Delphi Complete Works of Thorne Smith (Illustrated), page 197
“I am not in a position to satisfy your puzzling curiosity,” replied the doctor, repacking his little black bag.
“Then it certainly must be terrible,” observed Peter, “because you apparently stop at nothing.”
“Come,” said the doctor to the girl. “We must be skipping.”
“Don’t skip before me,” put in Peter. “I don’t think I could bear the sight and still retain my reason.”
“Your wound, which luckily is slight,” continued the doctor, ignoring Peter’s remark, “will be dressed again this evening.”
“Couldn’t you leave me a little extra dressing?” Peter asked. “Just a bandage or so? I’ve got an idea.”
“That would be cheating,” said the girl, following the doctor from the room. “Besides, it would look extremely silly.”
“I feel extremely silly,” Peter called after her as she left the room without closing the door.
No sooner were his two visitors gone than Peter sprang from the bed and tiptoed to the window. Protected by a curtain he discreetly peered out upon a green, rolling lawn splashed with sunlight and early flowers nodding up encouragingly at him in a breeze blowing fresh from the sea. And there was the sea itself, the sea looking a little unfamiliar now that it was clear of fog. Forever and forever it seemed to run, that flat, streaming surface, into a cool blue solitude untroubled by voice or wing. In his present naked predicament Peter very much wished he could enjoy a reasonable quantity of that solitude himself. Shifting his fascinated eyes from this ever-reaching expanse, he turned them on the dense, deep green of trees sweeping round the house in a half-moon of leafy protection. Branches waving in the wind, white clouds above, and white bodies on the lawn, white and gleamingly naked. An appalling sight, this, and yet not unpicturesque. Peter drew a deep breath. A little of his profound belief in the established order of things began to drop away from him. In the face of so much nudity he found himself doubting the reality of such terrifically reiterated facts as the Empire State Building, Tammany Hall, and crooning. Had the bodies been black instead of white, he would have felt a little better about it. Black bodies and brown ones had a way of getting naked. But, then, the black races were not essentially interested in things of the flesh like the white race. No. Black people took the flesh at a stride and passed on to the supernatural and other things of the spirit with only an occasional fleshly picnic — a good rough-and-tumble sort of orgy that cleared up a lot of nonsense and left their thoughts free for other and more important considerations.
A period was put to his confused meditations by a furtive sound in the room behind him. Turning, he beheld still another naked body. But this naked body was by all odds more disconcerting than those he had previously encountered, and this in spite of the fact that it was the most alluringly fashioned body it had ever been his good fortune to behold.
For a moment there was a tense, watchful silence in the room as wave upon wave of emotion dashed over Peter, but before he went down for the third time a bright little idea came to what he hoped would be his salvation. With nerveless limbs he staggered to the bed and disappeared beneath its coverings. However, the same bright idea seemed to have found an opening in Josephine’s demoralized mind. Stopping only to close and lock the door, she rushed across the room to the bed and, dragging the clothes off Peter, promptly emulated the example he had so brilliantly set.
“Give me those bedclothes,” grated the gentleman, laying frantic hands on the coverings, “and get out of my room and bed.”
Josephine hung on grimly.
“I won’t!” she gasped. “I won’t!”
“But you’ve left me naked as a coot,” cried Peter.
“That’s your worry,” she said. “Better you that way than me.”
“I don’t know,” replied Peter distractedly. “I can’t say. Both ways are pretty awful. I do know, however, I’m not going to lie here like this and argue about it with you.”
So saying, he gave the coverings a brutal tug, and Josephine’s naked body appeared as Peter’s burrowed under. It was a scene of desperate activity and concentration. Chivalry and gentleness were sacrificed to meet the demands of modesty.
“A nice man,” Josephine panted. “A lecherous little mole of a man. Snatch all the clothes from a naked woman, will you? Well, we’ll see about that. I’ll have you stripped in the shake of a lamb’s tail.”
