Chapter IV

Prepared as Tom was not to have cole slaw for supper, he could not hide his disappointment. Anna had been a good wife to him.

But somehow tonight, when he had brought Arthur Berolston home to supper, his disappointment was particularly keen, for he and Arthur had been discussing cole slaw all the way up East Division Street, across Division Street and through to the southwest corner of Dawson and Margate, where Tom lived, and each had said how much he liked it.

Should he strike Anna for failing him at this juncture? He, Tom Rettle, strike his wife, Anna Rettle? And, even if he should decide to strike her, _where_ should he direct the blow? Tom’s mind was confused with all these questions.

(_Reprint the above paragraph twenty-five times._)

CHAPTERS V-LXXXII INCLUSIVE

TO PRINTER: _With the above copy you will find a brief-case containing newspaper clippings giving the complete testimony of Anna Rettle, Thomas Rettle and Arthur Berolston in the case of_ “ANNA RETTLE VS. THOMAS RETTLE,” _tried in the Criminal Court of Testiman County, September 2-28, 1925. There is also a transcript of the testimony of three neighbors of the Rettles’ (Herman Nordquist, Ethel Nordquist and Junior Nordquist), and of Officer Louis M. Hertzog of the Fifth Precinct. Reprint all these and, at the bottom of the last page, put “THE END.”_

STORM WARNINGS FOR NEW YORK

Anyone wishing to see New York summer shows, or any other New York shows for that matter, had better run like everything. Any day now the walls of the city are going to topple in, and, with a blare of trumpets, the Forces of the Lord are going to smite New York, even as Sodom and Gomorrah were smitten. New York is riding for its Big Fall, and it wouldn’t be surprising if it came around the end of this week.

Probably never before in the history of disrobing (see Taine’s “A Short History of Unhooking and Unbuttoning,” Harpers’, 1897, 1 vol., 345-pp. octavo) have so many young ladies appeared with so few clothes before so many people at once. It is recorded that in ancient Rome the _puellæ_ wore fewer clothes at the annual outings, but their audiences were comparatively small and selected from a list of socially possible people. Today, in the Borough of Manhattan, the young folks appear before a Winter Garden full of practical strangers--that is, they are strangers at the beginning of the show. By the end of the first act, it is as if they had known them all their lives. Just as no man is a stranger (or a hero) to his Swedish rubber, so, by the price of a ticket to “The Great Temptations” you can have at least twenty people in New York whom you know awfully, awfully well. And yet they say that New York is cold and aloof!

All this levity on my part is just whistling past the graveyard. I, personally, am pretty worried. You can push the Forces of Vengeance just so far and then--buckety-buckety--down comes the ceiling. Ask the Sodom Chamber of Commerce. And the worst of it is, that just as the rain sheds its benefits on the just and the unjust alike, the fact that you have been home and in bed every night at ten o’clock isn’t going to help you a bit when your whole city begins to smell as if something was burning and then suddenly goes up in a puff of brimstone. You can’t go out and argue with a Pillar of Fire and explain that you, personally, have been spending your evenings building bookcases. If your town goes, you go too, and no back-talk.

Now, in my case, the prospects are even more depressing, because the job from which I eke out barely enough money to buy gin for my children makes it necessary that I attend the opening performances of all these wrath-provoking shows. I don’t like them. I would never go to see them if it were not for the fact that it is my life-work. Often I sit through them with my eyes shut. But I _am_ unquestionably on record in the office of the Snooping Angel as sitting in D-113 at the Winter Garden. And when they are making out their lists for culprits to be hit on the head by falling walls or swirled up into the skies on a fiery horse with nine heads, my name probably is right there among the “B’s” as a constant and incorrigible attendant at these festivals of sin. The angel probably doesn’t do more than take a look over the audience. You can’t expect him to go to the box-office and see who paid to get in or find out why they are there.

If I get through this summer all right, I am going to hire an assistant. Then, whenever a Shubert show is announced or something called “A Nuit in Paree,” I will slip him the seats and say: “Here, Joe, go and enjoy yourself.” In this way I may be able to escape the extra heavy punishment in store for participants and get out of the general cataclysm with perhaps just a broken ankle or singed eyelashes. It is going to be bad enough for the simple bystanders without getting mixed up in the private showing. The only break that I have ever had in this line was that I was in France at the time of Earl Carroll’s champagne-bath party in New York. When I got back I found my invitation on my desk. If I _had_ been there, covering the affair for my paper, they would have taken flashlight photographs.

