Читать книгу In New York with the Tucker Twins - Emma Speed Sampson - Страница 6

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With much giggling, more like the three girls of fifteen who had just met at Gresham, our boarding school, than grown-up young ladies, we finally composed ourselves on our precarious beds. We had pinned back the stuffy curtains and tucked up the heavy valances and then raised the windows to let in all the fresh night air possible.

“Bed comfy, Page?” whispered Dee.

“Fearsome! I’m going to look like the tramp who went to sleep on the park bench with kinks in him made by the arms. How about you?” I whispered back.

“I’m not asleep!” declared Dum in a loud tone. “No use in whispering. This bed is like an old year-before-last hammock. Either I have to sleep on top of Dee or she has to sleep on top of me. It sags in the middle so. I bet you some three hundred pounder has been occupying this elegant suite before we came here and he got this bed in bad habits.”

“Well we might as well make the best of it,” yawned Dee. “So night, night, and pleasant dreams.”

Sleep did finally claim us and dreams too got in their work though not such pleasant ones as far as I was concerned. There was a jumble of Gresham and Maison Gaston. Miss Plympton and madame seemed to be one and the same with the disagreeable traits of both. I had to recite algebra to Mrs. Grayson who sneered at me unmercifully and finally hit me in the back with her husband’s baseball bat. That was when one of the ruts in the bed got me in an unwary rib. Zebedee, all the time, was trying to help me out but he seemed to be nothing but a little boy with short velvet trousers and a Lord Fauntleroy collar. Afterwards I remembered it was the kind the sickly looking art students wore, who had sat opposite me the evening before.

“Never mind me, go to Tweedles!” I had cried out in my dream. “They are purple in the face from standing on their heads.”

“Help; Help!” Tweedles yelled. (Tweedles was the name the father of the twins had given his daughters when they were spoken of collectively.)

“Zebedee is coming! Don’t let the German spy find the inventions,” was my irrelevant rejoinder.

Suddenly the realization came to me that I was talking in my sleep and talking arrant nonsense. I sat up in my furrowed bed trying to wake up enough to realize that Zebedee was not a little boy in corduroy coat and big lay-down collar and that Mrs. Grayson and no one at all ever could make me study algebra again so long as I should live.

“Page! Page!”

“Help! Help!”

Could I be dreaming sitting up in bed? I pinched my stupid self.

“Let us out!”

Heavens above! It was my room mates. They were in trouble, but what trouble and where? The folding bed! The clamp that looked like a practical joker! I sprang up and ran to the assistance of the twins. The bed had quietly closed itself but thank goodness the girls were standing on their feet somewhere within that mummy case. I grabbed the foot of the bed and pulled with all my might and main. My pull amounted to about as much as a voteless woman who wants to get an appropriation out of the City Council for civic improvements she deems necessary. I must call for help. The girls might smother. Their cries were growing fainter. Even then they might be beyond help.

“Somebody come!” I shrieked flying to the door and letting out a shriek into the quiet, dark halls. “Help! Help!”

“Fire! Fire! The house is on fire!” someone yelled from the lower floor. I thanked the person in my soul. That would get assistance.

There was a commotion on every floor. Lights began to gleam; doors were opened; hurried questions were asked and vague hurried answers given.

“Here! Here! Third floor back!” I cried, lighting the gas.

“Fire?”

“No! Smothered!”

“Oh, it’s out! Those southern girls have put it out,” was the relieved remark made by some female.

“They are not out! Come!” I pleaded.

Mr. Smith, the tall young man who seemed to have a room on our floor, was the first to arrive. He was fully dressed, evidently being a keeper of late hours. Next came M. Durand in a flowered dressing gown; then Mr. Grayson running up two steps at a time. Mrs. Grayson did not appear. Madame Gaston was shouting directions from the bowels of the earth but no one marked her.

“The folding bed!” I gasped as Mr. Smith and the chancelor ran to my assistance. “The twins are shut up in it!”

“Sens dessus dessous?” was monsieur’s horrified question.

“No, right side up!”

“Ah, c’est convenable!”

For the second time that night three persons heaved to on that old bed. Smothered giggles relieved my mind greatly. The twins could not be smothered if their giggles were. Slowly the refractory piece of furniture gave way to our combined persuasion.

Discovered: Caroline and Virginia Tucker lying with hands crossed on their breasts and on their countenances, what they fondly hoped simulated the peace of untimely death.

Just as the bed slowly descended Madame Gaston came puffing into the room.

“Qu’est ce que c’est que ca?”

Mutely I pointed to the recumbent figures. The girls lay looking as much like the “Little Princes in the Tower” as they could.