“Mine’s shaking enough for a whole flock,” came Peter’s muffled voice. “Go away and stop all this talking.”
“I should worry how much it shakes.” Jo flung herself at the coverings and neatly twisted them from Peter, wrapping them round herself.
“This can keep up forever,” muttered Peter, “until we’re so exhausted we won’t be able to cover ourselves at all.”
“If you hope that’s going to happen you’re very much mistaken,” said Jo. “I’m under these coverings for good.”
“Don’t see why you’re under them at all,” he protested, churning the air with his hands. “An astonishing thing to do — crawling nakedly into bed with a man.”
“You crawled nakedly into a closet with me.”
“I know, but a closet’s different.”
“Why, may I ask?”
“Obviously a closet is not arranged.”
“What in the world do you mean?”
“I mean that a bed is always associated with vice and carrying on,” he told her. “You should know that yourself.”
“I sleep in my bed,” she replied.
“Well, you’re not going to sleep in mine, and that’s flat.”
“I’m not going to do anything else.”
“Who wants you to do anything else? Go on. Go back to your own bed and sleep.”
“I can’t,” she protested. “Perfect strangers keep coming in. I was looking for Aspirin Liz when I saw you. Then I said to myself, ‘Any port in a storm,’ and here I am.”
“Let me assure you, my girl,” said Peter, hoping to frighten her, “you picked far from a safe anchorage for your body. I’m drifting into danger myself.”
“With you, Peter,” she replied in a voice he both feared and suspected, “I can face any danger.”
“Sure,” said Peter, “you might even think up a few. No fooling now. Give me back those bedclothes. It’s your turn to be naked for a while.”
“Let’s compromise,” suggested Jo.
“We are compromised,” he retorted. “If this gets out we’ll be ostracized for life.”
“If what gets out?” asked the girl, popping up her head interestedly.
“This situation,” chattered Peter, flipping over on his stomach like a netted fish without having the comfort of knowing whether he had improved himself any. “Please throw some coverings on me.”
“He wants me to cover him, no less,” she said with nasty derision. “Cover your own vast nudity. I’m too busy with mine.”
By a miracle of contortion Peter succeeded in worming his body beneath the bitterly contested bedclothes only to find himself face to face with his disconcerting bedfellow.
“Aren’t we in a terrible fix?” he asked her in an awed voice.
“I don’t know,” said Jo. “Some persons might not think it so bad.”
“You’re awful,” he breathed, looking at her almost with admiration. “I can’t stand things like this. Actually, I’m nearly exhausted from excitement. Might swoon at any moment.”
“You’re far from complimentary,” she told him, her red head thrust out of the clothing within three inches of his. “What did you think of my one-piece, Peter?”
“From the glance I got,” he said, “you weren’t wearing any.”
“I certainly was,” she declared. “One piece of skin.”
Peter shivered at this.
“How you put it!” he muttered. “Would you ever have believed two days ago that we’d be like this in the same bed?”
“Yes,” she said without batting an eye.
“What!” exclaimed Peter.
“Certainly,” she replied quite calmly. “Why not? Other people have.”
“Not nice people,” he argued.
“Very nice people,” she told him. “Some of the best.”
“You mean married, of course.”
“Well, that would tidy up the situation a bit,” she replied thoughtfully, “but in view of the extraordinary circumstances in which we find ourselves through no fault of our own I, for one, am willing to waive certain little formalities, or at least to delay them.”
“You talk too much,” he answered, “altogether too much, and you don’t mean one eighth you say — that is, I hope not.”
“I’m not so sure,” said Jo. “Anyway, I know I love you.”
“Is this a nice place to tell me that?”
“If I didn’t tell you that,” she retorted, “the situation would be just plain wicked.”
“I’ve never been in a wickeder,” he confessed.
“Well, I’ve been a shade more remote myself,” she admitted. “When one’s in Rome, however, I suppose one might just as well make hay while the sun shines.”
