Delphi Complete Works of Thorne Smith (Illustrated), page 295
“What’s that?” I shouted to the crowd.
“Great, big, blue eyes,” some one replied.
“Right,” says I, with finality, before anyone else had a chance to guess. The poor Chief’s amazement was really pathetic. He turned away a broken man.
“Oh, go to hell the all of yers,” he muttered. “Get out of my sight. Period’s over. Into your barracks.”
We left him in the middle of the parade ground in a crumpled condition. He was passing his hands over his dazed eyes. Later in the day we caught sight of him reading signals sent by another Chief. He was evidently convincing himself that he wasn’t crazy. He turned around and saw me — but not for long.
Dec. 8th. — The favor of the gods was withdrawn from me to-day. Probably as a result of my yesterday’s success. Failed to catch a 48 hours’ liberty. Been washing windows. I can see the Chiefs fine hand in this.
Dec. 9th. — Special war extra: Mr. Fogerty has the cooties. He has no pride. I am crushed.
What with scratching Mr. Fogerty and scrubbing my whites I have had scant time for availing myself of the solace of intellectual recreation derived from writing my diary. The depraved dog approaches me and gazes into my eyes in such a miserable and pathetic manner that I cannot withhold the craved-for assistance. What a virile race the cooties must be! What families! What diligence! What fun!
Dec, 10th. — The trench dog Fogerty seems now to consider his unsavory visitation as being a mark of special honor. He passed one of our most aristocratic goats to-day without even so much as flopping an ear. As a matter of fact, Fogerty is a well-born dog himself and displayed all the characteristics of a careful and gentle rearing when I first knew him. I am sure he must have come from a home of culture and refinement Now look at him — fleas, late hours and the primrose road.
The “Spider” has just come off of guard duty. There were a lot of stray visitors up to-day and they evidently came too near the fence. He showed me a fake silver cigarette-case half full of fags, one gold cuff link, a stick pin and an exemption card. I have made him promise to send the exemption card home to-the rightful owner. The cigarettes we smoked and then gave Tim the case as a joint token of our great respect and devotion. We told him that we had sent to New York in order to get it. The poor dub was really quite touched about it, as, no doubt, was its original owner. The “Spider” told me in strict confidence that be frequently had picked up (or out) a great deal more at parades and six-day bicycle races. Between that and showing up the safe manufacturers I decided he must have eked out an existence.
Dec. 11th.— “Good-bye my fancy,” as old Walt said, or was it “farewell.”
Anyway it doesn’t matter. How can I speak of poets after what has happened. It is all off with Polly, I am a co-respondent — almost. It will all come out in the paper soon, I dare say. What will people say?
I have drunk deep of the waters of jazz in the course of my turbulent career and “shimmied” my share of miles around the clock. Frankly I admit that I have had my full quota of sweeties in the past and earnestly look forward to more in the future. In spite of which I have struggled manfully to retain that purity of character for which I was noted at the age of three. It is lost now. Already the headlines seem to be staring me in the face, crisp and clear.
BILTMORE OSWALD, THE WORLD’S STUPIDEST SAILOR,
FOUND WITH THE WIFE OF PROMINENT BOOKMAKER
youthful bluejacket claims
never having known model before
I can see it all now. Tony takes it as a huge joke. Tim says I did not go far enough. Polly says I went altogether too far, and the unscrupulous “Spider” only regrets not being able to sell me one of those diamonds he gained ill possession of through the biting process in his dark civilian days. I couldn’t help it and I told Polly so, but she refused to listen to reason.
“In every port,” she kept repeating almost to herself, “and on every corner,” this more emphatically. And nothing I can say seems to do any good. Women will forgive anything but another woman’s good looks and a man’s bad dancing. I am very bitter about women. When Polly told me that I was nothing more nor less than a low-minded, brawling sailorman I turned on her and said:
“A man is as bad as the occasion demands, but the woman creates the occasion,” which I thought was a pretty good comeback on the spur of the moment, but instead of crushing Polly, she merely retorted that a man’s whole life was devoted to hanging around waiting for that occasion. You can see just how briskly we milled it up.
