Turnabout

by Thorne Smith

  “Oh, Maggie’s perfectly harmless,” replied the orderly. “We’ve had her with us for years. She’s a sort of privileged character. She wanders from ward to ward. Nobody seems to mind.”

  “I mind terribly,” said Mr. Burdock. “I most strenuously object to Maggie. She may be a privileged character, but not with my neck.”

  At an early hour they were unstrapped and fed. Then Tom Burdock was given a heavy flat weight attached to a broom handle, and told to push it up and down the linoleum which ran the entire length of the ward.

  “My God,” protested Burdock. “This hall is so damned long I don’t even see the end of it. I’ll drop from sheer exhaustion before I’m halfway through.”

  “Better send Maggie along with him to keep him from getting lost,” suggested Sally.

  Without further protest the employer of five thousand souls set off on his long trip. Sally was set to work emptying buckets, a most uncongenial task. Whenever their paths chanced to cross in the course of their humiliating occupations the two friends’ expressions were eloquent. They were weary, strained, and disgusted. Sally looked especially wan.

  “Would you believe it?” demanded Mr. Burdock. “Me with this damn thing. Pushing it. And in such a get-up.”

  “I suppose I look quite natural,” remarked Sally bitterly.

  “You have all your life before you,” replied Tom Burdock.

  “And a sweet little bit behind,” retorted Sally. “You’ve made history for me, Tom Burdock.”

  By ten o’clock in the morning both of them were convinced that they had been up an entire day. An attendant flung two bags at them and told them to clear out. Neither one of them ever achieved again such speed in dressing as they did that morning. Even then the operation seemed interminable to them. Both were knotting their neckties as they marched down the hall. Once in the open air they breathed with voluptuous enjoyment. Never had life seemed quite so desirable. A taxi took them to the Grand Central. Sally was taking no chances.

  “I’ll fix it up with the hotel,” she assured Mr. Burdock. “I’ll pack your bags myself and see that they’re sent along.”

  “You’re a great little scout, Willows,” said the large man. “What a time we’ve had, eh?”

  “I’ve enjoyed every minute of it,” Sally replied with a grin. “Every jolly old minute. Wouldn’t have missed one of them.”

  “The same here, you liar,” said Mr. Burdock. “We’ve had a nice, quiet time. Going to tell my wife all about it.”

  They were standing on the long platform now and Sally was watching Tom Burdock with anxious eyes. A white-jacketed porter stepped out of a Pullman and greeted Mr. Burdock with a dazzling display of even whiter teeth. Mr. Burdock returned the salutation in his large, friendly style. Evidently he was well known on this line. Sally had no desire to linger over the farewells. She wanted to see her charge disappear into the train and the doors shut against his return.

  “Don’t forget America’s Sweetheart,” she told him.

  “You mean Maggie?” asked Burdock, with a slight shudder.

  “Herself,” replied Sally.

  “Never,” said Mr. Burdock. “I’m going in now and collapse in a chair. Do I look all right?”

  “Surprisingly well, considering what you’ve been through.”

  So departed Mr. Burdock from the city that had so disastrously misunderstood his playful intentions. Sally stood on the platform until the train pulled out, then she hurried to the nearest telephone and made a full report to a congratulatory Mr. Gibber. An hour later she caught a local to Cliffside, hoping there to enjoy a much-needed rest. She never did. Not on this occasion, at any rate.

  The excitement started when she was wearily crossing Springfield Avenue on her way home from the station. Speaking accurately, the excitement must have started elsewhere. It merely reached its highest point of activity in and around the spot where Sally was standing. It was first brought to her attention by a bitter fusillade of bullets and the sharp reports of an exceedingly loquacious revolver. As inured as she had become to the unexpected, Sally was nevertheless somewhat disturbed. She was more so when she saw Mr. Carl Bentley, clad in a dripping wet union suit, approaching her at great speed. Close behind Mr. Bentley, and covering ground much too rapidly for a prospective mother, came the metamorphosed Tim, diligently pumping an old service automatic. And close behind Tim were two leaping state troopers, their faces eloquently expressing incredulity and determination. It must have been a moment of supreme humiliation for Mr. Bentley, but the Don Juan of the suburbs seemed to have tossed all considerations of shame and modesty to the winds as being impediments to flight.