“I’m under the impression these particular Romans don’t,” said Peter. “The doctor seemed very snooty.”
“Don’t what?” she asked.
“You’re always so damn blunt,” he complained. “I mean they don’t make hay.”
“Then they don’t sound like Romans to me,” said the girl. “Those old devils were always making hay.”
“You carry logic to the point of depravity,” he objected.
“I don’t understand,” said Jo.
“Well,” he began with an effort, “I don’t quite understand myself, but it’s like this: Logically speaking, this situation calls for a certain line of conduct, whereas — —”
“Almost demands it,” said Jo.
“Don’t interrupt. Whereas, morally speaking, if you were a lady you’d get the hell out of here and go back to your own bed.”
“But, morally speaking, suppose I wasn’t a lady?” she asked.
“Then naturally we couldn’t continue to speak morally,” he replied.
“I’m glad of that,” said Jo, running her fingers through his hair.
“Don’t do that,” he told her. “Don’t make the slightest move.”
“Shouldn’t I do this?” she asked, a white arm slipping snake-like round his neck.
“No,” he replied. “Not that nor anything like it.”
“What will you give me if I don’t?”
“I haven’t a damn thing to give,” gloomed Peter. “They didn’t even leave me a check book. If they had I’d tear out the checks and rig up a girdle for myself.”
“You’d look sweet,” said Jo.
“Might not look so well,” he told her, “but I’d feel a lot less public.”
“You know those women?” Jo asked in a conversational voice.
“No,” Peter replied. “I don’t. What women?”
“Those women,” Jo went on, “who claim that if their husbands came home unexpectedly and found them in bed with some man, the husbands would show how evil-minded they were if they thought anything wrong about it — do you know those women, Peter?”
“There may be longer and less ably stated hypothetical questions,” replied Peter, “but I never answered one. No. I don’t know those women, thank God.”
“Well, what I was trying to say,” she continued, her arm tightening round his neck, “is that I’m not at all like those women.”
“And if I happened to be your husband,” said Peter, “I wouldn’t believe you if you were.”
“Then that clears away a lot of obstructions,” she observed.
“May I ask what all this is leading up to?” asked Peter.
“To this,” said Jo.
She kissed the man and forgot to stop.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
In Pursuit of Privacy
“YOU HAVE THE most evil-looking head of red hair I ever saw,” Peter vouchsafed lazily some time later. “Just like some of the smaller flames of hell or those snake-like locks of Medusa. And your face is baleful, too, in a beautiful sort of way.”
He was lying on his right side, critically surveying the girl’s face, touching it here and there with an inquiring fingertip.
“I don’t know how I can lie here in bed and look at yours,” she told him with a small companionable yawn. “God must have run out of color or lost interest when He came to your hair and eyes. You’re merely tinted. To me you are singularly rabbit-like.”
“In what sense, may I ask?”
“In appearance,” she said. “I daresay you consider yourself the Casanova of the coffee world now.”
“No,” he replied. “I have no such exalted aspirations. I am merely a man who will stand for so much and no more.”
“It’s too bad you’re not the kind who will go just so far and no further,” Jo retorted.
“One can hardly do that with you,” he said easily. “You’d drag them the rest of the way.”
“Oh, so I’m the responsible party,” she observed, gouging him in the cheek, “while you, you poor dear, are the wronged one.”
“Exactly,” was the complacent reply. “I look upon myself, thank God, in the most detached light. Only in a remote way, like an extra on a crowded stage, am I connected with the drama of your inevitable downfall.”
“I don’t like that crowded-stage crack,” the girl replied sombrely. “You were the first player in my young life. And as for that downfall stuff, don’t confuse life with fiction. There’re more ruined women in the world today eating three square meals with an easy conscience than there are homes for wayward girls.”
“You’re hard,” said Pete.