And, after all, what fun is there in going to these displays? “The Great Temptations,” for example, probably contains fewer real temptations than a Christian Endeavor convention. The thing is too unreal ever to constitute actual menace. You hear somebody announcing that, if the audience will remain seated, there will now be a parade showing the way parsnips are cooked in all the different countries of the world. Then eight girls walk across the stage, one representing Nell Gwyn cooking parsnips, one Cleopatra, one Thaïs, and so forth. It is very dull indeed, and the fact that the girls are clad as if they were just getting ready to turn on the hot water doesn’t help, or hurt, anything. The whole thing is highly academic, and unless you are interested in the cooking of parsnips, you are going to find yourself looking at your program to see how long it will take to empty the theater with every seat filled. If the Forces of Judgment only knew it, the display of what the advertisements call “feminine pulchritude” is one of the most innocuous of all forms of theatrical entertainment. It is like looking in at a delicatessen window. It is too much.

However, try to tell that to the Watch and Ward Society. Try to convince that great, big old Nine-Headed Horse, when he comes snorting down out of a cloud of fire with a flaming subpoena made out in your name, that these exhibitions bore you. Just say to him, if you can make your voice heard above the thunder and lightning and bellowing rocks, that a show where a nine-tenths naked lady walks across the stage means no more to you than watching the Stamford local go through New Rochelle, and listen to him laugh. Why, you will probably get a million years extra in the biscuit oven just for saying such a thing.

You see, he has heard that line a good many times and he is getting a little tired of it, just as you would, yourself, after the first few million years. He knows that nobody ever will admit that he goes where he shouldn’t because he likes it. Every single time it is a case of being on duty, as you might say; making an investigation for some reform agency, or getting material for a book, or showing an out-of-town customer a good time. Even the out-of-town customer has the alibi that he is just trying to find out whether things are really as bad in New York as the papers have been saying they are. He would much rather have spent the evening writing a report to the firm about conditions in the textile industry, but he didn’t think that he could afford to miss an opportunity to get some first-hand information about the decadence of the present age.

So the only thing that there is left to do, if we are going to save ourselves and the biggest city in the country from a horrible fate, is to stop the Messrs. Shubert from putting on shows like that. And the way to stop them from putting on shows like that is to go to them and say: “Messrs. Shubert, put down that mending for just a minute, I want to talk to you. I am a married man with a family and I have a lot of work that I have to do before I die. I have insurance to pay up and I have a house which has to be painted before it can be sold. Now, you and your shows are leading this whole city into inevitable destruction at the hands of the Forces of Vengeance. No city can go on as New York is going on giving pageants about the twelve different ways of cooking parsnips, without incurring Divine Wrath to a fatal extent. Won’t you, for the sake of the wife and kiddies, put, let us say, a girdle of large hydrangeas on your choruses and perhaps an old-fashioned shawl? Won’t you arrange it so that it won’t be quite so incriminating for a man who wants to go straight to be numbered among the patrons of your entertainments?”

And if the Messrs. Shubert just laugh and go on with their mending or whatever it is that they happen to be doing at the time, the only thing left for me to do, at any rate, is to do my duty without flinching--accept my complimentary tickets, and go to these shows wearing a tin helmet and carrying a letter from my pastor in my pocket against the Day of Judgment.

THE _LIFE_ POLAR EXPEDITION

Mt. Kisco, New York, January 21st.--At a meeting of the older members of the expedition last night it was voted to ask Bobby for his resignation, not in any spirit of anger but simply because it was felt that he wasn’t in sympathy with the aims and policies of those in command. Lieut.-Commander Connelly was elected to inform Bobby and to see that he got his carfare back to Scarsdale.

Bobby had anticipated our action, however, by resigning on his own hook and was already on his way home with one of the Barry children in the Barrys’ car, leaving a note to the effect that he was pretty tired of the whole thing and doubted whether the expedition would reach the Pole at all because of having so many fat men on it.

