Ptomaine Street by Carolyn Wells
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Carolyn Wells >> Ptomaine Street
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"Are you of the cognoscenti?" asked Faith Loveman of Warble. "I know all
about art but I don't know what I like," she returned, blushing prettily.
"Oh, we'll teach you that. That's what this club is for, to help us to
find ourselves, to give our restlessness an outlet to express the ego in
our cosmos and illumine the dark patches of our souls. We're riding the
pace that kills, living at the tension that snaps, blowing the bubble that
breaks. We need an outlet--a vent--you understand?"
"Yop," said Warble, "your soul pressure is too high."
"But we want it high--we love it high--we're restless--we're keyed up,
taut-strung, and hungry for soul food."
"I s'pose that's the only kind you have at these meetings."
Faith Loveman stared so hard that Warble made a face at her and went home.
* * * * *
She reflected.
"It was my fault. I might have known restless people wouldn't eat. And I
knew I couldn't bite on their restless sex problems. A big one seems to be
how to get thin and how to stay so. They were all ready to drop the high
sign babble for that! But all women are. They took it up again.
"Can I reform them? Or shall I be sucked in, like Italians eat spaghetti,
and my personality absorbed by the Butterflies, till I forswear all I
stand for--all my utilitarian ideals shattered, all my prosaic hopes
dashed, all my common sense wrenched from me, and my poor little brain-pan
filled with the soul-mash of these high-strung sexaphones?"
She ignored Beer's offer to undress her, she ran upstairs to an
unfrequented bathroom, and flinging off her clothes, she got into the tub
and wept in terror, her body a round pink blob in the briny water.
But, thought the poor child, it's the most sensible place to cry.
When Petticoat came home she said:
"Honeybunch, let me in on your professional secrets. Tell me more about
your most interesting cases. It might make me restless."
"Nothing much to tell. Life just one ptomaine after another. Cases all
alike except for the primal cause."
"Well, tell me something. Where've you been just now?"
"Over to Iva's. She had 'em again. Ripe olives. Getting better. Where you
been?"
"To the Restless Sexteen Club."
"Like it?"
"I don't get it. They talk about things that aren't there. But I think I
could make them see--"
"Oh, cut it out, Warble. You'd dust books so hard, you'd dust off the gilt
edges. They're deep-sea thinkers, that bunch--let 'em alone. What'd they
talk about?"
"About a book called 'Painted Shawls' or something, and about Thyco-
Serapy, and about a play called 'The Housebroke Heart.' Take me to see it,
will you, Bill?"
"You wouldn't like it. You'd prefer the movies."
* * * * *
Four days later, Daisy Snow called and gave Warble a jolt or two.
"Huh, sizing me up, are they?" Warble sniffed. "Looking at me through the
footle, distorted little microscope of their own silly scrubby little
souls! Pooh, they couldn't, one of them, make a decent puff paste!"
"But we can get cooks to do that. The Intelligentsia seek for the rare
essence of thought, for colored words and perfumed cadences--"
"There, there, Daisy, don't try me too far! What did Lotta Munn say about
me?"
"Oh, she didn't say much. Just that you're too stout and you haven't any
ideals and you don't know a picture from a hole in the wall, and she
thinks a man like Dr. Petticoat is wasted on you."
"Huh, she used to like Bill herself, didn't she?" "Does yet. She's
poisoned nearly as often as Iva Payne is."
"H'm; anybody else after Bill?"
"Only May Young."
"And you."
"Oh, me! I'm just a debutante. I'm not after anybody yet."
"Well, you keep off my Petticoat preserves! That Big Bill person is mine--
and I won't stand for any nonsense about that."
"My goodness, Warble, I didn't know you had so much spunk. Lotta says you
haven't any."
"She'll find out! Go on, what else did the cats say?"
"They made fun of your party--"
"Oh, my party! That I tried to make so nice and gay and festive!"
