The Lady Doc by Caroline Lockhart (best english novels for beginners TXT) 📖

Madame Guillotine presided must have been a frothy and frivolous affair compared to the beginning of this dinner.

Adolph Kunkel, who had attached himself to Dr. Harpe to the extent of walking within four feet of her side, darted from line and pulled out the nearest chair at the table. Observing too late that the other guests were still standing, he sprang to his feet and looked wildly about to see if he had been noticed. He had. Alva Jackson covered his mouth with his handkerchief and giggled.

There was a frozen smile upon the faces of the ladies who, sitting bolt upright, twisted their fingers under the kindly shelter of the table-cloth. Each trivial observation, humorous or otherwise, was greeted with a burst of laughter and the person brave enough to venture a remark seemed immediately appalled by the sound of his own voice. Adolph Kunkel, to show that he was perfectly at ease, stretched his arms behind his neighbor's chair and yawned.

In spite of the efforts which brought beads of perspiration out on the broad forehead of their host, Essie Tisdale appeared with the first course mid a ghastly silence.

"I hardly ever drink tea," observed Mr. Rhodes, for the purpose, merely, of making conversation.

"Oh, my Gawd, Tinhorn, that ain't tea, it's bullion!" Mrs. Terriberry's loud whisper was heard the length of the table as she tore the sugar bowl from his hand, but the warning came too late, for Mr. Rhodes already had sweetened his consommé.

The guests displayed their tact by assuming a wooden expression, and turning their heads away secretly relieved that they had not committed the faux pas themselves. Only Alva Jackson stared at Mr. Rhodes's embarrassment in unconcealed delight.

"Let Essie bring you another cup," suggested Mr. Symes.

"Oh, no! not at all; I take sweetenin' in everything," declared Mr. Rhodes.

There was a distinct relaxation of tension all around when Andy P. Symes took the initiative in the matter of spoons.

"This here soup makes me think of the time I had mountain fever and et it stiddy for three weeks." Adolph Kunkel whispered the reminiscence behind the back of his hand.

"My real favorite is bean soup," admitted Mr. Terriberry, and Mrs. Terriberry looked mortified at this confession of her husband's vulgar preferences.

"It's very nourishing," declared Mrs. Starr tremulously.

"And delicious, too, when properly served." Mrs. Percy Parrott curled her little finger elegantly and toyed with a spoon.

"It's a pretty good article in camp," said Mr. Symes desperately to keep the ball rolling.

The guests shrieked with mirthless laughter at the suggestion of rough camp life.

"Gosh! me and Gus was weaned and raised on bean soup—and liverwurst," interjected Adolph Kunkel in the lull which followed, and immediately squirmed under Mrs. Symes's blazing eyes. "Of course," he added lamely, "we et other things, too—mush and headcheese."

During these trying moments Dr. Harpe settled back in her chair with folded arms regarding the scene with the impersonal amusement with which she would have sat through a staged comedy. No sense of obligation toward her host and hostess impelled her to do her share toward lessening the strain, and Andy P. Symes felt a growing irritation at the faint smile of superiority upon her face. She was the one person present who might have helped him through the uncomfortable affair.

Formality was the keynote of the occasion. Ladies who had been at each other's back door a few hours previous borrowing starch or sugar now addressed each other in strained and distant tones while the men were frankly dumb. It was a relief to everybody when a heaping platter of fried chicken appeared upon the table followed by mounds of mashed potatoes and giblet gravy which made the guests' eyes gleam like bird-dogs gaunt from a run.

Fried chicken is only fried chicken to those who dwell in the country where chickens scratch in every backyard, but to those who dwell where they reckon time from the occasion when they last ate an egg, fried chicken bears the same relation to other food that nightingales' tongues bore to other dishes at epicurean Roman feasts. As a further evidence of Symes's prodigality there was champagne in hollow-stemmed glasses brought from the East.

It was a glorious feast with cold storage chicken expressed from the Main Line and potatoes freighted up from the Mormon settlement a hundred miles below.

"It's a durn shame," said Adolph Kunkel as he surreptitiously removed an olive, "that the plums is spiled, for this is the best supper I ever flopped my lip over."

Symes suppressed a groan.

Each guest devoted himself to his food with an abandon and singleness of purpose which left no doubt as to his enjoyment, and the effort of old Edouard Dubois to scrape the last vestige of potato from his plate brought out a suggestion from Adolph Kunkel to leave the gilt design on the bottom. And when tiny after-dinner coffee cups appeared, the guests felt that a new and valuable experience was being added to their lives.