It all happened so quickly and so innocently. There I was standing by the road waiting bashfully for someone to come by in a nice comfortable automobile and pick me up and carry me along to New York to see my permanent sweetie, who doesn’t seem to be quite so permanent now, when all of a sudden a plush looking motor draws up by me and a woman I scarcely looked at asks me to step in. What could be more natural than to comply with so gracious a request? I asked Polly this and she said “anything.” Of course, I didn’t realize that the lady was a great, big, beautiful woman, naturally forward with men, particularly sailors, and a little dangerous. As soon as I saw how pretty she was I slid quickly over to the opposite corner which seemed to be just what she was waiting for me to do, because she had me where she wanted me with all avenues of retreat cut off. When she put her head on my shoulder and called me a cute little thing, what was I to do? I couldn’t scream or call out the guard, and no gentleman can push a woman’s head off his shoulder as if it were a bag of potatoes, and anyway she was an extremely nice looking woman. One had to be kind to her. It was the only thing to do. So, in this brotherly manner I went rolling along toward New York trying to make this lady as comfortable as possible. It was “Louise and Billy” from the start. She was an exceptionally swift worker. Once in the city she swore that she just couldn’t let me go. Nothing would content her but that we go to tea together and as I had still a couple of hours before meeting Polly I reluctantly consented. Gasoline is high nowadays and I had shared quite a lot of this fair woman’s. Going to tea with her was the least I could do. But I didn’t plan on going to the exact spot where I was to meet Polly. Nevertheless this was just where we went — swell hotel with a twilight tea room. One of those places where one feels at least compromised after having sat in it with a woman for a couple of hours. My protests were of no avail. She merely turned her eyes on me and I felt like a brute for having interposed an objection. But I hadn’t counted on her walk. This was the most surprising thing. It began at the feet and progressed by slow, undulating stages along her rakish frame until it terminated at her shoulders. My eye, what a walk! She did everything but loop-the-loop.
My eye, what a walk! She did everything but loop-the-loop.
Dimly I recalled having seen modifications of it before, but never in my most flapperish days had I seen anything so exaggerated as this. At any moment I expected an out-of-town buyer to rush up and he’d take a couple of dozen of the model m-243. Casting a frightened looked down the street, I hastened after her into the portals of the hotel. By the time we entered the tea room I was so fascinated by that walk, so hypnotized, as it were, that I began, in spite of every effort to resist, to imitate it, following along in her tracks very much in the same manner as a trained collie dog does on the stage. Putting one foot directly before the other, overlapping them a trifle if possible, and wiggling all wiggable parts, we swept under full steam into that fatal tea room, intriguing and intimate under the soft glow of its dim little blobs of light. A regular Emile Zola sort of a dump. As luck would have it we ran smack into a brace of Ensigns hopefully drinking tea in the shadows. The poor chaps almost lost an eye. Gladly would I have exchanged places with them if only to be allowed to sweat quietly in a corner and collect my sadly shattered morale. It is my belief that one of them deliberately tripped me as I passed by, but I might be wrong. The room was impenetrably dark. My statuesque vamp came to in the middle of the room and after much uncalled for undulating picked out a clubby little table in a particularly sombre corner, wiggled herself into it and proceeded to hold my hand as if she was afraid of losing me, which she had every justification of being. I have never met a more unfortunately affectionate woman. Force of habit, I fancy, or probably just natural good will. As I sat there I thought bitterly to myself that I knew of exactly 16,999 sailors that would be glad to go on report to change places with me and I envied each and every one of them. However, it was a little better when she was sitting. She couldn’t wiggle so much although she managed to toss in a series of snake-like evolutions from time to time. I swore by all my gods in Harlem that I would never walk out of the place in the wake of that woman. Not that I had any personal objections to it, but I knew that I would be a marked man if I did, and then there was Polly. At the thought of Polly I fairly sickened. I would have drowsed myself in the tea cup if my nose hadn’t been so long.
