The big town - Lady Perkins - (1)

Along the first week in May they was a couple hot days, and Katie can’t stand the heat. Or the cold, or the medium. Anyway, when it’s hot she always says: “I’m simply stifling.” And when it’s cold: “I’m simply frozen.” And when it ain’t neither one: “I wished the weather would do one thing another.” I don’t s’pose she knows what she’s saying when she says any one of them things, but she’s one of these here gals that can’t bear to see a conversation die out and thinks it’s her place to come through with a wise crack whenever they’s a vacuum.
    So during this hot spell we was having dinner with a bird named Gene Buck that knowed New York like a book, only he hadn’t never read a book, and Katie made the remark that she was simply stifling.
    “If you think this is hot,” says our friend, “just wait till the summer comes. The Old Town certainly steams up in the Old Summer Time.”
    So Kate asked him how people could stand it.
    “They don’t,” he says. “All the ones that’s got a piece of change ducks out somewheres where they can get the air.”
    “Where do they go?” Katie asked him.
    “Well,” he says, “the most of my pals goes to Newport or Maine or up in the Adirondacks. But of course them places is out of most people’s reach. If I was you folks I’d go over on Long Island somewheres and either take a cottage or live in one of them good hotels.”
    “Where, for instance?” says my Mrs.
    “Well,” he said, “some people takes cottages, but the rents is something fierce, and besides, the desirable ones is probably all eat up by this time. But they’s plenty good hotels where you get good service and swell meals and meet good people; they won’t take in no riffraff. And they give you a pretty fair rate if they know you’re going to make a stay.”
    So Ella asked him if they was any special one he could recommend.
    “Let’s think a minute,” he says.
    “Let’s not strain ourself,” I said.
    “Don’t get cute!” said the Mrs. “We want to get some real information and Mr. Buck can give it to us.”
    “How much would you be willing to pay?” said Buck.
    It was Ella’s turn to make a wise crack.
    “Not no more than we have to,” she says.
    “I and my sister has got about eight thousand dollars per annum between us,” said Katie, “though a thousand of it has got to go this year to a man that cheated us up on Riverside Drive.
    “It was about a lease. But papa left us pretty well off; over a hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”
    “Don’t be so secret with Mr. Buck,” I says. “We’ve knew him pretty near a week now. Tell him about them four-dollar stockings you bought over on Fifth Avenue and the first time you put them on they got as many runs as George Sisler.”
    “Well,” said Buck, “I don’t think you’d have no trouble getting comfortable rooms in a good hotel on seven thousand dollars. If I was you I’d try the Hotel Decker. It’s owned by a man named Decker.”
    “Why don’t he call it the Griffith?” I says.
    “It’s located at Tracy Estates,” says Buck. “That’s one of the garden spots of Long Island. It’s a great big place, right up to the minute, and they give you everything the best. And they’s three good golf courses within a mile of the hotel.”
    The gals told him they didn’t play no golf.
    “You don’t know what you’ve missed,” he says.
    “Well,” I said, “I played a game once myself and missed a whole lot.”
    “Do they have dances?” asked Kate.
    “Plenty of them,” says Buck, “and the guests is the nicest people you’d want to meet. Besides all that, the meals is included in the rates, and they certainly set a nasty table.”
    “I think it sounds grand,” said the Mrs. “How do you get there?”
    “Go over to the Pennsylvania Station,” says Buck, “and take the Long Island Railroad to Jamaica. Then you change to the Haverton branch. It don’t only take a half hour altogether.”
    “Let’s go over to-morrow morning and see can we get rooms,” said Katie.
    So Ella asked how that suited me.
    “Go just as early as you want to,” I says. “I got a date to run down to the Aquarium and see the rest of the fish.”
    “You won’t make no mistake stopping at the Decker,” says Buck.
    So the gals thanked him and I paid the check so as he would have more to spend when he joined his pals up to Newport.
    Well, when Ella and Kate come back the next afternoon, I could see without them telling me that it was all settled. They was both grinning like they always do when they’ve pulled something nutty.
    “It’s a good thing we met Mr. Buck,” said the Mrs., “or we mightn’t never of heard of this place. It’s simply wonderful. A double room with a bath for you and I and a room with a bath for Katie. The meals is throwed in, and we can have it all summer.”
    “How much?” I asked her.
    “Two hundred a week,” she said. “But you must remember that’s for all three of us and we get our meals free.”
