Delphi Complete Works of Thorne Smith (Illustrated), page 7
The inn was built on sandy soil. The sea had once been there. If you looked between the trees at moonlight you could see white patches of sand lying in the woods. And if you stood quite still and listened to the wind thrumming through the pines you could catch an echo of waves falling on vanished beaches. The sea had once been there. The rhythm of its surf still lingered in the air, and the healing tang of its salt blended with the smell of pine. All was silent in the woods. Nobody ever came to them now. No couples flitted across the patches, no whispering voices were heard among the trees.
Mr. Topper stood on the back veranda of the inn and gazed into the woods. A breeze, fresh and soothing, filled with a lonesome fragrance, brought peace and a strange excitement to his heart. He felt happy and almost young. He had forgotten about his stomach. It was as if he had withdrawn from the old life and was digging with his toes in new and magic soil. How unreal and far away Mrs. Topper seemed. How delightfully remote from him was everyone he knew. Only Scollops retained her personality. Mr. Topper wanted his cat. Scollops would have loved this place. She would have approved of the rambling old inn with its soft, brown shingles and its long veranda broken by sun-filled angles, ideally arranged for a quiet nap, a warm, sensuous, sun-bathed nap. And Scollops would have found many interesting things in the woods. Mr. Topper unconsciously possessed one of the rarest and most precious faculties of the memory, a graphic and olfactory sense of childhood. He could visualize Scollops stalking between the trees, enter into her little, but intense, curiosities, and smell the things she smelled. There were grasshoppers and ant hills and exciting holes in the trees. What a place for Scollops. Mr. Topper let his eyes travel along the weather-browned side of the old inn. Far away in the distance the checker-board fields cupped down to an indolent river. Mr. Topper did not know the name of the river. He was equally ignorant of its beginning and its end. These things were matters of small importance to Mr. Topper. He did know, however, that the river added another touch of beauty to the landscape. It garnished the general effect. Curving out in a great leisurely horseshoe, it moved between smooth banks, and here and there a tree or two had crept up to its brink to gaze at its pretty limbs in the flowing mirror below. The sky swept down over the world and dropped behind the stepping hills on the highest of which rose the turrets of a castle dating back as far as 1922. Under ordinary circumstances Mr. Topper would have become involved in calculations regarding the probable cost of building such a place, but to-day he was content to accept it as a part of the scene that was filling his eyes with beauty.
“You sort of like it here,” said a quiet voice behind him. “What makes your eyes so sad?”
“I didn’t know they were sad,” replied Mr. Topper, with an uneasy smile. “Perhaps they’ve looked too long on desk tops and plumbing and legs of lamb. Perhaps they’ve looked on loveliness too late.”
“Perhaps they’ve looked on loveliness too late,” Marion Kerby softly repeated. “The world does wicked things to us with its success and routine and morality. Topper, it either cheats us with wealth or numbs us with want, steals away from us all the color and wonder of being alive, the necessary useless things. Only savages and children do proper honor to the sun, and children soon grow up into perfectly rational — —”
“Toppers,” interrupted Mr. Topper rather bitterly. “I know what you’re thinking. Those white duck trousers. I never wore them again, not since the day you said they looked self-conscious.”
There was a flash of laughter in the air and Mr. Topper felt a small hand brush lightly across the top of his.
“There was something wonderful about those trousers,” she said. “Something pitiful, too. Do you know what I mean?”
“Perfectly,” replied Mr. Topper. “The pitiful part was me.”
“No,” she continued. “I mean that they expressed in a futile way the desire to be dashing and picturesque, the need to slip a little beyond life. They were the starched symbol of rebellion. I liked you the moment I saw you in those white duck trousers. You were shifting from foot to foot, rather guiltily, I thought.”
“Don’t go on about those trousers,” Mr. Topper pleaded. “Try to forget that I ever wore them.”
“If it will make you feel any better,” Marion said comfortingly, “I’ll try to forget that you ever wore any trousers at all.”