And so ends the first really unfortunate episode of our trip. As Bobby grows older he probably will acquire more repression and will learn that individual whims must sometimes give way to the common good. I also hope that he starts growing tall pretty soon.

With the discordant element out of the way, the next thing to do was to plan for our hop-off. We still have quite a distance to go before we even get in sight of the Pole and we must be moving. So a meeting was called in the Barrys’ study, to which Mr. Barry was, _ex-officio_, invited, as it was thought that he might have some suggestions. His very first suggestion was excellent; it was, in part, to concoct an eggnog, a hot eggnog. He had some very good eggs, he said, and added that that was one of the advantages of living in the country--you get good eggs. This was voted on, and it was decided that Mr. Barry was right. So the eggnog was made hot and the meeting called to order.

Lieut.-Commander Connelly said that we ought to decide how we were to overcome the retarding action of deep snow on our wheels. We have made several trial spins around the house here, just to see that our cycles were in good order, and found (_a_) that they were not, and (_b_) that even if they had been, the snow would have made any kind of progress at all very difficult. As Lieut.-Commander Connelly said, “It is almost as if someone were actually holding the wheels back!”

From there the discussion got around to cases in which wheels actually _had_ been held back by some unseen force, but nobody had ever heard of such cases. Ensign Thermaline said that he knew of a case once where a man with hypnotic power had put a friend under a spell and made it impossible for him to move his hand away from his face. Mr. Barry asked whose face it was the man’s hand was on, his own or the hypnotizer’s, and Ensign Thermaline said that he had never thought to inquire, but that he could get the man on the telephone in a jiffy and find out. We all said that it would be interesting to know. So a telephone book was sent for and Ensign Thermaline set about looking up his friend’s number.

While this was going on, we got back to the business of the expedition and the question of when we should start on. Our route lies pretty fairly straight ahead of us, on up through Westchester County to Massachusetts, then on up through New Hampshire to Canada, and from there to the Pole. “It ought to be very pretty up around Williamstown at this time of year,” said Lieut.-Commander Connelly. “That’s where Williams College is.” Everyone agreed to this and it was remembered that the Williams song, “The Royal Purple,” has some very neat harmony to it. Furthermore, it was discovered that Mr. Barry sings a very passable baritone, and a baritone is the one thing that our expedition has lacked, for Lieut.-Commander Connelly twists out a very tricky tenor, and with me leading and Ensign Thermaline on a low but fairly accurate bass it began to look as if we might do something worth while after all.

“Here’s a funny thing,” spoke up Ensign Thermaline, still buried in the telephone book. “There are two people by the name of ‘Gepp,’ both living in Jersey City. A ‘Ben F. Gepp’ at 218 Belvidere Ave., and a ‘William A. Gepp’ at 82 Jewett Ave.”

“Probably brothers,” suggested Mr. Barry.

“Not necessarily,” retorted Lieut.-Commander Connelly, a little testily.

“All right; cousins then,” said Mr. Barry, and the threatened hard-feeling was avoided. Mr. Barry would be a very good man to have come along with us to the Pole as he is very conciliatory and diplomatic, and after Bobby we need somebody like that.

As a matter of fact, I suggested to him that he come with us and he said that he really ought to take his family to Cannes in March as he had promised them. But he added that he was almost persuaded to give that plan up and come along with us. I suggested that we go right then and sound out Mrs. Barry on the subject because I was sure that we could make her see the thing in the right light. So we all went upstairs to look for Mrs. Barry, but she was asleep. Lieut.-Commander Connelly suggested a little serenade, on the ground that married women get little or no romance in their lives, and said that if he knew married women at all Mrs. Barry would be very glad to have a serenade sung outside her door, asleep or not. So we did “The Royal Purple” for her, very soft the first time through and then crescendo on the repeat.

Then, at Mrs. Barry’s suggestion, we went to bed.

* * * * *

Transcriber’s note

Minor punctuation errors have been changed without notice. Hyphenation was standardized.

Some illustrations were moved so as to not break up paragraphs.

Spelling was retained as in the original except for the following change:

Page 23: “She though it a” “She thought it a”
Page 252: “the Forces of Vengea ce” “the Forces of Vengeance”