    “And I s’pose they also furnish knobs for the bedroom doors,” says I.
    “We was awful lucky,” said the wife. “These was the last two rooms they had, and they wouldn’t of had those only the lady that had engaged them canceled her reservation.”
    “I wished I’d met her when I was single,” I says.
    “So do I,” says Ella.
    “But listen,” I said. “Do you know what two hundred a week amounts to? It amounts to over ten thousand a year, and our income is seven thousand.”
    “Yes,” says Katie, “but we aren’t only going to be there twenty weeks, and that’s only four thousand.”
    “Yes,” I said, “and that leaves us three thousand for the other thirty-two weeks, to pay for board and room and clothes and show tickets and a permanent wave every other day.”
    “You forget,” said Kate, “that we still got our principal, which we can spend some of it and not miss it.”
    “And you also forget,” said the Mrs., “that the money belongs to Sis and I, not you.”
    “I’ve got a sweet chance of forgetting that,” I said. “It’s hammered into me three times a day. I hear about it pretty near as often as I hear that one of you’s lost their new silk bag.”
    “Well, anyway,” says Ella, “it’s all fixed up and we move out there early to-morrow morning, so you’ll have to do your packing to-night.”
    I’m not liable to celebrate the anniversary of the next day’s trip. Besides the trunks, the gals had a suitcase and a grip apiece and I had a suitcase. So that give me five pieces of baggage to wrestle, because of course the gals had to carry their parasol in one hand and their wrist watch in the other. A redcap helped load us on over to the station, but oh you change at Jamaica! And when we got to Tracy Estates we seen that the hotel wasn’t only a couple of blocks away, so the ladies said we might as well walk and save taxi fare.
    I don’t know how I covered them two blocks, but I do know that when I reeled into the Decker my hands and arms was paralyzed and Ella had to do the registering.
    Was you ever out there? Well, I s’pose it’s what you might call a family hotel, and a good many of the guests belongs to the cay-nine family. A few of the couples that can’t afford dogs has got children, and you’re always tripping over one or the other. They’s a dining room for the grown-ups and another for the kids, wile the dogs and their nurses eats in the grillroom à la carte. One part of the joint is bachelor quarters. It’s located right next to the dogs’ dormitories, and they’s a good deal of rivalry between the dogs and the souses to see who can make the most noise nights. They’s also a ballroom and a couple card rooms and a kind of a summer parlor where the folks sets round in the evening and listen to a three-piece orchestra that don’t know they’s been any music wrote since Poets and Peasants. The men get up about eight o’clock and go down to New York to Business. They don’t never go to work. About nine the women begins limping downstairs and either goes to call on their dogs or take them for a walk in the front yard. This is a great big yard with a whole lot of benches strewed round it, but you can’t set on them in the daytime because the women or the nurses uses them for a place to read to the dogs or kids, and in the evenings you would have to share them with the waitresses, which you have already had enough of them during the day.
    When the women has prepared themselves for the long day’s grind with a four-course breakfast, they set round on the front porch and discuss the big questions of the hour, like for instance the last trunk murder or whether an Airedale is more loving than a Golden Bantam. Once in a wile one of them cracks that it looks like they was bound to be a panic pretty soon and a big drop in prices, and so forth. This shows they’re broad-minded and are giving a good deal of thought to up-to-date topics. Every so often one of them’ll say: “The present situation can’t keep up.” The hell it can’t!
    By one o’clock their appetites is whetted so keen from brain exercise that they make a bum out of a plate of soup and an order of Long Island duckling, which they figure is caught fresh every day, and they wind up with salad and apple pie à la mode and a stein of coffee. Then they totter up to their rooms to sleep it off before Dear gets home from Business.
    Saturday nights everybody puts on their evening clothes like something was going to happen. But it don’t. Sunday mornings the husbands and bachelors gets up earlier than usual to go to their real business, which is golf. The women-folks are in full possession of the hotel till Sunday night supper and wives and husbands don’t see one another all day long, but it don’t seem as long as if they did. Most of them’s approaching their golden-wedding jubilee and haven’t nothing more to say to each other that you could call a novelty. The husband may make the remark, Sunday night, that he would of broke one hundred and twenty in the afternoon round if the caddy hadn’t of handed him a spoon when he asked for a nut pick, and the wife’ll probably reply that she’s got to go in Town some day soon and see a chiropodist. The rest of the Sabbath evening is spent in bridge or listening to the latest song hit from The Bohemian Girl.