“Lady, all I asked for was a hitch,” I said huskily.
“I can never let you go,” she whispered tragically across the oppressive gloom, and my God, I believed her!
“So kind,” I muttered with lame politeness. “I don’t deserve it.”
“We were made for each other,” she thrilled back — a remark that struck me as being quite unreasonable and without any logical foundation in fact. It terrified me. In my desperate imagination I could see myself trailing this woman through life, the both of us vamping like a couple of licorice sticks on a hot day, with an infuriated Polly on every corner.
For a long time I had been unpleasantly aware of a couple of gleaming eyes glaring steadily at us from across the waste of darkness and there seemed to be something unfriendly in the way they gleamed; in fact, after watching them furtively for some time I decided that they were decidedly hostile.
“And to think,” says my captor, sighing deeply as she snuggled up close to me and unlimbered her head on my shrinking shoulder once more. “And to think,” she repeated, “that I am married.”
Appalled silence.
“But it doesn’t matter,” she added dreamily, “nothing matters.”
“But it does matter,” I almost screamed. “A great many things matter — I — I’m deeply engaged myself.”
“You must break it to her gently,” she murmured, kissing my neck — a sailor’s most undefended spot.
‘You must break it to her gently,’ she murmured, kissing my neck.
“Break it to her gently,” I began, and then my voice failed me — the eyes were approaching us through the darkness, they were growing larger all the time.
“It’s Jack! My husband!” screamed the woman suddenly, and all the world grew still. Nothing could have been more horrible. I found myself almost falling into those wild, fire-touched eyes.
“A poor sailor defending his country. Shake bands with him, Jack. Show your patriotism,” whispered Louise with trembling assurance.
Jack proceeded to show his patriotism by uttering a howl of fury and snatching the cloth clean off the table. There was a smashing of china, general commotion and above it all I heard Jack’s voice:
“Git outter here,” he was shouting. “Git outter here this minute or I’ll baste yer one.”
I looked up and saw Polly standing in the doorway. She was pale, but she had nothing on me. A ghost would have appeared tanned in comparison. There was Polly in real life standing in the doorway — oh, the horror of it!
Jack was leading the woman out of the room. She apparently had forgotten that we had been made for each other and that she could “never let me go.”
“Yes, Jack,” she whispered timidly, forgetting to wiggle.
At the door Jack turned his huge figure around and pointed a threatening finger at me as I cowered behind an orange-colored lamp.
“I’m coming back to git you,” said Jack as he vanished.
Perhaps he did. I don’t know. It took me three blocks before I caught up with Polly and when I did she threatened to give me over to the police for flirting with her. Think of it! Such words from my future wife. Flirt with her. One might as well have flirted with a python. I followed her in distracted silence. Words were of no avail. She dismissed me bitterly.
“Kissing your neck in a restaurant,” she snapped. “Go out and find another sweetie to take pity on you — you — you bean pole.”
Bean pole were the words she used. Now, don’t I have the darndest luck? I’ve lost my permanent sweetie. She called me a bean pole.
Dec. 17th. — No word from Polly. I have sunk to the level of my dog. I am distracted, a broken reed, a crippled bean pole. There is no health in me. I will seek the solitudes with Fogerty and his cooties. A P.O. approaches. I fly. Bean pole! The bitterness of it
Dec. 18th. — For once Fortune smiled on me. The whole crowd of us standing by having been granted furloughs, and not one of the men refused to accept. Mother insists on sending me for a good rest to some swell hotel in Lakewood. Later she is going to bring father, grandfather and Polly down with her to join me. In the meantime I expect to wander quietly around an expensive, gold-plated hotel and behave myself. I don’t know that I enjoy the prospects, but anyway it will be a change from shipboard and camp life. Probably I shall adventure with an adventuress, or air with an heiress. Who can tell? I can’t, but at least I can hope.
