intruder. He flunghimself with all his weight and all his force against Bob Slack's door.It wheezed from the impact, but its stout oaken panels held fast. Whosays the impossible is really impossible? The accumulated testimony ofthe ages shows that given the emergency a man can do anything he justnaturally has to do. Neither by training nor by habit of life nor yet byfigure was Mr. Leary athletically inclined, but a trained gymnast mightwell have envied the magnificent agility with which he put a foot uponthe doorknob and sprang upward, poising himself there upon a slipperedtoe, with one set of fingers clutching fast to the minute projections ofthe door frame while with his free hand he thrust recklessly against thetransom.
The transom gave under the strain, moving upward and inward upon itshinges, disclosing an oblong gap above the jamb. With a splendid wrigglethe fugitive vaulted up, thrusting his person into the clear space thusprovided. Balanced across the opening upon his stomach, half in and halfout, for one moment he remained there, his legs kicking wildly as thoughfor a purchase against something more solid than air. Then convulsivedesperation triumphed over physical limitations. There was a rending,tearing sound as of some silken fabric being parted biaswise of itsfibres, and Mr. Leary's droll after sections vanished inside; andpractically coincidentally therewith, Mr. Leary descended upon therugged floor with a thump which any other time would have stunned himinto temporary helplessness, but which now had the effect merely ofstimulating him onward to fresh exertion.
In a fever of activity he sprang up. Pawing a path through theencompassing darkness, stumbling into and over various sharp-corneredobjects, barking his limbs with contusions and knowing it not, he foundthe door of the inner room--Bob Slack's bedroom--and once within thatsanctuary he, feeling along the walls, discovered a push bulb andswitched on the electric lights.
What matter though the whole house grew clamorous now with a mountingand increasing tumult? What mattered it though he could hear more andmore startled voices commingled with the shattering shrieks emanatingfrom the Braydon apartment beneath his feet? He, the hard-pressed andsore-beset and the long-suffering, was at last beyond the sight ofmortal eyes. He was locked in, with two rooms and a bath to himself, andhe meant to maintain his present refuge, meant to hold this fort againstall comers, until Bob Slack came home. He would barricade himself in ifneed be. He would pile furniture against the doors. If they took him atall it would be by direct assault and overpowering numbers.
And while he withstood siege and awaited attack he would rid himself ofthese unlucky caparisons that had been his mortification and hisundoing. When they broke in on him--if they did break in on him--hewould be found wearing some of Bob Slack's clothes. Better far to bemistaken for a burglar than to be dragged forth lamentably yetfancifully attired as Himself at the Age of Three. The one thing mightbe explained--and in time would be; but the other? He felt that he wasnear the breaking point; that he could no more endure.
XII
He stopped where he was, in the middle of the room, with his eyes andhis hands seeking for the seams of the closing of his main garment. Thenhe remembered what in his stress he had forgotten--the opening orperhaps one should say the closing was at the back. He twisted his armsrearward, his fingers groping along his spine.
Now any normal woman has the abnormal ability to do and then to undo agarment hitching behind. Nature, which so fashioned her elbows that shecannot throw a stone at a hen in the way in which a stone properlyshould be thrown at a hen, made suitable atonement for this articularoversight by endowing her joints with the facile knack of turning onexactly the right angle, with never danger of sprain or dislocation, forthe subjugation of a back-latching frock. Moreover, years of practicehave given her adeptness in accomplishing this achievement, so that toher it has become an everyday feat. But man has neither the experienceto qualify him nor yet the bodily adaptability.
By reaching awkwardly up and over his shoulder Mr. Leary managed to tugthe topmost button of his array of buttons out of its attendantbuttonholes, but below and beyond that point he could not progress. Hetwisted and contorted his body; he stretched his arms in their socketsuntil twin pangs of agony met and crossed between his shoulder blades,and with his two exploring hands he pulled and fumbled and pawed andwrenched and wrested, to make further headway at his task. But thesewing-on had been done with stout thread; the buttonholes were taut andsnug and well made. Those slippery flat surfaces amply resisted him.They eluded him; defied him; outmastered him. Thanks be to, or curses beupon, the passionate zeal of Miss Rowena Skiff for exactitudes, he,lacking the offices of an assistant undresser, was now as definitely andfinally inclosed in this distressful pink garment as though it had beenhis own skin. Speedily he recognised this fact in all its bitter andabominable truth, but mechanically, he continued to wrestle with theobdurate fastenings.