“You don’t have to go so far as that,” he replied. “You and your husband have taken my dignity, I have only my decency left.”
“Look!” exclaimed Marion. “The sun is sinking behind the castle. How fine it is.”
Topper took a deep breath. His very being seemed to merge with the crazy-quilt of colors streaming across the low sky.
“It is fine,” he said. “The way it fans out above the towers makes me think of Ivanhoe. I don’t know why. There was a girl in it named Rebecca. She was always jumping out of windows.”
“Well, the Rebecca living in that castle isn’t jumping out of any windows,” said George Kerby jarringly, his voice coming from the doorway of the inn. “You couldn’t even push the old dame through. She’s fat, quarrelsome, and very rich. Always falling in love with her gardeners. That’s why she loses them all the time. She’s too tough a bud even for a gardener to pick.”
“George, dear,” Marion remarked in her sweetest voice “you always sound the right note at sunset. It’s a part of your irresistible charm. You’re so deliciously low at all times.”
“Oh, so that’s it,” replied Kerby. “I’m not too low to be collecting wood for a fire. While you two have been idling out here detracting from the natural beauty of the scene, I’ve been looking for stuff to keep you warm outside and in. I’ve been useful and busy while you’ve been useless and — and — —”
“Indolent, supine or loutish,” suggested Marion. “Take your choice.”
“You’re awfully funny,” Kerby retorted.
“Please go away and continue being useful and busy,” said his wife.
“All right,” answered Kerby in a sulky voice, “but if Topper wants anything to drink he’d better tear himself away from that meager-looking sunset and help me hunt. I’ve a good idea that the law didn’t know all the ropes of this cafeteria.”
Topper obediently turned from the sunset. He would much rather have remained with Marion to watch the evening die, but Kerby was a man demanding a man’s cooperation in an enterprise that smacked of devilishness. Topper felt that he could not afford to be found wanting. There was something rugged and masculine about leaving a sunset flat to go in search of grog. He would show Marion Kerby that he was as game for a good time as the next one.
“Are you coming, Marion?” asked Kerby.
“Not now,” she replied.
“Come on, Topper,” said George Kerby briskly, then in a lower voice, “If we find anything to drink we’ll jolly well help ourselves before we let her know.”
He nudged Topper in the ribs and Topper sprang back, startled.
“Pardon me,” he said. “I must have been crowding you.”
Kerby laughed.
“No,” he replied, “I’m merely over-eager. I’m a dead man parched for a drink, an intangible body with a palpable thirst. Search diligently, Topper. We must find a bottle.”
Kerby’s voice trailed away across the twilight of the inn. Topper heard things moving about, felt clouds of dust descending upon his head, saw empty boxes sliding mysteriously through the gloom, and in the midst of this he stood unmoved. The room had taken possession of him. He looked about like a tourist in a tomb.
The vague, slanting roof extending above his head was filled with ancient dusk solidified by cross-beams, great reaching things, rough-hewn and low. High up in a pointed section of the wall a small window strained through its dirty panes the departing light of day. The little shaft of yellow light sifting through the darkness fingered a yawning fireplace, filled with bits of wood and dusted white with blown ashes. From where Topper stood the room on either side of him ran on forever into shadows. Cross-beams and shadows and ebbing daylight — Topper absorbed these elements, but was unable to blend them harmoniously in his mind. He was like a man in a dream, quite willing to accept, but unable to explain.
And as he stood there, in the great dark room, the wood in the fireplace suddenly sprang into flame. Waves of red sparkled over the stones and warmth carved a pocket in the dampness of the place. The cross-beams, caught in the glow of the firelight, twisted and swam in the quivering parade of the flames. Shadows that had once been dead came back to life and trembled rhythmically on the floor. The old inn seemed to sigh and find itself, like a man waxing expansive after a long period of rigorous domestic hypocrisy. Topper edged up to the fireplace and absorbed reassurance from its warmth. He had a feeling that something was taking place in the room, something very near him. An unseen person was breathing heavily almost at Mr. Topper’s feet.