"They thought those bathing suits were--er--rather bizarre--"
"I _didn't_ get them out of the Bazar! I thought it all up myself. And
they made fun of it! Go home, Daisy Snow, I've got to reflect."
* * * * *
Like a very small, very spanked child, she crawled upstairs on her hands
and knees.
It was not her father she wanted now, but an old Petticoat ancestor, dead
these two hundred years. Petticoat was dawdling on a _chaise longue_,
absorbed in a small mirror, and wondering whether one more hair out of
each eyebrow would strengthen the arch from a purely architectural
viewpoint.
"What's the trouble?" Warble asked, "broken down arches?"
"Nope, guess they're all right."
"Say, Bill," and she crept into the hollow of his chest, "are folks
talking about me?"
"They sure are."
"What do they say?"
"Well, I hate to stir up trouble, but since you began it, I may as well
own up they think you're just about as lowbrow as they come. And I s'pose
you are."
"Oh, well. And what about the girls? Are they jealous of me?"
"Sort of. Lotta says if you cut her out with Trymie Icanspoon, she'll
elope with me."
"And will she?"
"Not if I reach the ticket office first. Besides, I like Iva better."
"Oh, Bill, don't you love me any more?"
"Course I do, Little Fudge Sundae. But a popular doctor has
responsibilities."
"I know. I don't mean to be unreasonable. But let's keep peace in the
family as long as it's convenient--see what I mean?" "I see. Do you think
I'd like my new pajims better trimmed with frilled malines, or just
decorated with a conventional pattern of gold soutache braid?"
Warble, sitting on the other end of the now separated _chaise longue_ made
no reply, except to scratch her leg a little.
Petticoat yawned, took a stroll round the room, tried on a new dressing
gown, mixed himself a highball, smoked three cigarettes, glanced through
"What the Swell-dressed Man can Spare," wound his watch, put out his
Angora cat, yawned again, sneezed twice, stomped out in the hall and back,
and then went and stood in front of the fireplace, teetering on his heels.
But until he bawled, "Aren't you ever going to clear out?" she sat,
unmoving.
CHAPTER IX
Lotta Munn ran in occasionally. She was of the anecdotal type. The stories
she told made one gasp. They were always prefaced by an "Oh, my dear, I
can't tell you _that_ one--it's _too_ awful!"
Warble didn't care much for these tales, indeed, frequently missed the
point, and laughed purely from a sense of duty.
As she observed to Petticoat, one day, in exasperation, "There are only
two classes of women in this world--women who tell naughty stories, and
women I have never met!"
Also Lotta Munn was by way of being complimentary. She told Warble that
old Leathersham thought her a peach, and that Trymie Icanspoon declared he
was going to make love to her.
That Mrs. Charity Givens had heard she was a great heiress, and meant to
stick her for a new hospital. That Le Grand Paynter wanted to do her
portrait, life size and full width, and that the Reverend Avery Goodman
said she was very light on her feet for a fat woman.
The last made Warble mad and she made a face at Lotta and sent her home.
* * * * *
A rose-colored June day. Meringues of cloud floating on a sky of cerulean
custard.
She crawled out for a walk. It was ninety-eight in the shade, too hot to
run much.
She walked down Ptomaine Street, her nose shining, and pearly drops
chasing each other down her back like rain on a car window pane.
In her tucked white dimity and ankle-ties, her pink sunbonnet and her
tiny, frilled parasol, she was as much out of place in the aesthetic town
as whipped cream on a grapefruit.
She circled the outskirts of the town, and noted the massive and imposing
gateways to the great estates. She knew the grandeur inside, she had been
there. Cubist landscapes, some of them, others were Russian steppes, and
in one instance a magnate was having the ruins of an Egyptian temple
excavated on his grounds, which he had previously with difficulty and at
great expense had buried there.
She did not know what to do about it.
She felt, intuitively, that these men would resent her criticism of their
homes. Yet she couldn't let it go on--this gigantic inutility, this
mammoth lack of practical, efficient management.