  Catching sight of a person he erroneously believed to be the husband of his murderously inclined pursuer, Mr. Bentley crouched behind Sally and pleaded for protection.

  “A terrible mistake,” he managed to get out between gasping breaths. “She suddenly went mad. Speak to her, Mr. Willows, I’m too young to die.”

  This settled Mr. Bentley’s hash forever with Sally.

  “You were never too young to die,” she told the cringing man. “You should never have been allowed to get as far along as you have.”

  Tim, held firmly by the two state troopers and talking loosely about his purely hypothetical honor, was hustled up to the spot.

  “I’m afraid, Mr. Willows,” said one of the troopers to Sally, “I’ll have to ask you to accompany your wife and this—this—” The trooper seemed to be having difficulty in classifying Carl Bentley. Tim helped him out.

  “Nasty-minded craven,” he supplied, then added several unladylike epithets.

  “Madam!” said the trooper reprovingly.

  “To hell with you,” snapped Tim. “If the two of you hadn’t butted in this bum would have been a corpse by now.”

  “May I ask what all the shooting’s about?” Sally put in mildly.

  “That’s what we want to know,” said the other trooper. “Come on down to the police station and we’ll try to find out.”

  “If you want to know,” remarked Tim, “it’s all about this damned honor of mine.”

  He slipped an arm through Sally’s and winked wickedly up at her. Sally was undecided whether she would prefer to lose her honor privately or her reputation in public. Ahead of them, held with unnecessary brutality, Carl Bentley in his dripping union suit proceeded down the street.

  In, virtually, any part of the civilised world this little procession would have occasioned comment. In Cliffside it did more than that. Even to this day it is a subject of conversation that increases in dramatic intensity with the passing of the years. Carl Bentley’s dripping union suit is still as fresh in the memory of those who had been privileged to witness the incident as when that unfortunate gentleman had first sprinted grotesquely down Springfield Avenue.

  Chapter 13

  The Baiting of Mr. Bentley

  Mr. Ram should never have done the thing he did. But, then, one never can tell about Egyptians. Especially with old Egyptians. With new Egyptians it’s different. Nobody knows just what a new Egyptian is. One can’t very well dig up a new Egyptian. Old Egyptians are much easier to get to know. They seem to have had a quaint idea of humor. Like Mr. Ram.

  There was no sense in giving Tim Willows the body of a woman and leaving him the mind of a man. It was a flagrant example of perverted sorcery, and just what one would expect from an old Egyptian, an old and cynical Egyptian deeply steeped in all the more exasperating phases of the black arts.

  One may say that in the case of Mr. Ram there were extenuating circumstances. Perhaps there were. No one enjoys less than an old Egyptian being forced to listen to the constant bickerings of a married couple. An occasional row is diverting, but a daily diet of recrimination and vain regrets wears on one’s nerves and saps one’s moral fiber. Even at that Mr. Ram might have tried something a little less drastic. For example, he could easily have made Sally dumb and Tim deaf or vice versâ. It would not have mattered much just how he went about
it. But, seemingly, Mr. Ram did not choose to act reasonably in the matter. Probably he decided that the only way to get these two unreasonable persons to understand him was to be thoroughly unreasonable himself. Either that or he suddenly lost his temper after long years of provocation, and did the first thing that popped into his head. He might have figured it out this way: Give people what they ask for and then wait and see what they make of it. Both Tim and Sally had made a mess of it. But Tim had made a bigger mess of it than Sally. Perhaps a woman is more adaptable than a man. She must be if there is any truth in the rumour that from a mere rib—an unsightly object at best—she developed into the complicated creature of curves and nerves she represents to-day. You would never catch a man allowing a thing like that being done to him. If the process had been reversed and the rib extracted from Eve’s side, that rib would have hemmed and hawed and argued and compromised until there was not a bone left in the poor woman’s body. Men are like that. They have a fine sense of dignity. No real man would be willing to run the risk of having his wife turn on him suddenly and cry: “Shut up, you mere rib.” A man would not stand for that, but a woman would. A woman will stand for anything so long as she gets the best of the man. Eve did not care a snap of her fig leaf about being Adam’s rib, whereas Adam would have put up an awful howl had the tables been turned or the ribs reversed. Eve knew perfectly well that as soon as she got working properly, that is, as soon as she had developed her curves and acquired her nerves, Adam would forget all about the rib part of it and try to get familiar. Men are even more like that. In a paroxysm of nervous hysteria she forced the apple on Adam, saying he never liked anything she picked, then with a skillful use of her curves she got the best of him as she had all along known she would even when a mere rib. And that must have been about the way of it. Adam never had a chance. Neither had Tim Willows. Nor Carl Bentley, for that matter. Certainly the latter had no chance at all when he was so ill-advised as to call on one he mistakenly supposed to be the delectable Sally Willows on the same day when that young lady in her husband’s aching body was seeing the last of Tom Burdock.