“Topper!” exclaimed a strained voice as a square section of the flooring flew open. “Topper, my heart’s blood, the world is ours.”
Firelight fell into the aperture disclosed by the lifted boards. Little jets of flame danced redly on deep green glass. Golden fire-beams trickled through jackets of spotted straw and girdled the liveried necks of ancient bottles. A box emerged from the pocket and cut a swath through the dust. With a businesslike snap the board settled back into place. Mr. Topper gave a slight start, then smiled nervously in the general direction of his invisible accomplice.
“You’ve found a lot, haven’t you?” said Mr. Topper with false enthusiasm.
“I’ve a good mind to materialize just for to-night,” muttered Kerby in a preoccupied voice.
Mr. Topper drew a quick breath. From where he was standing he had an excellent view of this much discussed phenomenon. It was, if anything, a trifle too excellent a view to suit Mr. Topper. He would have preferred to have witnessed it from the back row of a crowded hall. “Why,” he thought to himself, “should I of all people be privileged to undergo such unpleasant experiences when thousands of spirit hunters would gladly take my place? Why was not Sir Conan Doyle selected? I am not the man.”
Mr. Topper stopped asking himself questions. He became incapable of self-interrogation. An appalling thing was taking place before his eyes. George Kerby’s legs were appearing, quietly and without undue haste, but nevertheless his legs were quite unmistakably appearing. Mr. Topper began to shiver as if caught in a chill wind. With perfect self-possession and unconcern the legs arched up from the floor. With dilated eyes Mr. Topper followed the ribs in the golf stockings and dwelt reluctantly on the crisscross pattern of the trousers. No detail of those legs escaped him. Years after he could have modeled them in clay. Then, quite suddenly, he realized that another section had been added to the legs. It was the central and after part of George Kerby’s anatomy. In a thoroughly detached manner it was flaunting itself in the air. Mr. Topper’s feet began to shuffle wistfully. They wanted to go to the door and be let out, but, before they had time to obey this impulse, they clung to the floor like expiring flounders. Mr. Topper was gazing into George Kerby’s face, gazing into it, not as Mr. Topper would have liked but in a peculiarly upsetting way. Kerby’s face was oddly suspended between his legs, and it was upside down. Mr. Topper had no precedent to follow. Not even in a sideshow had he ever seen a face placed in such a novel position, but this fact seemed to make no difference to the face, for it smiled up at Topper as gayly as if it had been in its conventional location. The wide-mouthed, inverted smile nearly did for Mr. Topper. He found himself unable to return it.
“Oh, dear,” he said, moving back, “oh, dear me, is that the way you’re going to be?”
“What way do you mean?” demanded the face, its mouth wagging snappily in a manner most horrifying to Mr. Topper.
“The way you are,” muttered Mr. Topper. “You know. Is it always going to be like this?”
“Now what the devil’s gotten into you?” asked Kerby, rising to his full height and confronting the troubled Topper with a bottle in either hand. “Can’t a man bend over?”
“My mistake,” replied Mr. Topper, licking his dry lips. “I thought that probably you’d sprained your back in the accident and that . . .”
Kerby cut him short with a laugh and moved over to the fireplace.
“You still believe in ghost stories, I see,” he said, good-humoredly. “Well, I’m all here, every inch of me. Never felt better in my life. Shake. I’m glad you see me.”
“I’m overjoyed I do,” replied Mr. Topper, gingerly accepting the proffered hand. “Would you mind opening one or both of those bottles? A drop of something would help a lot.”
“Topper, I love you,” whispered Kerby, hurrying away in the gloom.
Topper looked consideringly after the retreating figure. He found it rather hard to accept Kerby in his materialized form after having with great difficulty become reconciled to his voice. Topper felt that there was a lamentable lack of stability in his relationship with George and Marion Kerby. They should be either one thing or the other, but certainly not both. It required too swift and radical an adjustment of the mind to be talking with space at one moment and the next to be shaking hands with a perfectly tangible body. After all, a person could absorb only a certain limited number of shocks in a lifetime. Mr. Topper felt that he had already absorbed his full quota.
