Irvin Cobb - Ladies and Gentlemen

“Mind you, I’m not predicting that the spell will endure. The ancient feud may blaze up. We may yet have a race war in our kitchen. For all you know, you may at this moment be sitting pretty on a seething volcano; but unless something unforeseen occurs I think I may safely promise you peace and harmony, during the great event which is about to ensue in our hitherto simple lives.

“For, as I said just now, Norah is under a thrall – temporary perhaps but a thrall just the same. Well, I confess to being all thralled-up myself. That certainly was a high-church dinner – that one tonight was. Several times I was almost overcome by a well-nigh irrepressible temptation to get up and ask Ditto to take my place and let me pass a few things to him.”

“I don’t believe there ever has been such a drought,” said Mrs. Gridley.

“Ho, hum, well, I suppose we’ll all get used to this grandeur in time,” said Mr. Braid. “I wonder if he is going to put on the full vestments every night no matter whether we have company or not? I wish on nights when we do have very special company he’d loan me his canonicals and wear mine. I expect he’d regard it as presuming if I asked for the address of his tailor? What do you think, Dumplings?”

“I wish it would rain,” said Mrs. Gridley. “And I hope and pray Norah doesn’t fly off into one of her tantrums. I wonder does Mr. Boyce-Upchurch like Thousand Islands dressing or the Russian better? What were you just saying, Ollie?”

Mr. Braid tapped his skull with his forefinger.

“Ah, the family failing,” he murmured, “that dread curse which afflicts our line! With some of the inmates it day by day grows worse. And there’s nothing to be done – it’s congenital.”

“I expect the best thing to do is just to take a chance on the Russian,” said Mrs. Gridley. “If he doesn’t like it, why he doesn’t like it and I can’t help myself, I didn’t catch what you said just then, Ollie?”

“Abstraction overcomes the victim; the mind wanders; the reason totters,” said Mr. Braid. “By the way, I wonder if Ditto would care to have his room brightened with a group view of the Royal Family – the King in shooting costume, the Queen wearing the sort of hat that the King would probably like to shoot; the lesser members grouped about? You know the kind of thing I mean.”

“Would you start off tomorrow night with clams or a melon?” asked Mrs. Gridley.

“Or perhaps he’d prefer an equestrian photograph of the Prince of Wales,” said Mr. Braid. “I know where I can pick up one second hand. I’ll stop by tomorrow and price it. It’s a very unusual pose. Shows the Prince on the horse.”

“Melon, I guess,” said Mrs. Gridley. “Most Englishmen like cantaloups, I hear. They’re not so common among them.”

“My duty being done I think I shall retire to my chamber to take a slight, not to say sketchy bath in a shaving mug,” said Mr. Braid.

“I wish it would rain,” said Mrs. Gridley.

Numbers of friendly persons met Mr. Boyce-Upchurch at the boat that Wednesday afternoon. Miss Titworthy inevitably was there and riding herd, so to speak, on a swaying flock of ewes of the Ingleglade Woman’s Club. She organized a sort of impromptu welcoming committee at the ferry-house. Mrs. Gridley missed this, though. She had to stay outside with her runabout. Her husband and brother – the latter had escorted Mr. Boyce-Upchurch to One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street from the University Club where he had been a guest of someone since finishing his New England swing the week before – were with the visiting celebrity. They surrendered him over to Miss Titworthy, who made him run the gantlet of the double receiving line and introduced him to all the ladies. Of these a bolder one would seek to detain him a minute while she told him how much she admired his books and which one of them she admired most, but an awed and timider one would merely say she was so glad to meet him, having heard of him so often. Practically every timider one said this. It was as though she followed a memorized formula. Now and then was a bolder bold one who breasted forward at him and cooed in the manner of a restrained but secretly amorous hen-pigeon.

Mr. Boyce-Upchurch bore up very well under the strain of it all. Indeed, he seemed rather to expect it, having been in this country for several months now and having lectured as far west as Omaha. He plowed along between the greeters, a rather short and compact figure but very dignified, with his monocle beaming ruddy in the rays of the late afternoon sun and with a set smile on his face, and he murmuring the conventional words.

The ceremonial being concluded, the two gentlemen reclaimed him and led him outside, and there he met Mrs. Gridley, who drove him up the Palisades Road, her husband and brother following in a chartered taxi with Mr. Boyce-Upchurch’s luggage. There was quite a good deal of luggage, including a strapped steamer-rug and two very bulging, very rugged-looking kit bags and a leather hat-box and a mysterious flat package in paper wrappings which Mr. Braid told Mr. Gridley he was sure must contain a framed steel engraving of the Death of Nelson.

Mr. Braid pattered on:

“For a truly great and towering giant of literature, our friend seems very easy to control in money matters. Docile – that’s the word for it, docile. He let me tip the porter at the club for bringing down these two tons of his detachable belongings, and on the way up Madison Avenue he deigned to let me jump out and go in a shop and buy him an extra strap for his blanket roll, and he graciously suffered me to pay for a telegram he sent from the other side, and also for that shoe-shine and those evening papers he got on the boat. Told me he hadn’t learned to distinguish our Yankee small change. Always getting the coins mixed up, he said. Maybe he hasn’t had any experience.”

“Rather brusk in his way of speaking to a fellow,” admitted Mr. Gridley. “You might almost call it short. And rather fussy about getting what he wants, I should say. Still, I suppose he has a great deal on his mind.”

“Launcelot will fairly dote on him,” said Mr. Braid. “Mark my words, Launcelot is going to fall in love with him on the spot.”

Meanwhile, Mrs. Gridley was endeavoring to explain to Mr. Boyce-Upchurch why it was that in a town lying practically on a river so large and so wide as the Hudson there could be a water shortage. He couldn’t appear to grasp it. He declared it to be extraordinary.

This matter of a water shortage apparently lingered in his mind, for half an hour later following tea, as he was on the point of going aloft to his room to dress for dinner he called back to his host from half-way up the stairs:

“I say, Gridley, no water in the taps, your wife tells me. Extraordinary, what? Tell you what: I’ll be needing a rub-down tonight – stuffy climate here and all that. So later on just let one of your people fetch up a portable tub to my room and bring along lots of water, will you? The water needn’t be hot. Like it warm, though. Speak about it, will you, to that slavey of yours.”

Mrs. Gridley gave a quick little wincing gasp and a hunted look about her. But Delia had gone to carry Mr. Boyce-Upchurch’s waistcoat upstairs. The episode of the waistcoat occurred a few minutes before, immediately after the guest had been ushered into the house.

“Frightfully warm,” he remarked on entering the living-room. “Tell me, is America always so frightfully warm in summer?” Then, without waiting for an answer, he said: “Think I must rid myself of the wescut. All over perspiration, you know.” So saying, he took off first his coat and next his waistcoat and hung the waistcoat on a chair and then put the coat back on again. Still, as Mr. Braid remarked in an undertone to nobody in particular, it wasn’t exactly as though Mr. Boyce-Upchurch had stripped to his shirt-sleeves because, so Mr. Braid pointed out to himself, the waistband of the trousers came up so high, especially at the back, and the suspenders – he caught himself here and mentally used the word “braces” instead – the braces were so nice and broad that you didn’t see enough of the shirt really to count.