  Tim, thoroughly convinced that his condition justified a little self-indulgence, was lolling in bed with his morning paper and a cigar when Mr. Bentley, like the astute snake in the grass he was, telephoned to ascertain if the coast was clear. Tim answered the call in Sally’s most affected voice.

  “Hello. Who’s speaking?” he asked.

  “Sally, is that you?” came the low inquiry.

  Tim’s face darkened, but his tones remained just as dulcet. He had recognized Mr. Bentley’s hateful voice. “Oh, dear,” he said vibrantly, emitting the while a cloud of pungent cigar smoke. “It’s ages since I’ve seen you.”

  At the other end of the wire Mr. Bentley was beginning to feel better and better. He liked to keep his women feeling that way.

  “You said it, baby,” he replied, in that whimsically slangy way of his that proved so effective with women. “Is it all right for me to come round now?”

  “But Carl, dear,” protested Tim, smiling grimly, “baby’s still in bed.”

  “Then I’ll hurry right over,” said Bentley. “Don’t trouble to get up for me.”

  “What a man!” exclaimed Tim coyly as he viciously jabbed the receiver down on its hook. “I’ll make him pay for this,” he continued to himself as he sprang from the bed. “By God, I’ll make him wish he’d never been born a man. One of these birds who refuses to learn a lesson. All right, I’ll teach him. Thinks I’m at work, does he? Ha! I’ll make him sweat.”

  Opening a bureau drawer he examined his automatic to see if it was properly loaded, then, dressing rapidly, he deluged himself with perfume and hurried downstairs.

  When Carl Bentley arrived a few minutes later and found his prey already up and dressed, his face eloquently expressed his disappointment.

  “You needn’t have gone to all that trouble for me,” he said. “I’ve often been received by ladies in bed.”

  “Especially when their husbands are safely out of the way at their stupid old offices,” put in Tim with a wicked smile.

  Mr. Bentley smiled back fatuously and approached Tim with carnal intent.

  “I took a day off from my office just for this opportunity,” he said in a low voice. “Are you going to make it worthwhile, Sally?”

  “What do you think?” asked Tim teasingly, then added to himself, “You low-lived louse, you’ll get more than you ever expected in your wildest dreams.”

  As Bentley’s eager arms enfolded him, Tim managed to lock one foot back of that gentleman’s heel, then, as if in a frenzy of passion, he hurled himself suddenly against the opposing chest and let gravity claim its own. It did. Carl Bentley went down with a crash, landing painfully on the sharp edge of a footstool. At the same moment Dopey lumbered in from the kitchen and, seeing a man in an apparently helpless condition, immediately attacked him. Bentley emitted feeble cries of fear and suffering as Tim clumsily strove to disengage the gallant dog’s teeth from the prostrate man’s trousers. Eventually Tim succeeded, but not without leaving a nice big V-shaped rip. Everything was going splendidly. Tim had not counted on the collaboration of Dopey. He appreciated the dog’s intervention. Kneeling down by the writhing figure he proceeded to scold it playfully for being so easily thrown off its balance. Carl Bentley’s vanity was challenged. He rose weakly from the floor and hobbled over to a chair, into which he tenderly eased his injured torso.

  “I know,” he complained, “but I wasn’t expecting an assault. You pretty nearly ruined me.”

  “I’m that way,” murmured Tim with downcast eyes. “You make me lose my self-control and then I don’t know what I’m doing. Anything might happen. You’ll have to protect me against myself, Carl dear.”

  Carl dear had no such intentions, but he did resolve to protect himself a little better against Sally in the future.