Why, the ground sunk in a sunken garden would raise crops enough to feed
an army--and Lord knew how soon they might be needed.
And then she happened to think that reform, like charity should begin at
home, and she decided to start in on Petticoat.
She did.
* * * * *
They were sitting in their home-like Tower of Jewels, and, a bit timidly,
Warble said, "Let's pote quoetry to each other."
Poor child, nervousness or emotion always made her reverse her initial
letters.
"All right," Petticoat returned, good naturedly, "you begin."
Just what Warble wanted! Fate was always good to her.
"I will, because I hope to reform your tastes, dear, and teach you to see
the beauty of simple beautiful poetry. Listen to this:
"Weep and the world weeps with you,
Laugh and you laugh alone--"
"That'll do, Warb. Don't go too far. Now it's my turn. But, you know, dear,
quoting isn't everything. You must learn to dissect, to interpret, and
above all to trace the influences that swayed the poet.
"Now I'll read you a poem picked at random, and then I'll trace the
influences for you."
Petticoat reached out a languid arm, picked up a current magazine and
read:"'FULFILMENT
'Here, at your delicate bosom, let death
Come to me
Where night has made a warm Elysium,
Lulled by a soft, invisible sea.
'Now in the porches of your soul I stand
Where once I stood;
Fed and forgiven by a liberal hand,
My broken boyhood is renewed.
'You are my bread and honey, set among
A grove of spice;
An ever brimming cup; a lyric sung
After the thundering battle-cries.
'You are my well-loved earth, forever fresh,
Forever prodigal, forever fond,
As, from the sweet fulfilment of the flesh,
I reach beyond.'"
Noting that Warble was still awake, Petticoat discoursed:
"In the first line, we note the influence of Swinburne. There could be no
better start out. The Swinburne collocation of delicate bosom and death
is both arrestive and interesting. The third and fourth lines denote the
influence of Poe. To be sure, 'a warm Elysium' sounds like a new and
appetizing soft drink, but that is not what is meant; and the sea is
indubitably the one that sounded around the tomb of Miss Annabel Lee.
"The second stanza opens under pure Tennysonian influences. This may not be
clear at first to the beginner in influence tracing, but it is unmistakably
so to the expert. The recurring sibilants, the sound without sense, the
fine architectural imagery, all point to the great Lady Alfred. The latter
half of this stanza is due entirely to the strong influence of D. W.
Griffith. The poem was, without doubt, written after the poet had been to
see 'Broken Blossoms,' and the liberal hand from which that production
was flung to a waiting world left its ineffaceable finger-prints on his
polished mind.
"Now we come to stanza three. The first line shows the influence of
Mother Goose; the second is an unconscious echo of Solomon's Song; the
ever-brimming cup owes itself to Omar; and the rest of the stanza to Rupert
Brooke.
"Thus we see the importance of widespread reading, and a catholicity of
influences.
"Influence is wonderful! To invent a new simile, it is like a pebble
dropped into a placid lake; the ripples form ever-widening circles, and the
influence of an influence is never wholly lost.
"Perhaps--and this is quite as it should be--the final stanza is the finest
of all. It starts out under the influences of Walt Whitman. Had Walt
been omitted, the whole structure would have tumbled to the ground! No
self-respecting poet now-a-days writes without being influenced by
Whitman. It isn't done. It would be as indiscreet as to appear in one's
shirt-sleeves. The influence of the good, gray Poet _must_ be felt, must be
_shown_, or the budding bard is out of the running. Only a dash of Whitman
is needed--'my well-loved earth' and 'prodigal' are quite sufficient.
"'The sweet fulfilment of the flesh' is a final roundup that gracefully
blends Whitman's and Ella Wheeler Wilcox's influential powers--and,
incidentally, justifies the magnificent title of the poem.
"Then, as a crowning triumph, note the splendid last line, a masterpiece
brought about by the influence of Sir Oliver Lodge and his spiritistic ilk!
Could anything be finer? What imagery for a last line! What a break-off,
leaving the gasping reader in a state of choking suspense, of avid,
ungratified curiosity! A great poem indeed, and influenced by a noble army
of writers.
"Nor is the manner of the thing all that matters. The theme--the great idea
of the whole affair--is a marvelous example of influence. The New York
State Legislature recently passed a bill making attempted suicide no longer
a punishable offense. If successful, it is, like virtue, its own reward.
Indeed, it has to be, for as the Penal Code distinctly states, owing to
the impossibility of reaching the successful perpetrator no forfeiture is
imposed. But the new law lifts the ban from futile efforts in the matter
of self-destruction, and one need not pay the hitherto exacted fine of a
thousand dollars by way of a luxury tax on such diversion.
"Can it be doubted, then, that our Poet read of this new law, and--it may
be unconsciously--was so influenced by it that he devoted sixteen lines of
his precious verse to the expression of his willingness to let death come
to him?"
"I don't blame him for being willing, and I wouldn't put a straw in Death's
way," said Warble, earnestly. "I'm glad you read me that, Bill, for that is
just the sort of thing I mean to eradicate from your system. It's like a
disease, this aestheticism of yours--it's the Culture Ptomaine."
"Now, hold on, Dumpling Dear, do you know a culture from a ptomaine?"
"Oh, I don't mean the cultures you take, I mean Culture with a big C. It's
a poison, and as you cure ptomaine poisoning, I'm going to cure this town
of its deadly art poisoning. I'm in revolt."
"That's right, everybody who is anybody is in revolt against something
nowadays, because our knowledge of the truth is too great for our existing
conditions, and it bursts--"
"Like poor Betsy Binn, who was so very pure within,
She burst this outer shell of sin,
And hatched herself a cherubim!"
Warble interrupted.
"Yes, or as Gertrude Stein puts it: 'It is a gnarled division, that which
is not any obstruction, and the forgotten swelling is certainly attracting.
It is attracting the whiter division, it is not sinking to be growing, it
is not darkening to be disappearing, it is not aged to be annoying. There
cannot be sighing. This, is bliss.' There you see how art is greater than
life--how--"
"Do you think I'm too fat?" Warble again interrupted him.
"I do, my dear. You weren't, I think you are, I know you will be."
"Would you love me more if I were--didn't weigh so much?"
"Yes, in exact inverse ratio."
Warble made an awful face at him, and then she went quietly around behind
him, and dropped down his back a little fuzzy caterpillar, which she had
tied in her handkerchief for that very purpose.
* * * * *
It was her last effort to cure her husband of culture poisoning, but she
was not yet ready to give up her big idea of reforming Butterfly Center.
Warble was a determined little person, and, too, fate often gave her a good
boost, and she thought one was about due.
* * * * *
She went to the Toddletopsis Club, at Lotta Munn's.
Lotta had inherited eight or ten town and country houses, and for the
moment was perched like a bird of passage, on her Roman villa, called Seven
Hills.
Warble's little electric Palanquin rolled through the arch of Constantine
and she ascended the dazzling flight of marble steps to the entrance patio.
"Hello, Pot Pie," screamed Lotta, by way of greeting, "come on in, the
firewater's fine."
It was, and there was lots of it, and a group of long silk-legged
Butterflies were sprawled on the Roman couches, smoking and chatting as
they spun the Toddletops.
Warble was unfamiliar with the teetotum-like things, but the others kindly
instructed her. Moreover, there was a roulette wheel and some other devices
of which our litle heroine didn't even know the name.
Also, there were tables, where those who chose played high-staked bridge,
poker or rum.
Warble wasn't a born gambler. Games of chance had no appeal for her. She
wanted to make faces at everybody and run away. But she scolded herself for
being too superior and forced herself to stay with the bunch.
In a way, she was rewarded, for she won all the money from the others.
Her luck was monumental. Every different game she tried she took all the
stakes, and at last having broken the bank, she was forced to go home for
lack of occupation.
* * * * *
She was a proud and stuck-up chit all the evening.
Trymie Icanspoon called and flirted something fierce. But it didn't mean a
thing to Warble, for the man was so saturated with art that it oozed forth
in his conversation and she had no idea what he was driving at.
He went home thinking she was the most deliciously tempting morsel he had
ever seen and the biggest fool.
* * * * *
"No, I couldn't fall in love with him. I like him, as a gift-book, but he's
no man. Could I kiss him? Not with a real movie kiss.
"They say marriage is a lottery. I haven't drawn much. I mean in the matter
of love. I wish I had a Prince Charming. Bill would do, all right, but he
thinks I'm too fat. I wish I could get thinner--all of them are. Lotta's
like a golf club and Daisy's like a breadstick.
"I s'pose they were born that way.
"I wasn't.
"I wonder when we'll begin to keep a family.
"I'm crazy about Bill--I am--I am--
"Am I?
"All the girls are, too.
"Does he care for them? For any of them? For all of them?
"For that detestable Daisy? That disgusting Iva? That rotten Lotta!
"Oh, I may as well admit it--I just adore Bill!
"This frock is too tight--I must have it stretched.
"Yes, I'm mad over my husband--but--"
* * * * *
She sought Petticoat in his rooms.
She tumbled into his lap, and he pushed her out until he could set aside
the Angora cat and the Airedale and his pet guinea pig, then he said
politely, "Is this your seat?" and she perched on his knee.
"Do you love me, dear?" she asked, her voice full of a dumb pathos.
"Ooooooooooooooooooo! I'm sleepy," he said, with a cavernous yawn and a
Herculean stretch that threw her out on the floor. "Want any money?" She
looked at him. He was not unlike John Barrymore in The Jest, and Warble
fell for him afresh.
"You are so beautiful--" she wailed. "I wish you loved me--"
"I wish I did," he returned, honestly, "but you are such a butter-ball."
"Oh, Butterfly Thenter calls anybody Butter-ball who weights over
ninety-five! If you're so cut up about it I won't live under this roof
another minute! I can earn my own living, and all I want, too! You can get
a divorce and marry some thread of a woman who has ptomaines all the time!"
"Pish, tush, Warb, don't be a damfool! Lay off the melodrama. I do love
you--at least, I love ninety-five pounds of you. Now, will you be good?"
"Yeth."
"And will you try to think of me as a devoted and loving husband, even if
I'm not one?"
"Oh, my dear, I am unjust to you! I will take what you give me--what you
can spare from the little dog and the cat and the guinea pig. And I will be
your own little Petty Warblecoat. And I won't give you over to Iva Payne--I
hate her!"
CHAPTER X
The mail.
The Petticoats rarely received mail. It wasn't done much in Butterfly
Center. So unaesthetic.
On a tray, a lacquered lackey brought a letter to Warble.
A white letter. Large and square--ominously square.
Warble took tray and all and went with it to Petticoat's rooms--the letter
was addressed to him.
She tapped but there was no answer. Listening at the door, she could hear
him splashing in his rock-hewn bath and leaping, chamois-like, from crag to
crag of his quarried bathroom.
She sat down on the floor and waited. Petticoat's toilets were like linked
sweetness, long drawn out.
It was late afternon, before he emerged, fresh, roseate and smiling, and
imprinted a kiss on Warble's cheek that left the red stamp of a lip-sticked
mouth. Warble sometimes thought if it could be arranged as a dating stamp,
she could keep a record of when he had last kissed her.
Poor little Warble--she loved her Big Bill so fondly, and he only looked on
her as something fatter than his dog, a little bigger than his cat. Timidly
she proffered the trayed letter.
"Oh, my Heavens!" and Petticoat smote himself, hip and thigh. "Where
did you get this? Why was I not told sooner of its arrival? To me! And
postmarked Lake Skoodoow-abskoosis! Home of my ancestors! Woman! Why this
delay? _Why_?"
"It came this morning," said Warble, apologetically, "but you were in your
bath, and the door was locked."
"But this is a most important letter. Why didn't you slip it under the
door?"
"I couldn't," said Warble, simply, "it was on a tray."
"As I hoped--I mean, feared--" exclaimed Petticoat, tearing the envelope
from the sheet, "he is dead!"
It made Warble writhe to see the devastated envelope--she always slit them
neatly with a paper-knife--but she was thrilled by Petticoat's excitement.
"A fortune!" he exclaimed. "My revered ancestor, the oldest of the
Cotton-Petticoats, has died and left all his wealth to me! A windfall! Now
we can afford to have a baby and get over the Moorish Courtyard, too! Oh,
Warble, ain't we got fun!"
He danced about the room, in his blue burnous and red tarbush, looking more
like a howling dervish than a tempestuous Petticoat.
Warble thought a minute. A baby would be nice--and perhaps she could reform
that more easily than she could older people.
"All right," she said, "and I'll have beautiful gaternity mowns of
shuffy fliffon--I mean, fliffy shuffon, no--shiffy fluffon--oh,
pleathe--pleathe--"
Warble's tongue always misbehaved when she was excited or embarrassed, but
Petticoat didn't notice her.
"I can send Roscoe Rococo after that Courtyard," he mused, "he'll know. The
last man I sent to Spain for a casemented facade, brought home a temple!
But Roscie knows, and he'll do it proper. I don't want to run over just
now--"
* * * * *
The baby was coming.
Warble reveled in infant layettes and her own layouts for lying in. She
sank deeper and deeper in a sea of baby-clothes, down pillows and orris
powder. Nursery quarters were added to the house, influenced by Lucca Delia
Robbia and Fra Angelico.
Also a few influential Madonnas.
* * * * *
The Butterflies came in with advice. Marigold Leathersham was dubious about
the wisdom of the plan, but brought a pillow of antique rose point, filled
with ostrich plumes.
Mrs. Holm Boddy rushed over with a copy of _Poems Every Expectant Mother
Ought to Know_, and Lotta Munn sent a card of diamond safety pins.
Iva Payne, the hateful thing, sent a Cubist picture of an infant falling
downstairs, but Warble couldn't make it out so its pre-natal influence
didn't amount to much.
Daisy Snow, innocent child, sent a beautiful edition of _How to Tell Your
Young_, a treatise of the bird-and-bee-seed-and-pollen school, and Faith
Loveman sent her own marked copy of _Cooks that Have Helped Me_.
But Warble made a face at them all, and gave their books to the Salvation
Army and read the Diary of Maggot Somebody.
* * * * *
Another fate slather.
The baby was twins.
That was the way things came to Warble--fate in big chunks--destiny in
cloudbursts.
Two little red Petticoats all at once to hang on the ancestral tree.
But Warble was not caught napping. In her efficient way, she had provided
two bassinets, two nurseries--in fact, she had really provided three of
everything, but the third wasn't needed, and she thriftily ordered it put
aside for the present and for the future.
Dr. Petticoat was enchanted.
He saw the children first, asleep in their downy nests, tucked in by the
skilled hands of the staff of trained nurses, and as he gazed on his
offspring, his little tucked and quilted Petticoats, he named them Guelph
and Ghibelline, after two of his illustrious ancestors and ran off at once
to put up their names at various select and inaccessible clubs.
CHAPTER XI
Petticoat had five hobbies. Ptomaines, his collection of pieplates, Warble,
his personal appearance and his Aunt Dressie.
The last was one of the old Cotton-Petticoats, and in her younger days
had been a flibbertigibbet. Was still, for that matter, but she flibbered
differently now.
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