“No, I’m not,” she retorted. “I’m reasonable. And I’m not at all unromantic. For instance, I think it’s quite beautiful being here with you like this. Won’t forget it for some time.”
“When you feel that you’re beginning to, just drop round when you’re not busy and I’ll try to refresh your memory,” said Peter.
“You see,” asserted Jo triumphantly, “you’re really the hard-boiled member of this team. Men usually pretend to make quite a fuss over the women they’ve ruined. You strike me as being a little proud, a little strutty.”
“I confess I don’t know,” he admitted. “No man ever attempted to ruin me, but as you say, I do suspect myself of a slight feeling of elation.”
“As much as I hate to take the wind out of your sails,” she said, “in justice to myself I must remind you that far from being your victim you’re jolly well mine.”
“Stuff and nonsense,” scoffed Peter. “You’re merely a butterfly on the wheel, crushed and broken — another conquest, no more and no less.”
“You’ll be crushed and broken, you little coffee bean,” she retorted hotly, “if you don’t watch your step. I ruined you, my lad. You didn’t ruin me.”
“It hardly seems sensible to be lying here disputing over which of us ruined the other,” he remarked. “It’s a highly technical question.”
“My eye, it is,” exclaimed Jo. “You’re damn well seduced and I did it.”
“Have it your way,” he said amiably. “Just so long as one of us was seduced, I don’t care much who it is.”
“Oh, you don’t,” she snapped. “Just like a man. Ruination means nothing to you.”
“Inasmuch as you insist on me being the ruined party,” he mildly protested, “I’m doing my best to be as cheerful as possible among all the débris.”
“And succeeding almost too well,” she retorted. “One would think you actually enjoyed it.”
“Well,” confessed Peter ruminatively, “you must admit it has its lighter side.”
“I admit nothing,” she said.
“Under the circumstances that would perhaps be best,” he agreed. “In fact, I’d deny everything, if you don’t mind an impersonal suggestion.”
“I’m telling Yolanda right off,” she told the man with malicious enjoyment. “Then I’m going to tell the Bishop, and after that I’m going to get him to marry you to me.”
“How are you going to manage that? Seduce him, too?”
“If necessary.”
“Rather than that should happen, I’ll marry you, if not of my own free will at least without public lamentation.”
“Then you do care!” cried Jo, impulsively flinging herself upon him. “How sweet!”
“I was thinking of the Bishop,” he protested, making a poor showing of warding off her flashing arms.
Fortunately for this record Josephine’s hoydenish activities were interrupted by a peremptory knocking on the door which was followed by the command of a stern voice. The sound of the knocking returned to Peter a terrible realization of the situation in which he found himself. And with the arrival of this realization his presence of mind departed. In a naked panic he sprang from the bed.
“Open the door!” cried the voice. “This is strictly against the rules. Open the door immediately.”
“I don’t know the rules,” chattered Peter.
“You should know enough not to do a thing like that,” the voice replied in high reproof.
“My God,” muttered Peter, his face blanching. “The whole world seems to know already. Like what?” he asked aloud.
“Don’t quibble with me, young man,” said the voice. “If you don’t open this door I’ll have it broken down. Is there a woman in there with you?”
“What made you get that quaint idea?” asked Peter, motioning Jo to silence.
“There’s a girl missing,” came the answer. “And sometimes new arrivals carry on.”
“Carry on how?” called Peter, sparring desperately for time.
“When were you born?” queried the voice.
“This is hardly the proper moment for vital statistics,” retorted Peter. “Go away and leave that door alone.”
Fresh voices could be heard in the hall — the patter of bare feet. There were sounds of suppressed laughter and giggling — frolicsome slaps on bare flesh. Peter closed his eyes and shuddered. He pictured a mass of naked bodies waiting outside the door to witness his disgrace. The pounding was resumed. In his desperation he forgot his wounded arm and began to tear a sheet in strips, thoughtfully putting one aside.