Dec. 19th. — The most extraordinary thing happened to me today; before breakfast at that. It’s bad enough, I find, to have extraordinary things happen to me after luncheon or even later In the evening, but to start the day with a localized but hardly self-contained riot is almost too much of a vulgar display of the fate that seems to brood over my pure young life.
This is one of those gold-tipped, twin-six hotels at which I am stopping — very much in the nature of a bad watch — in which one must spend practically one’s entire life and several fortunes in order to be able to find one’s ways around the halls with any small degree of success. Like many of those foxy little tricks in arithmetic which used to keep me out of God’s pure sunshine in the days of my rapidly receding youth, the corridors of this cut glass seat of dyspepsia divide and multiply into infinity.
Morning found me without much difficulty in bed, and, remembering my mother’s advice to take a bath whenever I could get it, I sprang from my hop and proceeded, with full equipment and a bathrobe, to wander down the labyrinthian passages in a hazy, but hopeful frame of mind, in search of some receptacle in which I could immerse my body and thus gain that cleanliness which we are given to believe obtains for us a certain large amount of godliness. The fruits of my labors were a bewildered mind and a pair of weary legs, “Upstairs, downstairs, in my lady’s chamber,” as the sweet jingle goes, had I been, and still had succeeded in finding nothing remotely resembling a bathroom. Presently, coming around a turn in the vast hall about two miles off I faintly made out the figure of a bellboy bearing down in his jaunty bellboyish manner in my direction. Consequently I seated myself on a pair of stairs and patiently waited the ten minutes it required for this brave spirit to wend his way from the point at which I had first sighted him to my languid presence.
“O, intrepid traveler of endless spaces,” says I, giving my bathrobe a dramatic hitch, “save me from a life of solitary wandering around these trackless wastes and lead me to the nearest bathroom before these my whiskers impede my progress and my weary limbs grow feeble in decay.”
Of course no bellboy likes to be addressed in this manner before breakfast and I cannot find it in me to blame the bellboy, but nevertheless he came to and asked me in eloquent Canarsie English what was the nature of my business.
“Take me, if you still love God and hate the devil, to the nearest bathroom by the shortest route with the minimum of delay,” that’s what I told him.
“Sure,” says he, with assurance, and together we set off on our pilgrimage.
After a quarter of an hour devoted to diligent search I began to lose the confidence this youth bad hitherto inspired in me.
“It seems,” I said, “that I am a little less lonely than before I met you, but am still in the same unbathed condition and although I feel sure I would grow to like you better the more I know you, I still believe it would be much pleasanter to do our walking out in the bracing fresh air. This, of course, is a mere suggestion which conveys at the same time a strong but perfectly friendly suspicion of your ability to find anything in the nature of a bathroom.”
“I’ve only been here three months, boss,” replies the bellboy in answer to my mild remark, “and I haven’t gotten quite settled down to this dump myself.”
I stopped the bellboy and shook his hand.
“I have been unjust,” I replied. “I have been guilty of gross injustice. No man who has not taken a course in navigation and dwelt in these sacred precincts for at least four score years and ten could ever hope to have anything other than the vaguest knowledge of his whereabouts. Together we are lost. Together we must find our way out. If worst comes to worst and we must starve, let us face our sad and respective fates like men.”
Thus encouraging the young man, we proceeded to grope our way along the gallery until after interminable traveling we came upon a very old man sitting in the darkness on a trunk. Probably a victim of the halls, thought I to myself. Some unfortunate person who like myself in his early youth set out from his bed to find a bathroom in this accursed hotel.
“Old man,” I said, “if it needs must be that we share our fate with you, be so kind as to share your trunk with us upon which we can die together at some closely future date. When our parched bones are at last found it is my earnest hope that the finders in decency will erect a monument to commemorate the valor, daring and fortitude of the three unhappy individuals who in the recklessness of their youth once considered it possible to take a bath in a public hotel — not that I know of any private ones,” I added after due deliberation.
“It’s a bath you’re after wanting?” questioned the old man in a melancholy voice.