    The hotel’s got all the modern conveniences like artificial light and a stopper in the bathtubs. They even got a barber and a valet, but you can’t get a shave wile he’s pressing your clothes, so it’s pretty near impossible for a man to look their best at the same time.
    Well, the second day we was there I bought me a deck of cards and got so good at solitary that pretty soon I could play fifty games between breakfast and lunch and a hundred from then till suppertime. During the first week Ella and Kate got on friendly terms with over a half dozen people--the head waiter, our waitress, some of the clerks and the manager and the two telephone gals. It wasn’t from lack of trying that they didn’t meet even more people. Every day one or the other of them would try and swap a little small talk with one of the other squatters, but it generally always wound up as a short monologue.
    Ella said to me one day, she says: “I don’t know if we can stick it out here or not. Every hotel I was ever at before, it was easy enough to make a lot of friends, but you could stick a bottle of cream alongside one of these people and it’d stay sweet a week. Unless they looked at it. I’m sick of talking to you and Sis and the hired help, and Kate’s so lonesome that she cries herself to sleep nights.”
    Well, if I’d of only had sense enough to insist on staying we’d of probably packed up and took the next train to Town. But instead of that I said: “What’s to prevent us from going back to New York?”
    “Don’t be silly!” says the Mrs. “We come out here to spend the summer and here is where we’re going to spend the summer.”
    “All right,” I says, “and by September I’ll be all set to write a book on one-handed card games.”
    “You’d think,” says Ella, “that some of these women was titled royalties the way they snap at you when you try and be friends with them. But they’s only one in the bunch that’s got any handle to her name; that’s Lady Perkins.”
    I asked her which one was that.
    “You know,” says Ella. “I pointed her out to you in the dining room. She’s a nice-looking woman, about thirty-five, that sets near our table and walks with a cane.”
    “If she eats like some of the rest of them,” I says, “she’s lucky they don’t have to w’eel her.”
    “She’s English,” says Ella. “They just come over and her husband’s in Texas on some business and left her here. She’s the one that’s got that dog.”
    “That dog!” I said. “You might just as well tell me she’s the one that don’t play the mouth organ. They’ve all got a dog.”
    “She’s got two,” said the wife. “But the one I meant is that big German police dog that I’m scared to death of him. Haven’t you saw her out walking with him and the little chow?”
    “Yes,” I said, “if that’s what it is. I always wondered what the boys in the Army was talking about when they said they eat chow.”
    “They probably meant chowchow,” says the Mrs. “They wouldn’t of had these kind of chows, because in the first place, who would eat a dog, and besides these kind costs too much.”
    “Well,” I says, “I’m not interested in the price of chows, but if you want to get acquainted with Lady Perkins, why I can probably fix it for you.”
    “Yes, you’ll fix it!” said Ella. “I’m begining to think that if we’d of put you in storage for the summer the folks round here wouldn’t shy away from us like we was leopards that had broke out of a pesthouse. I wished you would try and dress up once in a wile and not always look like you was just going to do the chores. Then maybe I and Sis might get somewheres.”
    Well, of course when I told her I could probably fix it up with Lady Perkins, I didn’t mean nothing. But it wasn’t only the next morning when I started making good. I was up and dressed and downstairs about half past eight, and as the gals wasn’t ready for their breakfast yet I went out on the porch and set down. They wasn’t nobody else there, but pretty soon I seen Lady Perkins come up the path with her two whelps. When she got to the porch steps their nurse popped out of the servants’ quarters and took them round to the grillroom for their breakfast. I s’pose the big one ordered sauerkraut and kalter Aufschnitt, wile the chow had tea and eggs fo yung. Anyway, the Perkins dame come up on the porch and flopped into the chair next to mine.
    In a few minutes Ed Wurz, the manager of the hotel, showed, with a bag of golf instruments and a trick suit. He spotted me and asked me if I didn’t want to go along with him and play.
    “No,” I said. “I only played once in my life.”
    “That don’t make no difference,” he says. “I’m a bum myself. I just play shinny, you might say.”
    “Well,” I says, “I can’t anyway, on account of my dogs. They been giving me a lot of trouble.”
    Of course I was referring to my feet, but he hadn’t no sooner than went on his way when Lady Perkins swung round on me and says: “I didn’t know you had dogs. Where do you keep them?”
