal tearing up the town it looks like the visit will be a failure for all parties.

I tell Cora on the contrary it looks like a good chance to recall the town to its better self. If this here Dulcie is all that is claimed for her she can very probably demolish the Latin Quarter and have us all leading correct society lives in no time, because the public is fickle and ever ready for new stuff, and as a matter of fact I suspect the Latin Quarter is in a bad way because of everything in town of an illegal character having been drunk up by the comrades. Me? I was trying to get some new life into the fight, understand, being afraid it would die natural and leave us to a dull winter.

Cora's eyes lighted up with a great hope and she beat it off to the Recorder office to have a piece put in the paper about Dulcie's coming.

It was a grand piece, what with Cora giving the points and Edgar Tomlinson writing it. It said one of Gotham's fair daughters would winter in our midst, and how she was a prominent society leader and an ornament of the fast hunting set, noted for her wit and beauty and dazzling costumes, and how a series of brilliant affairs was being planned in her honour by her hostess and aunt, Mrs. Leonard Wales, Red Gap's prominent society matron and representative of all that was best in our community, who would entertain extensively at her new and attractive home in Price's Addition. And so forth.

I'm bound to say it created a flurry of interest among the younger dancing set, and more than one begun to consider whether they would remain loyal to Bohemia or plunge back into society once more, where stockings are commonly wore, and smoking if done at all is hurriedly sneaked through out on the porch or up in the bathroom.

From Cora's description I was all prepared to find Dulcie a tall, stately creature of twenty-eight, kind of blase and haggard from her wearing social duties in New York. But not so. Not so at all. Cora had invitations out for a tea the day after Dulcie come; invitations, that is, to the non-Bohemians and such as had reformed or give good signs of it. I don't know which head I got in under. And this Dulcie niece was nothing but a short, fat, blond kid of seventeen or eighteen that had never led any society whatever. You could tell that right quick.

She was rapidly eating cream-cheese sandwiches when I was presented to her. I knew in one look that society had never bothered Dulcie any.

Victuals was her curse. In the cattle business it ain't riding disrespectful horses that gets you the big money; it's being able to guess weights. And if Dulcie pulled a pound less than one hundred and eighty then all my years of training has gone for naught. She was certainly big-framed stock and going into the winter strong. Between bites of sandwich, with a marshmallow now and then, she was saying that she was simply crazy about the war, having the dandiest young French soldier for a G.o.dson and sending him packages of food and cigarettes constantly, and all the girls of her set had one, and wasn't it the darlingest idea.

And her soldier was only twenty-two, though his beard made him look more mature, and he wrote such dandy letters, but she didn't suppose there would ever be anything between them because papa was too busy with his coal yard to take her over there.

As the girl chattered on it didn't seem to me that our Latin Quarter was in the slightest danger from her. Still, some of the girls that was there seemed quite impressed or buffaloed by her manner. One idea she give out now was new in Red Gap. She had all her rings named after meals. She had a breakfast ring and a dinner ring and a supper ring and a banquet ring, and Daisy Estelle Maybury admired the necklace she had on, and Dulcie said that was a mere travelling necklace; and how did they like this cute little restaurant frock she was wearing? A little dressmaker over on Amsterdam Avenue had turned it out. All the parties she dealt with, apparently, was little. She had a little dressmaker and a little hair woman and a little manicure and a little florist, and so forth. She'd et five cream-cheese sandwiches by this time, in spite of its being quite painful for her to pick up a dropped napkin. Dulcie didn't fold over good. You could tell here was a girl that had never tried to get away from it all. She wanted to be right where it was.

Pretty soon one of the girls said something about the Bohemians of the Latin Quarter, probably aiming to show this New York chatterbox that Red Gap wasn't so far west as it looked. But Dulcie gave 'em the laugh. She said oh, dear, New York society had simply quit taking up Bohemians, it not being considered smart any longer, and did we really take them up here? The girls backed up at this. And Dulcie went on being superior. She said of course society people now and then made up a party and went down to Was.h.i.+ngton Square to look them over, but as for taking them up, oh, dear, no! It was more like a slumming party. One could stare at them, but one simply didn't know them.

And perhaps, if she could get Aunt Cora to chaperon them, they might make up one of these slumming parties some evening and go down to Red Gap's Latin Quarter; it might be amusing. Cora Wales glistened at this. She said she guessed people could now see how such goings-on were regarded by society in the true sense of the word. And it did give the girls a chill, calling the Bigler home a slum. But I still didn't see any stuff in Dulcie to vanquish Vernabelle.