While he thus vainly contended, events in which he directly wasconcerned were occurring beneath that roof. From within his refuge heheard the sounds of slamming doors, of hurrying footsteps, of excitedvoices merging into a distracted chorus; but above all else, and fromthe rest, two of these voices stood out by reason of their augmentedshrillness, and Mr. Leary marked them both, for since he had just heardthem he therefore might identify their respective unseen owners.
"There's something--there's somebody in the house!" At the top of itsregister one voice was repeating the warning over and over again, andjudging by direction this alarmist was shrieking her words through akeyhole on the floor below him. "I saw it--him--whatever it was. Iopened my door to look out in the hall and it--he--was right there. Oh,I could have touched him! And then it ran and I didn't see him any moreand I slammed the door and began screaming."
"You seen what?"
The strident question seemed to come from far below, down in the depthsof the house, where the caretaker abided.
"Whatever it was. I opened the door and he was right in the hall thereglaring at me. I could have touched it. And then he ran and I----"
"What was he like? I ast what was he like--it's that I'm astin' you!"The janitress was the one who pressed for an answer.
For the moment the question, pointed though it was, went unanswered. Themain speaker--shrieker, rather--was plainly a person with a mania fordetails, and even in this emergency she intended, as now developed, topresent all the principal facts in the case, and likewise all theincidental facts so far as these fell within her scope of knowledge.
"I was awake," she clarioned through the keyhole, speaking much fasterthan any one following this narrative can possibly hope to read thewords. "I couldn't sleep. I never do sleep well when I'm in a strangehouse. And anyhow, I was all alone. My nephew by marriage--Mr. EdwardBraydon, you know--had gone out with the gentleman who lives on thefloor above to play cards, and he said he was going to be gone nearlyall night, and my niece--I'm Mrs. Braydon's unmarried aunt fromPoughkeepsie and I'm down here visiting them--my niece was called toLong Island yesterday by illness--it's her sister who's ill withsomething like the bronchitis. And he was gone and so she was gone, andso here I was all alone and he told me not to stay up for him, but Icouldn't sleep well--I never can sleep in a strange house--and just afew minutes ago I heard the bell ring and I supposed he had forgottento take his latchkey with him, and so I got up to let him in. And Icalled down the stairs and asked him if it was him and he answered back.But it didn't sound like his voice. But I didn't think anything of that.But, of course, it was out of the ordinary for him to have a voice likethat. But all the same I went back to bed. But he didn't come in and Iwas just getting up again to see what detained him--his voice reallysounded so strange I thought then he might have been taken sick orsomething. But just as I got to the door a plank creaked and I openedthe door and there it was right where I could have touched him. And thenit ran--and oh, what if----"
"I'm astin' you once more what it was like?"
"How should I know except that----"
"Was it a big, fat, wild, bare-headed, scary, awful-lookin' scoundreldressed in some kind of funny pink clot
hes?"
"Yes, that's it! That's him--he was all sort of pink. Oh, did you seehim too? Oh, is it a burglar?"
"Burglar nothin'! It's a ravin', rampagin' lunatic--that's what it is!"
"Oh, my heavens, a lunatic!"
"Sure it is. He tried to git me to let him in and----"
"Oh, whatever shall we do!"
XIII
"Hey, what's all the excitement about?"
A new and deeper voice here broke into the babel, and Mr. Learyrecognising it at a distance, where he stood listening--but not failing,even while he listened, to strive unavailingly with his problem ofbuttons--knew he was saved. Knowing this he nevertheless retreated stilldeeper into the inner room. The thought of spectators in numbersremained very
The Life of the Party Page 9