Ptomaine Street by Carolyn Wells

Author:Carolyn Wells
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pronoun

* * *

Warble was certain she was a great reformer.

Yet would these reformed people stay reformed?

True, they were now in the spirit of her party, Mack Sennett himself couldn’t have asked a better interpretation of his own vital principles. But had they come to realize that this after all was the real thing, the true ideal?

Warble feared.

* * *

They were a stuck-up lot. The fly-paper had intrigued them all. Not only were they all half-soled with it but the merry wags had decorated the ladies’ bare backs and the men’s coated backs, until all looked like sandwich men or peripatetic ragpickers.

Trymie Icanspoon crowned Mrs. Charity Givens with a fresh sheet of tanglefoot and Warble hilariously made a foolscap of another for the Rector’s bald head. Judge Drinkwater folded Daisy Snow’s two little hands together, then wrapped them tightly in fly-paper, and shook with laughter to see her futile attempts to get free.

“Naughty man!” she cried, “to make poor little me so helpless!” With a spring she flung her entangled hands over the Judge’s head, and hung round his neck like a pretty little millstone.

Warble relaxed, and found that she was shockingly tired and very hungry.

But she was the stuff of which true reformers are made and Martin Luther had nothing on her.

Then Beer came tripping in with a pile of varicolored garments which she held up to view.

“These,” Warble announced, “are the real Mack Sennett costumes. They are one-piece bathing suits, I got them from an importer of contraband goods. You are to put them on in place of your clothes. And please forget that you are Butterflies and turn into bathing beauties and champion swimmers.”

While they were shyly getting into the suits, she donned her own, a little scalloped apron effect, with cross-strapped sandals, and a silk bandanna knotted round her head.

She glanced about and saw Big Bill Petticoat beaming with proud glee at his wife’s social success, and looking lovely himself in a black satin one-piece, with jet shoulder straps.

For a second Warble could see only Petticoat’s pink cheeks and perfected eyebrows. Then she shook off the spell and keyed up.

“We’re going to have an obstacle race,” she announced, “all over the house. You must follow me, wherever I go. I shall lead you a dance! And then I shall come last to the lake in the front hall, and whoever is nearest me there, will be rewarded.”

Yet even as she spoke, she overheard Trymie whispering to Iva Payne, “Yes, I believe that the new art era into which we are now slipping, will worship beauty for itself alone, and that art, sublimated by—”

She turned away, sick at heart.

Why bother, her tortured soul cried out. Yet the irrepressible impulse of reform egged her on and it was a perfectly good egg.

She flew past Petticoat, only pausing to shout, “Like it all, my tramp? Yes, it is an expensive party.”

Then she led her followers a mad race. Sliding down banisters, squeezing into dumb waiters; crawling under beds and out the other side; jumping in and out again of bathtubs full of perfumed water.

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