by B. M. Bower
He swallowed twice. “Aw, yuh don’t want to go and feel bad about it; I never meant—I’ll do anything yuh ask me to.”
“Thank you. I knew I could count upon you, Jack.”
The schoolma’am recovered her spirits with a promptness that was suspicious; patted his arm and called him an awfully good fellow, which reduced Happy Jack to a state just this side imbecility. Also, she drew a little memorandum book from somewhere, and wrote Happy Jack’s name in clear, convincing characters that made him shiver. He saw other names above his own on the page; quite a lot of them; seven in fact. Miss Satterly, evidently, was not quite as destitute of friends as her voice, awhile back, would lead one to believe. Happy Jack wondered.
“I haven’t quite decided what we will have,” she remarked briskly. “When I do, we’ll all meet some evening in the school-house and talk it over. There’s lots of fun getting up an entertainment; you’ll like it, once you get started.”
Happy did not agree with her, but he did not tell her so; he managed to contort his face into something resembling a grin, and retreated to the hotel, where he swallowed two glasses of whiskey to start his blood moving again, and then sat down and played poker disasterously until daylight made the lamps grow a sickly yellow and the air of the room seem suddenly stale and dead. But Happy never thought of blaming the schoolma’am for the eighteen dollars he lost.
Neither did he blame her for the nightmares which tormented his sleep during the week that followed or the vague uneasiness that filled his waking hour, even when he was not thinking directly of the ghost that dogged him. For wherever he went, or whatever he did, Happy Jack was conscious of the fact that his name was down on the schoolma’am’s list and he was definitely committed to do anything she asked him to do, even to “speaking a piece”—which was in his eyes the acme of mental torture.
When Cal Emmett, probably thinking of Miss Satterly’s little book, pensively warbled in his ear:
Is your name written there,
On the page white and fair?
Happy Jack made no reply, though he suddenly felt chilly along the spinal column. It was.
“Schoolma’am wants us all to go over to the schoolhouse tonight—seven-thirty, sharp—to help make medicine over this Santa Claus round-up. Slim, she says you’ve got to be Santy and come down the stovepipe and give the kids fits and popcorn strung on a string. She says you’ve got the figure.” Weary splashed into the wash basin like a startled muskrat.
The Happy Family looked at one another distressfully.
“By golly,” Slim gulped, “you can just tell the schoolma’am to go plumb—” (Weary faced him suddenly, his brown hair running rivulets) “and ask the Old Man,” finished Slim hurriedly. “He’s fifteen pounds fatter’n I be.”
“Go tell her yourself,” said Weary, appeased. “I promised her you’d all be there on time, if I had to hog-tie the whole bunch and haul yuh over in the hayrack.” He dried his face and hands leisurely and regarded the solemn group. “Oh, mamma! you’re sure a nervy-looking bunch uh dogies. Yuh look like—”
“Maybe you’ll hog-tie the whole bunch,” Jack Bates observed irritably, “but if yuh do, you’ll sure be late to meeting, sonny!”
The Happy Family laughed feeble acquiescence.
“I won’t need to,” Weary told them blandly. “You all gave the schoolma’am leave to put down your names, and its up to you to make good. If yuh haven’t got nerve enough to stay in the game till the deck’s shuffled yuh hadn’t any right to buy a stack uh chips.”
“Yeah—that’s right,” Cal Emmett admitted frankly, because shyness and Cal were strangers. “The Happy Family sure ought to put this thing through a-whirling. We’ll give ’em vaudeville till their eyes water and their hands are plumb blistered applauding the show. Happy, you’re it. You’ve got to do a toe dance.”
Happy Jack grinned in sickly fashion and sought out his red necktie.
“Say, Weary,” spoke up Jack Bates, “ain’t there going to be any female girls in this opera troupe?”
“Sure. The Little Doctor’s going to help run the thing, and Rena Jackson and Lea Adams are in it—and Annie Pilgreen. Her and Happy are down on the program for ‘Under the Mistletoe’, a tableau—the red fire, kiss-me-quick brand.”
“Aw gwan!” cried Happy Jack, much distressed and not observing Weary’s lowered eyelid.
His perturbed face and manner gave the Happy Family an idea. An idea, when entertained by the Happy Family, was a synonym for great mental agony on the part of the object of the thought, and great enjoyment on the part of the Family.
“That’s right,” Weary assured him sweetly, urged to further deceit by the manifest approval of his friends. “Annie’s ready and willing to do her part, but she’s afraid you haven’t got the nerve to go through with it; but the schoolma’am says you’ll have to anyhow, because your name’s down and you told her distinct you’d do anything she asked yuh to. Annie likes yuh a heap, Happy; she said so. Only she don’t like the way yuh hang back on the halter. She told me, private, that she wished yuh wasn’t so bashful.”
“Aw, gwan!” adjured Happy Jack again, because that was his only form of repartee.
“If I had a girl like Annie—”
“Aw, I never said I had a girl!”
“It wouldn’t take me more than two minutes to convince her I wasn’t as scared as I looked. You can gamble I’d go through with that living picture, and I’d sure kiss—”
“Aw, gwan! I ain’t stampeding clear to salt water ’cause she said ‘Boo!’ at me—and I don’t need no cayuse t’ show me the trail to a girl’s house—”
At this point, Weary succeeded in getting a strangle-hold and the discussion ended rather abruptly—as they had a way of doing in the Flying U bunk-house.
Over at the school-house that night, when Miss Satterly’s little, gold watch told her it was seven-thirty, she came out of the corner where she had been whispering with the Little Doctor and faced a select, anxious-eyed audience. Even Weary was not as much at ease as he would have one believe, and for the others—they were limp and miserable.
She went straight at her subject. They all knew what they were there for, she told them, and her audience looked her unwinkingly in the eye. They did not know what they were there for, but they felt that they were prepared for the worst. Cal Emmett went mentally over the only “piece” he knew, which he thought he might be called upon to speak. It was the one beginning, according to Cal’s version:
Twinkle, Twinkle little star,
What in thunder are you at?
There were thirteen verses, and it was not particularly adapted to a Christmas entertainment.
The schoolma’am went on explaining. There would be tableaux, she said (whereat Happy Jack came near swallowing his tongue) and the Jarley Wax-works.
“What’re them?” Slim, leaning awkwardly forward and blinking up at her, interrupted stolidly. Everyone took advantage of the break and breathed deeply.
The schoolma’am told them what were the Jarley Wax-works, and even reverted to Dickens and gave a vivid sketch of the original Mrs. Jarley. The audience finally understood that they would represent wax figures of noted characters, would stand still and let Mrs. Jarley talk about them—without the satisfaction of talking back—and that they would be wound up at the psychological moment, when they would be expected to go through a certain set of motions alleged to portray the last conscious acts of the characters they represented.
The schoolma’am sat down sidewise upon a desk, swung a neat little foot unconventionally and grew confidential, and the Happy Family knew they were in for it.
“Will Davidson” (which was Weary) “is the tallest fellow in the lot, so he must be the Japanese Dwarf and eat poisoned rice out of a chopping bowl, with a wooden spoon—the biggest we can find,” she announced authoritatively, and they grinned at Weary.
“Mr. Bennett,” (which was Chip) “you can assume a most murderous expression, so we’ll allow you to
be Captain Kidd and threaten to slay your Little Doctor with a wooden sword—if we can’t get hold of a real one.”
“Thanks,” said Chip, with doubtful gratitude.
“Mr. Emmett, we’ll ask you to be Mrs. Jarley and deliver the lectures.”
When they heard that the Happy Family howled derision at Cal, who got red in the face in spite of himself. The worst was over. The victims scented fun in the thing and perked up, and the schoolma’am breathed relief, for she knew the crowd. Things would go with a swing, after this, and success was, barring accidents, a foregone conclusion.
Through all the clatter and cross-fire of jibes Happy Jack sat, nervous and distrait, in the seat nearest the door and farthest from Annie Pilgreen. The pot-bellied stove yawned red-mouthed at him, a scant three feet away. Someone coming in chilled with the nipping night air had shoveled in coal with lavish hand, so that the stove door had to be thrown open as the readiest method of keeping the stove from melting where it stood. Its body, swelling out corpulently below the iron belt, glowed red; and Happy Jack’s wolf-skin overcoat was beginning to exhale a rank, animal odor. It never occurred to him that he might change his seat; he unbuttoned the coat absently and perspired.
He was waiting to see if the schoolma’am said anything about “Under the Mistletoe” with red fire—and Annie Pilgreen. If she did, Happy Jack meant to get out of the house with the least possible delay, for he knew well that no man might face the schoolma’am’s direct gaze and refuse to do her bidding,
So far the Jarley Wax-works held the undivided attention of all save Happy Jack; to him there were other things more important. Even when he was informed that he must be the Chinese Giant and stand upon a coal-oil box for added height, arrayed in one of the big-flowered calico curtains which Annie Pilgreen said she could bring, he was apathetic. He would be required to swing his head slowly from side to side when wound up—very well, it looked easy enough. He would not have to say a word, and he supposed he might shut his eyes if he felt like it.
“As for the tableaux”—Happy Jack felt a prickling of the scalp and measured mentally the distance to the door—“We can arrange them later, for they will not require any rehearsing. The Wax-works we must get to work on as soon as possible. How often can you come and rehearse?”
“Every night and all day Sundays,” Weary drawled.
Miss Satterly frowned him into good behavior and said twice a week would do.
* * * *
Happy Jack slipped out and went home feeling like a reprieved criminal; he even tried to argue himself into the belief that Weary was only loading him and didn’t mean a word he said. Still, the schoolma’am had said there would be tableaux, and it was a cinch she would tell Weary all about it—seeing they were engaged. Weary was the kind that found out things, anyway.
What worried Happy Jack most was trying to discover how the dickens Weary found out he liked Annie Pilgreen; that was a secret which Happy Jack had almost succeeded in keeping from himself, even. He would have bet money no one else suspected it—and yet here was Weary grinning and telling him he and Annie were cut out for a tableau together. Happy Jack pondered till he got a headache, and he did not come to any satisfactory conclusion with himself, even then.
The rest of the Happy Family stayed late at the school-house, and Weary and Chip discussed something enthusiastically in a corner with the Little Doctor and the schoolma’am. The Little Doctor said that something was a shame, and that it was mean, to tease a fellow as bashful as Happy Jack.
Weary urged that sometimes Cupid needed a helping hand, and that it would really be doing Happy a big favor, even if he didn’t appreciate it at the time. So in the end the girls agreed and the thing was settled.
The Happy Family rode home in the crisp starlight gurgling and leaning over their saddle-horns in spasmodic fits of laughter. But when they trooped into the bunk-house they might have been deacons returning from prayer meeting so far as their decorous behavior was concerned. Happy Jack was in bed, covered to his ears and he had his face to the wall. They cast covert glances at his carroty top-knot and went silently to bed—which was contrary to habit.
At the third rehearsal, just as the Chinese Giant stepped off the coal-oil box—thereby robbing himself miraculously of two feet of stature—the schoolma’am approached him with a look in her big eyes that set him shivering. When she laid a finger mysteriously upon his arm and drew him into the corner sacred to secret consultations, the forehead of Happy Jack resembled the outside of a stone water-jar in hot weather. He knew beforehand just about what she would say. It was the tableau that had tormented his sleep and made his days a misery for the last ten days—the tableau with red fire and Annie Pilgreen.
Miss Satterly told him that she had already spoken to Annie, and that Annie was willing if Happy Jack had no objections. Happy Jack had, but he could not bring himself to mention the fact.
The schoolma’am had not quoted Annie’s reply verbatim, but that was mere detail. When she had asked Annie if she would take part in a tableau with Happy Jack, Annie had dropped her pale eyelids and said: “Yes, ma’am.” Still it was as much as the schoolma’am, knowing Annie, could justly expect.
Annie Pilgreen was an anaemic sort of creature with pale eyes, ash-colored hair that clung damply to her head, and a colorless complexion; her conversational powers were limited to “Yes, sir” and “No, sir” (or Ma’am if sex demanded and Annie remembered in time). But Happy Jack loved her; and when a woman loves and is loved, her existence surely is justified for all time.
Happy Jack sent a despairing glance of appeal at the Happy Family; but the Family was very much engaged, down by the stove. Cal Emmett was fanning himself with Mrs. Jarley’s poppy-loaded bonnet and refreshing his halting memory of the lecture with sundry promptings from Len Adams who held the book. Chip Bennett was whittling his sword into shape and Weary was drumming a tattoo in the great wooden bowl with the spoon he used to devour poisoned rice upon the stage. The others were variously engaged; not one of them appeared conscious of the fact that Happy Jack was facing the tragedy of his bashful life.
Before he realized it, Miss Satterly had somehow managed to worm from him a promise, and after that nothing mattered. The Wax-works, the tree, the whole entertainment dissolved into a blurred background, against which he was to stand with Annie Pilgreen, for the amusement of his neighbors, who would stamp their feet and shout derisive things at him. Very likely he would be subjected to the agony of an encore, and he knew, beyond all doubt, that he would never be permitted to forget the figure he should cut; for Happy Jack knew he was as unbeautiful as a hippopotamus and as awkward. He wondered why he, of all the fellows who were to take part, should be chosen for that tableau; it seemed to him they ought to pick out someone who was at least passably good-looking and hadn’t such big, red hands and such immense feet. His plodding brain revolved the mystery slowly and persistently.
When he remounted his wooden pedestal, thereby transforming himself into a Chinese Giant of wax, he looked the part. Where the other statues broke into giggles, to the detriment of their mechanical perfection, or squirmed visibly when the broken alarm clock whirred its signal against the small of their backs, Happy Jack stood immovably upright, a gigantic figure with features inhumanly stolid. The schoolma’am pointed him out as an example to the others, and pronounced him enthusiastically the best actor in the lot.
“Happy’s swallowed his medicine—that’s what ails him,” the Japanese Dwarf whispered to Captain Kidd, and grinned.
The Captain turned his head and studied the brooding features of the giant. “He’s doing some thinking,” he decided. “When he gets the thing figured out, in six months or a year, and savvies it was a put-up job from the start, somebody’ll have it coming.”
“He can’t pulverize the whole bunch, and he’ll never wise up to who’s the real sinner,” Weary comforted himself.
“Don’t you believe it. Happy doesn’t think very often; when he does though, he can
ring the bell—give him time enough.”
“Here, you statues over there want to let up on the chin-whacking or I’ll hand yuh a few with this,” commanded Mrs. Jarley, and shook the stove-poker threateningly.
The Japanese Dwarf returned to his poisoned rice and Captain Kidd apologized to his victim, who was frowning reproof at him, and the rehearsal proceeded haltingly.
That night, Weary rode home beside Happy Jack and tried to lift him out of the slough of despond. But Happy refused to budge, mentally, an inch. He rode humped in the saddle like a calf in its first blizzard, and he was discouragingly unresponsive; except once, when Weary reminded him that the tableau would need no rehearsing and that it would only last a minute, anyway, and wouldn’t hurt. Whereupon Happy Jack straightened and eyed him meditatively and finally growled, “Aw gwan; I betche you put her up to it, yuh darned chump.”
After that Weary galloped ahead and overtook the others and told them Happy Jack was thinking and mustn’t be disturbed, and that he thought it would not be fatal to anyone, though it was kinda hard on Happy.
From that night till Christmas eve, Happy Jack continued to think. It was not, however, till the night of the entertainment, when he was riding gloomily alone on his way to the school-house, that Happy Jack really felt that his brain had struck pay dirt. He took off his hat, slapped his horse affectionately over the ears with it and grinned for the first time since the Thanksgiving dance. “Yes sir,” he said emphatically aloud, “I betche that’s how it is, all right and I betche—”
The schoolma’am, her cheeks becomingly pink from excitement, fluttered behind the curtain for a last, flurried survey of stage properties and actors. “Isn’t Johnny here, yet?” she asked of Annie Pilgreen who had just come and still bore about her a whiff of frosty, night air. Johnny was first upon the program, with a ready-made address beginning, “Kind friends, we bid you welcome on this gladsome day,” and the time for its delivery was overdue.