I was pleased to see real concern on the countenance of our landlady. It would not be good for her business to have two girls smothered in a folding bed in her establishment, even if they were nothing more than third-floor backs.

“Dead!” she gasped.

“No—o! Just—just kind of overcome.”

M. Durand was with difficulty restraining his laughter. I wondered how long I could keep back mine, also how long the girls could hold their position.

“I’ll get some water,” I suggested. I was thankful that some instinct had guided me to slip on my kimona while I was crying for help. I was still barefooted, however, as I hastily ran down the stairs to the bath room, which was on the second floor. I knew perfectly well that those girls did not need water but I felt I should burst if I could not get out of the room a moment and let out a few chuckles. Mr. Grayson and Mr. Smith both offered to go but I was in the hall and half down the steps while they were protesting.

The disturbed boarders had gone back to their rooms when they found out it was not fire. The doors along the halls were all shut except the Graysons’ and M. Durand’s. As I flew noiselessly down the carpeted stairs, my bare feet making not a sound, I was much taken aback to see Mrs. Grayson coming from the chancelor’s room. In her hand she held a roll of papers and on her handsome countenance was an evil leer of triumph.

I crouched down behind the bannisters until I heard her door softly close and then I got the water and returned in great haste.

It was an easy matter to restore the shamming pair to life. A few flicks of cold water and they were quite themselves.

“Brava! Brava!” cried the chancelor. “Bernhardt herself could not improve on it.”

He was careful to say this in an aside as the chancelor evidently held madame in wholesome awe. The lady was busily engaged in closing the windows and unpinning the curtains.

“The night air will kill all of you. The night air of New York is quite as injurious as that of Paris and we all know that in Paris, persons who sleep with the windows up soon lose their eyesight.”

Dum was on the point of protesting but Dee gave her a warning pinch and she desisted. Dee’s policy through life was to let people think they were having their own way as much as possible but go on and have hers nevertheless. Surely it was a much easier matter to wait until madame was gone and then get up and open the window than have a war of words with her on the subject.

We thanked the gentlemen who had so bravely come to our assistance. I suddenly became conscious of the fact that I was barefooted and in decided negligee and Tweedles at the same time pulled the covers closely up under their chins. It was something in the nearsighted eyes of the tall Mr. Smith that made me conscious. The girls said afterwards that they did not like his looks either. His mouth was too red.

Just as our deliverers were departing while madame remained to reprimand us I fancy, the magic bed again began slowly to fold up. The girls shrieked and I hung on to the footboard. The gentlemen turned to come back but madame shooed them out and sternly bade Tweedles to arise while she sat on the dashboard. How I wished it would go up with her but she knew her weight and relied on it.

“I have never heard such a commotion in a respectable house,” she stormed.

“Neither have I,” said Dee coolly. “It is too bad you should not have had the bed repaired before you put us in it. Suppose we had been the children you say you expected—what would have become of us? I have no doubt you would have been arrested for infanticide. If we had not had the sense to sleep with our heads to the foot we would have been seriously injured. It is no joke to be awakened from a sound sleep to find yourself standing on your head in an airtight compartment. You have no right to put anyone in such a death trap.”

When Dee got started there was no stopping her. She was a most tactful good tempered girl, but when she felt herself to be abused or realized that fraud was being practiced she was exactly like her father who let no man walk over him. Madame actually seemed to shrink up. She began to weep and sobbed out something about being a widow and every one taking advantage of her.

“No one is taking advantage of you,” continued Dee. “Our father wrote engaging board for my sister, my friend and me. You seemed in your correspondence glad enough to get us. We come. You treat us with scant courtesy; give us one room when he wrote for two; put us in folding beds that are thoroughly uncomfortable and unsanitary; you do not warn us that there is danger of this one’s folding up when it is occupied. You send a young gentleman who is calling on us up to our bedroom when you know perfectly well it is not the proper thing to do. He is a gentleman and we are ladies so it has made no difference but I shall ask you in future to send us a message when we have callers and if it is the custom of the house for your boarders to see their guests in their rooms we shall of course conform to it, but we do not wish to have any and everyone sent to our room without notice.”

“Certainement, mademoiselle!” it was a very crestfallen madame who meekly let herself out of our door and crept downstairs.

“Dee, you are a wonder!” I exclaimed.

“I should have made the old brute sit on the footboard all night so we can get some sleep,” yawned Dee, but Dum was already busy with trunk straps. She fastened the leg of the big bed to the leg of the small one.

“United we fall, divided we arise,” she said as she viewed her ingenious device. Once more the windows were raised and we crept to rest, committing our souls to our Maker and bodies to the folding beds.