  “What am I going to do about my trousers?” he asked, looking ruefully at the rip.

  “I’ll sew that up after you’ve taken them off,” said Tim, then added hastily, “Oh, dear, what have I said? What could I have been thinking about? Do forgive me, Carl. Of course you don’t have to take off your trousers.”

  “But I will if you think it best,” replied Mr. Bentley quite willingly.

  “I think it best,” Tim said decisively.

  Before Mr. Bentley had time to reply to this one Tim undulated from the room and mixed a huge cocktail composed of medicated alcohol. He had tried the stuff once himself in a moment of desperation and as a result had become violently and lingeringly ill.

  “Sorry I can’t join you,” he said enviously when he had returned to Mr. Bentley, “But it’s the doctor’s orders. I’m off the stuff for a month, maybe longer. I’ll just snuggle up close to you and watch you enjoy yourself. If you don’t like that cocktail I’ll know you don’t love me and I’ll turn you out of the house.”

  The doomed man tossed down the proffered cocktail, then his face became a horrid thing to see. It looked all smeared and twisted. Nevertheless, remembering Tim’s words about turning him out of the house, he contorted his lips into a grimace of a smile and tried to give the impression he had swallowed wrong. For several moments he feared he was going to strangle to death. His eyes began to rove desperately round in their sockets as he wheezily sought to entice some air down the sizzling reaches of his seared throat.

  “Delicious,” he said at last in a husky voice, wiping the tears from his eyes. “What do you call the thing?”

  “I call it a Rub-down Special,” was Tim’s proud reply. “It’s so soothing inside. Now you can have just one more and then you’ll have to be a good boy. I wouldn’t think of letting you make love to me if you kept on drinking.”

  “As a matter of fact,” Mr. Bentley stated, “I think I’ve had about enough already. I don’t enjoy drinking alone, and”—here he made a weak attempt to smile alluringly—“I’d much rather make love to you.”

  “I guess one more w
on’t do you any harm,” replied Tim, in a voice just a little too gruff for Sally’s. “If you don’t take it I’ll not like you one little bit.”

  Once more the crippled hero of many liaisons subjected himself to the brutal punishment of a Rub-down Special, thinking as he did so that whatever favors he received at the hands of his hostess would be well earned indeed. Shortly after the consumption of this second cocktail he faintly asked to be excused for a moment to enable him to brush up a bit. When he dragged himself back to the room Tim had the satisfaction of beholding a wan and haggard Mr. Bentley. The man sank wearily into a chair and made revolting noises in his throat.

  “Did the doctor tell you especially not to drink those cocktails?” he asked after he had rested for a moment.

  “Yes,” replied Tim innocently. “He said the things would kill me if I kept on drinking them. He claimed I was poisoning myself.”

  “Can’t see that,” declared Bentley gamely. “They seem mighty fine to me.”

  “You’re a regular old darling,” cried Tim, slapping the enfeebled man so appreciatively on the back that he was forced once more hurriedly to leave the room. This time when he swayingly returned Mr. Bentley was unquestionably not in the pink. Still, he hoped against hope for better things. The fair object of his foul ends seemed to have noticed nothing. It was an odd thing, though, how everything seemed to go wrong whenever he entered the Willows’ house. There seemed to be a curse on the place. Again he sank into a chair and made some more queer noises, this time apologizing profusely for his little lapses.

  “What you need,” proclaimed Tim, “is a little fresh air. That’s what we both need. I’m going to take my great big beautiful man for a nice walk and after that—ah-ha, what then?”

  The great big beautiful man allowed himself to be bundled into his overcoat and pushed with playful vigor out of the front door. In some mysterious manner he missed his footing on the top veranda step and a moment later found himself sprawling at the bottom of the flight. Two stout matrons of Cliffside had the pleasure of witnessing Carl Bentley’s grotesque debacle. Too dejected to put up a pretense, he lay on the walk with his head cocked at an awkward angle on the bottom step and looked at the two passing matrons from out of his dim, unseeing eyes. In the back of his throbbing mind a suspicion was growing that all these things could not happen to a man without there being some directing force, either human or supernatural, behind them. However, the sympathy and consternation so eloquently expressed on the face that Tim was wearing as he helped the fallen man to his feet dispelled such unworthy doubts.