In a Little Town Part 36

"Ah, wake up, pop!" said Horace. "It's a sensation here, too."

"In Carthage? They're dancing the tango in our home town?"

"Surest thing you know, pop. The whole burg's goin' bug over it."

"How is it done? What is it like?"

"Something like this," said Horace, and, rising, he indulged in the prehistoric turkey-trot of a year ago, with burlesque hip-snaps and poultry-yard sc.r.a.pings of the foot.

"Stop it!" papa thundered. "It's loathsome! Do you mean to tell me that my daughter does that sort of thing?"

"Sure! She's a wonder at it."

"What scoundrel taught my poor child such--such--Who taught her, I say?"

"Gos.h.!.+" sniffed Horace, "sis don't need teachin'. She's teachin' the rest of 'em. They're crazy about her."

"Teaching others! My g-g-goodness! Where did she learn?"

"Chicago, I guess."

"Oh, the wickedness of these cities and the foreigners that are dragging our American homes down to their own level!"

"I guess the foreigners got nothin' on us," said Horace. "It's a Namerican dance."

"What are we coming to? Go tell Prue to come here at once. I'll put a stop to that right here and now."

Serina gave him one searing glance, and he understood that he could not deliver his edict to Prue yet awhile. He heard her singing even more barbaric strains. The chandelier danced with a peculiar savagery, then the dance was evidently quenched and subdued. Awestruck yowls from above indicated that Prue was in hot water.

"This is the last straw!" groaned papa, with all the wretchedness of a father learning that his daughter was gone to the bad.

IV

Prue did not appear below-stairs for so long that her father had lost his magnificent running start by the time she sauntered in all sleek and s.h.i.+ny and asked for her food. She brought a radiant grace into the dull gray room; and Serina whispered to Will to let her have her breakfast first.

She and Ollie waited on Prue, while the father paced the floor, stealing sidelong glances at her, and wondering if it were possible that so sweet a thing should be as vicious as she would have to be to tango.

When she had scoured her plate and licked her spoon with a child-like charm her father began to crank up his throat for a tirade. He began with the reluctant horror of a young attorney cross-examining his first murderer:

"Prue--I want to--to--er--Prue, do you--did you--ever--This--er--this tango business--Prue--have you--do you--er--What do you know about it?"

"Well, of course, papa, they change it so fast on you it's hard to keep up with it, but I was about three days ahead of Chicago when I left there. I met with a man who had just stepped off the twenty-hour train and I learned all he knew before I turned him loose."

In a strangled tone the father croaked, "You dance it, then?"

"You bet! Papa, stand up and I'll show you the very newest roll. It's a peach. Put your weight on your right leg. Say, it's a shame we haven't a phonograph! Don't you suppose you could afford a little one? I could have you all in fine form in no time. And it would be so good for mamma."

Papa fell back into a chair with just strength enough to murmur, "I want you to promise me never to dance it again."

"Don't be foolish, you dear old b.u.mp-on-a-log!"

"I forbid you to dance it ever again."

She laughed uproariously: "Listen at the old Skeezicks! Get up here and I'll show you the cutest dip."

When at last he grew angry, and made her realize it, she flared into a tumult of mutiny that drove him out into the rain. He spent the day looking for a job without finding one. Horace came home wet and discouraged with the same news. Ollie, the treasure, however, announced that she had obtained a splendid position as typist in Judge Hippisley's office, at a salary of thirty dollars a month.

William was overjoyed, but Serina protested bitterly. She and Mrs. Judge Hippisley had been bitter social rivals for twenty years. They had fought each other with teas and euchre parties and receptions from young wifehood to middle-aged portliness. And now her daughter was to work in that hateful Anastasia Hippisley's old fool of a husband's office? Well, hardly!

"It's better than starving," said Ollie, and for once would not be coerced, though even her disobedience was on the ground of service.

After she had cleared the table and washed the dishes she set out for her room, lugging a typewriter she had borrowed to brush up her speed on.

Prue had begged off from even wiping the dishes, because she had to dress. As Ollie started up-stairs to her task she was brought back by the door-bell. She ushered young Orton Hippisley into the parlor. He had come to take Prue to a dance.

When papa heard this mamma had to hold her hand over his mouth to keep him from making a scene. He was for kicking young Hippisley out of the house.

"And lose me my job?" gasped Ollie.

The overpowered parent whispered his determination to go up-stairs and forbid Prue to leave. He went up-stairs and forbade her, but she went right on binding her hair with Ollie's best ribbon. In the midst of her father's peroration she kissed him good-by and danced down-stairs in Ollie's new slippers. Her own had been trotted into shreds.

Papa sat fuming all evening. He would not go to bed till Prue came home to the ultimatum he was preparing for her. From above came the tick-tock-tock of Ollie's typewriter. It got on his nerves, like rain on a tin roof.

"To think of it--Ollie up-stairs working her fingers to the bone to help us out, and Prue dancing her feet off disgracing us! To think that one of our daughters should be so good and one so bad!"

"I can't believe that our little Prue is really bad," Serina sighed.

"Yet girls do go wrong, don't they?" her husband groaned. "This morning's paper prints a sermon about the tango. Reverend Doctor What's-his-name, the famous New York newspaper preacher, tears the whole tango crowd to pieces. He points out that the tango is the cause of the present-day wickedness, the ruin of the home!"

Serina was dismal and terrified, but from force of habit she took the opposite side.

"Oh, they were complaining of divorces long before the tango was ever heard of. That same preacher used to blame them on the bicycle, then on the automobile and the movies. And now it's the tango. It'll be flying-machines next."

Papa was used to fighting with mamma, and he roared with fine leoninity: "Are you defending your daughter's shamelessness? Do you approve of the tango?"

"I've never seen it."

"Then it must be just because you always encourage your children to flout my authority. I never could keep any discipline because you always fought for them, encouraged them to disobey their father, to--to--to--"

She chanted her responses according to the familiar family antipathy antiphony. They talked themselves out eventually; but Prue was not home.

Ollie gradually typewrote herself to sleep and Prue was not home. Horace came in from the Y. M. C. A. bowling-alley and went to bed, and Prue was not home.

The old heads nodded. The sentinels slept. At some dimly distant time papa woke with a start and inquired, "Huh?"

Mamma jumped and gasped, "Who?"

They were s.h.i.+vering with the after-midnight chill of the cold room, and Prue was not home. Papa snapped his watch open and snapped it shut; and the same to his jaw: