Chapter XIII Ringing In
Why the fat Mr. Schmidt from Chicago wanted to go to a dance was a problem that Sam made no serious effort to solve, for in a modern day when neither fat nor age nor bodily infirmity checks the universal human impulse it was of little avail to seek the motive in a given case. You simply go and dance—or think you do—and that’s an end of it, with no questions asked.
The dancing-desires of the fat grain-broker from Chicago had taken him from the American mainland to Wellesley Island, a passage safely accomplished aboard the Fifty-Fifty. And when Schmidt had been set ashore at the wharf-entrance to a hotel-property that blazed with light Sam backed a little way into the river and made fast to a handy mooring.
Boats by the dozen, churning in from all directions passed close to the dingy launch. They were freighted with people, much dressed and wholly abandoned to laughter and chatter.
The boatman watched the procession with close attention. It had a cheering effect upon his loneliness.
“No sense to it—but why should there be?” he reflected. “If it’s not dancing it’s something else just as crazy. I don’t blame ’em. I say, go to it; yes, even Schmidt.”
“Doll up and walk like a duck while the band plays. It’s easy and foolish, and if you do it wrong everybody tries to imitate the new step. Far be it from me to complain. On with the dance!”
Besides, Schmidt paid in cash and paid well—and Sam was not a boatman for his health.
A sharp, incisive voice, clear as a bell across the water, reached his quick ears. He turned in the direction of the sound. Out of the gloom came the shape of a large, white launch, passing close, and inbound for the festivities.
“Of course,” said the voice in a tone of bored protest, “it will not be necessary to meet—persons in general.”
“Not unless you wish to,” the voice was answered by another. “We have our own crowd.”
“That’s something, of course. I hope we shall be able to keep together; I hate a mixture.”
Sam smiled and wrinkled his nose.
“Same old master mechanic,” he murmured. “Royalty going to watch the peasants frolic.”
He watched the Witherbee yacht make the landing, and saw, by the glow of the colored lanterns that bespangled the wharf, a tall, slender figure in white that was not unfamiliar. An instant later it was lost in the crowd.
From the shore came the sounds of a band. The lips of the boatman pursed; he whistled softly. Presently his feet were tapping on the floor of the cock-pit. His shoulders swayed rhythmically to the beat of the music.
“And Reggy—she calls him Reggy—is there,” he murmured as the tune faded away. “And the English gink, too. And the child with the fishing-rod. And they’ll all be dancing with the master mechanic. Huh! Maybe even Schmidt will horn in, too.”
By the feeble light of the lantern that stood on a seat he surveyed his costume and frowned.
“Who said clothes don’t make the man?” he demanded aloud. “They make him dance at any rate. It’s against the rules of the game to do it in rags.”
Through the trees he had brilliantly lighted vistas of a broad hotel-porch, whereon a crowd surged ceaselessly in all directions with but one common impulse—to keep in step with the band. Again Sam’s feet rattled on the flooring, and again his body rocked from side to side.
Then, abruptly, without waiting for the end of the music, he became rigid.
“Why not?” he demanded.
There was nobody to explain.
“Once more, why not? Now is the time for any grain of sense that may happen to be in my nut to speak up, or forever after do the oyster act. I wait—I still wait. I hear no answer. Therefore I have no sense. Therefore—why not?”
He went forward quickly, cast loose from the mooring-buoy, scrambled aft to the engine, cranked it with a nervous jerk at the fly-wheel, and headed out into the river.
For half an hour the launch ran down-stream, passing numerous craft that were obviously bound for the place of the whirling feet.
Sam maintained a close watch upon the procession. He was looking for a particular vessel, and eventually he believed he sighted it, for with a nod of satisfaction he altered his course and bore in toward the cluster of islands that included those of Mr. Witherbee, Mr. Davidson, and their neighbor vigilantes.
Now he extinguished his lantern—he never bothered with port and starboard lamps—and proceeded cautiously into the little archipelago that stood aloof from the other islands in its exclusiveness. Somewhere, probably in a dark shadow near a shore, lurked a patrol-boat.
It was nearly an hour later when the dimly marked hull of the boatman’s launch, still devoid of any light, made its reappearance in midstream and laid a return course for the blaze of lights that beckoned hospitably to the islanders of the St. Lawrence. Opposite the hotel, Sam chose a new anchorage, farther from the shore and comfortably remote from that occupied by any other craft.
He relighted his lantern and chuckled as his glance fell upon a roughly wrapped bundle in the bottom of the boat. Seating himself beside it, he ripped off the paper and brought to view a series of articles that caused him fresh mirth.
First came a tiny mirror not much larger than a pocket-glass. This he propped beside the lantern. Then came a brush and comb, and after them a collar and a soft-bosomed, spotless white shirt. He handled the linen gently with grimy fingers.
Next he produced those three unmistakable garments so persistently demanded in the lower left-hand corner of certain cards of invitation—“evening dress.” And then a pair of shining pumps.
For a minute he studied his bearded visage in the mirror, a scrutiny that ended in a grimace.
“If I took these chinchillas up to the hotel the bouncer would toss me out on my neck,” he muttered. “But I guess I can trim ’em up some. What did I do with the scissors?”
Fumbling among the remnants of the paper wrapper, however, failed to produce the weapon he sought. An exclamation of dismay escaped him as he again inspected his beard.
“Some of it’s simply got to come off,” he told himself sternly. “We’ll try a knife.”
The knife was dull and rusty, while the beard was tough and tenacious. He groaned at the first stroke and barely suppressed a howl at the second. It was a two-handed proceeding, one set of fingers being employed in grasping a tuft of hair, while the other set, grimly gripping the knife, essayed the function of severing the tuft at a point half-way between the tip and the roots.
For several minutes he toiled in agony. Then nature weakly yielded to the pangs of pain and he tossed the knife overboard with an anathema.
“And still people go to beauty-doctors!” he growled, as he surveyed with disgust the meager results of his work.
“I’d singe it down a bit if I was sure it wasn’t inflammable,” he added. “But I’d hate to turn myself into a torch. Besides, I might lose it all, and that won’t do—yet.”
Then came to the boatman, as often to other persons, an idea. He turned to his tool-box and extracted therefrom an instrument which he regarded for an instant with doubtful eyes. Gritting his teeth, he faced the mirror once more.
You can bale out an ocean with a thimble if you have sufficient time and persistence. A task relatively similar is that of trimming a beard with a pair of wire-cutters. Sam set himself to it.
Compared with the operations of the discarded knife, it was happily free from serious pain. But it was mournfully slow. A wire-cutter is designed to sever one wire at a time, so its jaw, though powerful, is short. To the boatman it seemed an almost impossible feat to make the instrument cut more than one hair at a time.
He toiled doggedly, bending close to the little glass and twisting his head into such positions as promised the most favorable opportunity for attack. Patience was finally rewarded with a certain degree of expertness. The beard slowly diminished in length to an extent visible to the naked eye. Whether he was really achieving a Van Dyke he did not dare to guess, but he was at least bringing it to a point at the chin, and was cropping away some of its shagginess on the cheeks.
The mustache was a distinct problem. Twice he caught his upper lip between the jaws of the cutter and—swore.
“There!” he exclaimed at last. “If anybody objects to the effect let him say so at his own risk. Before I’ll trim any more hair with a wire-cutter I’ll let the blamed thing grow until—yes, even until Carrie Catt is President!”
Stripping himself of a gray flannel shirt, he next performed ablutions in a tin water-bucket, alternating soap with sand as he tried to reduce the grime that clung to his hands.
Again the wire-cutter came into play as he manicured his nails. Then there was a new period of torture when he drove the comb through locks that had not been raked for weeks.
To dress was the simplest part of all. He arrayed himself briskly in broadcloth and linen, even submitting patiently to the iron grip of the collar that encircled his neck. His quarters were so cramped that he sat most of the time in order to avail himself of the services of the mirror; but this was an inconvenience that gave him little concern. The worst was over, he reflected, until—
“For the love of Mike!”
That remark was in celebration of the discovery that he possessed every garment of a gentleman save a tie.
He viewed his image with a look of despair. His raiment fitted him astonishingly well, as nearly as he could judge. He had managed to button his collar into place without soiling it. The shirt-front was still immaculate. But no tie!
“You need a nurse,” he told himself glumly. “What are you going to do now?”
Yet even at this catastrophe he would not acknowledge himself beaten.
“I suppose it’s possible,” he muttered, “to go ashore as I am and sandbag a waiter, or even a guest if I can catch one alone. But that has risks, and I don’t feel like taking too many to-night. Any kind of a tie would do; I wouldn’t be particular. Come! Get clever now and invent something. Remember the wire-cutters!”
Twice he made a search of the pockets of his clothes, faintly hoping that one of them might conceal the article he lacked, but his quest was unrewarded.
“Why does a man have to wear a necktie?” he raged. “And if he feels that he positively must wear one is he really a man? Talk about your slaves to fashion! You never see a necktie on a lady—and you never see a gentleman without one!
“Yes, I said ‘gentleman.’ Just a while back I was a man, now I’m a gentleman! Being one of those things, I have to have a necktie. I can’t see that a man’s clothes make anything out of him except a confounded coward.”
Speech ceased suddenly as he spied a white object lying under a seat directly in front of him. He reached for it and held it up to the light.
It was a tiny and very thin square of linen, embroidered at the edges. As he brought it close to his eyes he became aware that it exhaled the faintest possible perfume.
“Bless the ladies!” he exclaimed. “One of ’em—I don’t know which—has left me a handkerchief. We’ll see what can be done.”
With careful yet ruthless hands he tore the linen square into four strips of equal width. These he folded once lengthwise. Next he knotted them together, end upon end. The result was, at least in the semidarkness, something that resembled the necktie of a gentleman.
He grinned at himself triumphantly as he fashioned a bow out of the ends, after passing the strip of linen about his neck. There were frayed edges here and there, but they did not count against the general effect. It was a tie!
The boatman rose to his feet and glanced shoreward. Faintly there came across the water the quick, inspiring notes of a fox-trot.
“Time to hurry, I guess,” he observed as he slipped forward and set the boat loose from her mooring.
As the Fifty-Fifty edged her way gently to the float he stepped out briskly and made the painter fast to a ring. Not until he reached the head of the gangway did he give a thought to a possible difficulty. Then it was forced upon him suddenly.
“Your ticket, sir,” said an attendant deferentially, holding out his hand.
“Ticket?”
“Admission is by card, sir.”
“Oh—of course.” The boatman smiled graciously and waved his hand toward the float. “One of the other gentlemen in my party has the cards. He will be up directly.”
The attendant bowed and Sam passed onward. He did not stop to note that the man at the gangway, after a period of reasonable waiting, peered down at the float and discovered it to be quite empty of persons; nor that the same functionary immediately took a few futile steps in the direction whither the lone guest had gone and strained his eyes in an endeavor to locate the man without a card.
Sam had anticipated these things. He had mingled with the trees and was approaching the hotel, not by the broad path, but by a circuitous route across the lawns.
He paused as he neared the broad veranda and studied the throng. It was an interval between dances; some of the guests were descending the steps to the lawn, which was overhung with paper lanterns. He saw no familiar face.
“We’ll wait till the band plays,” he murmured, “and then we’ll give it a try-out.”
Furtively his fingers groped their way to the tie and found it bravely in place. He shook out his cuffs, smoothed his shirt-bosom, and examined his glistening pumps. Thoughtfully, even a little anxiously, he stroked his beard. Then—
The band again. The boatman strode forward jauntily and made his way to the crowded porch.