With the firelight at his back, Topper, his eyes now grown adjusted to the darkness, looked about the room. At one end he saw a gathering of shadowy tables, one table carrying the other on its back as though retreating from the field with a wounded comrade. The legs of the wounded tables formed a forest in the darkness. At the other end of the room a huge, many-caverned sideboard flattened its rugged back defiantly against the wall and waited. It was a sideboard that would stand just so much and no more. After the limit had been reached all the prohibition agents in the world would be unable to make it budge. One more indignity, another outrageously intimate searching of its secret recesses might cause it to fly from the wall and fall on its tormentors. Like the last of the barons it stood guard over the desecrated inn. Dust covered its honorable veneer with a delicate pall, but the old sideboard remained at its post and guarded the room it had so often seen filled with the revelers of a freer generation.
George Kerby was standing in front of the sideboard, diligently rummaging through its drawers. As Topper watched the deftly searching hands he decided that Kerby was bereft of fear and respect. Certainly, no ordinary person could thus casually search through such an imposing piece of furniture. With a low exclamation of satisfaction, Kerby left the sideboard and returned to the fireplace with a corkscrew in one hand and two glasses in the other.
“Hold these,” he said, giving Topper the glasses, “but don’t make any noise. Marion’s really childish about nature. If we don’t disturb her she’ll blither around outside all night and let us peacefully fill our skins.”
With professional skill he extracted the cork from one of the bottles, then filled the glasses and politely extended one of them to Mr. Topper, who was extremely glad to receive it. He was honestly convinced that if any man in the world deserved a drink, he, Topper, was that man. Kerby emptied his glass at a gulp and pulled a couple of boxes within range of the fire’s warmth.
“Take it easy, Topper,” he said. “This Scotch is worth a couple of yards of ectoplasm. Do you get drunk?”
Topper, emerging with a brilliant color from his glass, paused before answering the question. A swift, rollicking revolution accompanied by a pleasant tingling sensation was taking place within him. He felt himself growing lighter and less material. Perhaps he was going to disappear altogether. That would be splendid. Then he would be a spirit, too, like George and Marion Kerby.
“Never had much chance,” he replied, “but I did get drunk once. No one noticed it, so I didn’t have much fun. They were all so stuffy at the party. The kind that know when they’ve had just enough. Then they become heavily jolly and wink at each other with wise eyes. I went to sleep in a hammock. Mrs. Topper doesn’t like drinking, it makes her nervous. I suppose you get drunk most of the time?”
Kerby replenished the glasses before he answered.
“Whenever I get the chance,” he said. “Marion says I’m never sober. And she sticks to it, but of course she exaggerates. The moment I take a drink she begins to remind me about the last time and helps me along by auto-suggestion.”
“It’s really too bad about women,” Mr. Topper answered sympathetically. “They don’t seem to have any sense of proportion at all. If Mrs. Topper should walk into the room right now I’d be forced to speak to her quite pointedly to keep her from raising a row. But I’ve never beaten her,” he went on thoughtfully. “Not yet, I haven’t.
“Thanks, Kerby. This Scotch is delicious. Do you feel like dancing?”
Kerby quickly looked up from his drink. Mr. Topper appeared to be perfectly normal. He was sitting solidly on his box and gazing into the fireplace.
“Do I feel like what?” Kerby demanded.
“Dancing, George,” replied Mr. Topper in a reasonable voice. “Dancing or singing.”
“Certainly not,” said Kerby, shortly.
“That’s odd,” replied Mr. Topper. “I seem to.”
“Well, don’t do it,” Kerby commanded. “You’ll spoil everything.”
“Then let’s each have a bottle of our own,” suggested Mr. Topper. “It will seem more abandoned.”
“Drink up this one first,” said Kerby.
Mr. Topper promptly extended his empty glass.
“Listen, George,” he asked humbly, “if I just sit quietly here by the fire and feel like dancing it will be all right, won’t it?”