"Holy smoke—but that's stout!" hinted Mr. Terriberry after looking the table over for the customary pitcher of tinned milk. But before Mr. Symes could act upon the hint his brother-in-law's eyes began to water and bulge. He groped for his napkin while he compressed his lips in an heroic effort to retain the hot and bitter coffee, but instead he grabbed the hanging edge of the table-cloth. His pitiful eyes were fixed upon the coldly disapproving face of Andy P. Symes, but there is a limit to human endurance and Adolph Kunkel quickly reached it. Simultaneous with a spurt of coffee Adolph rose and fled, upsetting his chair as he went, disgraced upon his only appearance in that exclusive set from which he was henceforth and forever barred.

He coughed significantly under the window to remind Mr. Symes that he might be induced to return, but the hint passed unheeded, for regret would not have been among Mr. Symes's emotions if his brother-in-law's removal had been complete and permanent.

Over the coffee and a superior brand of cigars to which Mr. Symes called particular attention, the conversation of his guests began to contain some degree of naturalness and their painful self-consciousness gradually vanished. When they seemed in a mellow and receptive mood he began to rehearse his achievements in the East and unfold his plans. As he talked, their imaginations stimulated by wine, they saw the future of Crowheart pass before them like a panorama.

The army of laborers who were to be employed upon this enormous ditch would spend their wages in Crowheart. The huge payroll would be a benefit to every citizen. The price of horses would jump to war-time values and every onery cayuse on the range would be hauling a scraper. Alfalfa and timothy would sell for $18 a ton in the stack and there would be work for every able-bodied man who applied. The grocery bills of the commissary would make the grocers rich and Crowheart would boom right. When the water was running swift and deep in the ditch the land-hungry homeseekers would fight for ground. And it was only a step from settlement to trolley cars, electric lights, sandstone business blocks and cement pavements, together with lawns growing real grass! Under the spell of his magnetic presence and convincing eloquence nothing seemed more plausible or possible than the fulfilment of these prophecies. And all this was to be brought about through the efforts of Andy P. Symes, who intimated that not one million but millions had been placed at his disposal by eager and trusting capitalists to be used by him if necessary in making the desert bloom like the rose.

Mr. Rhodes saw himself selling corner lots at twenty thousand each while space rates rose in the mind of Sylvanus Starr in leaps and bounds. The Percy Parrots saw themselves lolling in a rubber-tired vehicle while the vulgar populace on the curb identified them by pointing with their grimy fingers. Each guest looked forward to the fulfilment of some cherished dream and Dr. Emma Harpe saw a picture, too, as she gazed at Symes with speculative, contemplative eyes.

He looked the embodiment of prosperity and success, did Symes, and if he subtly intimated that the road to prosperity lay through loyalty to him, that his friendship, support and approval were the steps by which they could best climb, they were willing to give it without quibbling. They were content to shine in his reflected glory, and they dispersed at a late hour feeling that they had been tacitly set apart—a chosen people.

The next issue of the Crowheart Courier referred to the dinner as a three-course banquet, and published the menu. If the description of the guests' costumes made Crowheart's eyes pop and none more than the wearers, the latter did not mention it.

Pleased but bewildered, Mrs. Terriberry read of herself as "queenly in gray satin and diamonds," being unable to place the diamonds until she recalled the rhinestone comb in her back hair which sparkled with the doubtful brilliancy of a row of alum cubes.

Mrs. Percy Parrott had some difficulty in recognizing herself as "ravishing in shot silk garnished with pearls," since the plaid taffeta which had come in a barrel from home with the collar tab pinned flat with a moonstone pin bore little resemblance to the elegance suggested in the paragraph.

And if the editor chose to refer to the pineapple pattern, No. 60 cotton, collarette which Mrs. Jackson had crocheted between beers in the good old Dance Hall days as an "exquisite effect in point lace," certainly Mrs. Jackson was not the lady to contradict him.

But this was merely the warming up exercise of the editor's vocabulary. When he really cut loose on Andy P. Symes the graves of dead and buried adjectives opened to do him honor. In the lurid lexicon of his eloquence there was no such word as obsolete and no known synonym failed to pay tribute to this "mental and physical colossus." In his shirt sleeves, minus his cuffs, with his brain in a lather, one might say, Sylvanus Starr painted a picture of the coming Utopia, experiencing in so doing such joys of creation as he had not known since his removal from the obituary department.

And reading, the citizens of Crowheart rejoiced or envied according to their individual natures.