    At first I was going to tell her “In my shoes,” but I thought I might as well enjoy myself, so I said: “They’re in the dog hospital over to Haverton.”
    “What ails them?” she asked me.
    Well, I didn’t know nothing about cay-nine diseases outside of hydrophobia, which don’t come till August, so I had to make one up.
    “They got blanny,” I told her.
    “Blanny!” she says. “I never heard of it before.”
    “No,” I said. “It hasn’t only been discovered in this country just this year. It got carried up here from Peru some way another.”
    “Oh, it’s contagious, then!” says Lady Perkins.
    “Worse than measles or lockjaw,” says I. “You take a dog that’s been in the same house with a dog that’s got blanny, and it’s a miracle if they don’t all get it.”
    She asked me if I’d had my dogs in the hotel.
    “Only one day,” I says, “the first day we come, about a week ago. As soon as I seen what was the matter with them, I took them over to Haverton in a sanitary truck.”
    “Was they mingling with the other dogs here?” she says.
    “Just that one day,” I said.
    “Heavens!” said Lady Perkins. “And what’s the symptoms?”
    “Well,” I said, “first you’ll notice that they keep their tongue stuck out a lot and they’re hungry a good deal of the time, and finally they show up with a rash.”
    “Then what happens?” she says.
    “Well,” said I, “unless they get the best of treatment, they kind of dismember.”
    Then she asked me how long it took for the symptoms to show after a dog had been exposed. I told her any time between a week and four months.
    “My dogs has been awful hungry lately,” she says, “and they most always keeps their tongue stuck out. But they haven’t no rash.”
    “You’re all right, then,” I says. “If you give them treatments before the rash shows up, they’s no danger.”
    “What’s the treatment?” she asked me.
    “You rub the back of their neck with some kind of dope,” I told her. “I forget what it is, but if you say the word, I can get you a bottle of it when I go over to the hospital this afternoon.”
    “I’d be ever so much obliged,” she says, “and I hope you’ll find your dear ones a whole lot better.”
    “Dear ones is right,” I said. “They cost a pile of jack, and the bird I bought them off of told me I should ought to get them insured, but I didn’t. So if anything happens to them now, I’m just that much out.”
    Next she asked me what kind of dogs they was.
    “Well,” I said, “you might maybe never of heard of them, as they don’t breed them nowheres only way down in Dakota. They call them yaphounds--I don’t know why; maybe on account of the noise they make. But they’re certainly a grand-looking dog and they bring a big price.”
    She set there a wile longer and then got up and went inside, probably to the nursery to look for signs of rash.
    Of course I didn’t tell the Mrs. and Kate nothing about this incidence. They wouldn’t of believed it if I had of, and besides, it would be a knock-out if things broke right and Lady Perkins come up and spoke to me wile they was present, which is just what happened.
    During the afternoon I strolled over to the drug store and got me an empty pint bottle. I took it up in the room and filled it with water and shaving soap. Then I laid low till evening, so as Perk would think I had went to Haverton.
    I and Ella and Kate breezed in the dining room kind of late and we hadn’t no more than ordered when I seen the Lady get up and start out. She had to pass right past us, and when I looked at her and smiled she stopped.
    “Well,” she said, “how’s your dogs?”
    I got up from the table.
    “A whole lot better, thank you,” says I, and then I done the honors. “Lady Perkins,” I said, “meet the wife and sister-in-law.”
    The two gals staggered from their chairs, both pop-eyed. Lady Perkins bowed to them and told them to set down. If she hadn’t the floor would of bounced up and hit them in the chin.
    “I got a bottle for you,” I said. “I left it upstairs and I’ll fetch it down after supper.”
    “I’ll be in the red card room,” says Perk, and away she went.
    I wished you could of see the two gals. They couldn’t talk for a minute, for the first time in their life. They just set there with their mouth open like a baby blackbird. Then they both broke out with a rash of questions that come so fast I couldn’t understand none of them, but the general idear was, What the hell!
    “They’s no mystery about it,” I said. “Lady Perkins was setting out on the porch this morning and you two was late getting down to breakfast, so I took a walk, and when I come back she noticed that I kind of limped and asked me what ailed my feet. I told her they always swoll up in warm weather and she said she was troubled the same way and did I know any medicine that shrank them. So I told her I had a preparation and would bring her a bottle of it.”
    “But,” says Kate, “I can’t understand a woman like she speaking to a man she don’t know.”