Читать книгу The Jingo - George Randolph Chester - Страница 7

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The class in American worked six hours a day by schedule and the remainder of the time by choice; and, laughing its way roughshod over all such stupid obstacles as grammar and spelling, it made tremendous headway. The king was perhaps the most diligent student of all, if not the quickest learner, his acute interest dating from the moment he knew that Jimmy proposed to make glass.

The instructor, owing to a severe wound in his hip, was confined to his room several solid weeks, and by the end of that time he could converse very freely. If the others did not quite understand every word he said it was their fault; it was their business to catch up, for he had a very decided intuition that he would be busy when he got outside.

"If there's no way out of these all too peaceful surroundings I figure that I'll be about the most active person in the world, outside of the owner of a first automobile," he confided to the king on the day it was decided that he might venture outdoors. "What we want to do first is to take up this glass question. I understand that I came ashore with no valuables but my finger nails. If that's the case, and I can't get away from here, I'll have to earn a living; and when I see what you need my only worry is that I'll become too rich."

"Go to it," laughed the king. "By the way, Jimmy, how do you make glass?"

"I don't know," confessed Jimmy promptly; "but we'll get right together and organize a glass company, and, while we're issuing the prospectus and filling up the subscription list, and holding the preliminary meetings and locating the plant, I'll experiment until I find out. I know you use sand and, I think, some sort of soda."

The king looked pained.

"I thought you knew," he faltered.

"Now, King, just you let me do the worrying," kindly admonished Jimmy. "I may have to spoil a lot of chemicals and have an explosion or two, but I'll get you glass; and it will be good glass, too, after the first dozen or so failures. I promised Betsy Ann a mirror."

"We'll have our glass," said the king, much relieved. "Betsy Ann will make you make good."

"Make good!" repeated Jimmy fondly. "Do you know, King, you've secured a rattling good Nelson hold on American for so short a training? Make good! I don't think there's any finer expression in any language than that. It's the whole essence and spirit of America. It ought to be the national motto, in place of E Pluribus Go Bragh--Oie! Oie! Make good! There's nothing in English like it."

"English?" hesitated the king. "What is that?"

"English," explained Jimmy patiently, "is the dead language upon which American was more or less patterned."

"I see," mused the king. "American, then, is a live language."

"It's so live it can't hold still!" responded Jimmy with enthusiasm. "American is the only live language the world has known for more than a thousand years. It's the verbal symbol of a nation that has ideas so fast it has to invent new words every day to express them. By the way, King," and here he lowered his voice and looked cautiously at all the doors, "do you know where I could get some pants?"

"I do not know that word," admitted the king, regretfully, as Jimmy cast an uncomfortable glance at his shapely legs, each of which was wound spirally in dark red cloth, scalloped in sapphire-blue.

"I'll have to make you working drawings, I guess," decided Jimmy miserably. "You know, King, I don't like to seem rude and ungrateful--let alone fussy; but, honest, I can't wear these things. To begin with, these darn spirals make my legs look crooked; moreover, they seem more or less indecent and, aside from all that, I'm so used to pants that I don't think I could work well in anything else. I just must have pants!"

"I understand," laughed the king, with intuitive sympathy for Jimmy's feelings in the matter; and excusing himself, he hurried away, leaving Jimmy joyfully surprised and hopeful. He returned in a moment or two with a pair of Blue-and-white striped bathing trunks, fresh from the laundry. "We thought that it would be too cold for you to wear them just yet," he apologized.

"Excuse me!" Laughed Jimmy. "I suppose you thought this the national costume of America, and it is for two weeks every summer."

"Well, we did think it"--the king hesitated for a word--"rather--rather piffling."

"Piffling is the exact American phrase," approved Jimmy, holding out the trunks with a grin. "I think there's some class to the way I happened to have these on. When it looked like a mortal cinch--you'll have to get that word 'cinch'; it's handy--that the good ship Kaisertania was going on the rocks, most of the passengers who were not praying for the first time in years broke into their staterooms and loaded their pockets with jewelry and souvenirs; but I'm an egotist, and I never figured that I needed anything but me--so I opened my trunk with my key, in place of breaking the lock, and did a lightning change act into this trapeze outfit. Lying right on top of it was Jones' Handbook of Modern Shop Practise and Revised-to-the-Minute Formulas, thirteenth annual edition, just off the press, and the best reading you ever saw. I grabbed that; and, just before we hit the reef, I jumped overboard."

"There was class to the way you came through those reefs," admired the king. "There have been many wrecks on those rocks; but you were the first person, I believe, to come ashore alive since the founding of Isola."

"I never would have done so if they hadn't been tossing out ballast for half an hour before we hit," asserted Jimmy gratefully. "I grabbed a big stout-looking box, bound with ropes, which rode so high it looked as if it might be air-tight, and I tried to wedge Jones' Handbook under one of the ropes. Did I bring that box with me?"

"It brought you," laughed the king. "Betsy Ann has it in charge. She had it brought up from the cave this morning."

"It's Betsy Ann's," acknowledged Jimmy promptly. "I only borrowed it to come ashore, but I owe it a vote of thanks and I'd like to balance my account. Where is it?"

"In Bezzanna's sitting-room," replied the king. "Let me help you."

"Can't afford it," refused Jimmy, gritting his teeth. "When I'm out of bed I have to be well."

"What is a Jones' Handbook?" asked the king, as they stalked back through the long passage.

"Was it under the rope?" demanded Jimmy, so excited that he forgot to limp. "If that Handbook came ashore I'll make you the wealthiest king who ever dodged a bomb! Was it about this long, and this wide, and this thick?"

The king delightedly acknowledged that it was.

"Then I'll tell you how to make glass and gunpowder and shaving soap and Babbitt metal in about five minutes. Of course, you don't know what the most of those things are; but, as president of the corporations, you'll find out soon enough. By the way, King, what is your last name? I've heard it three or four times, but I needed another ear to get it all."

The king chuckled, and obliged with his name, syllable by syllable--all seven of them. Jimmy listened intently, but after the second repetition he gave it up.

"It's no use, Thanks Old Scout," he commented; "we'll keep that name for Sundays. It's too fussy to be exposed to the weather all through the week. Meantime, you're such a good sport that I know you won't mind if I just call you plain 'king'."

"Go to it," agreed the king in excellent American. "What is Sunday?"

"Holy Moses!" groaned Jimmy. "Now I suppose I have to hand you Sunday; and it's a cinch the formula isn't in the Handbook. I've been missing Sunday already, but I wouldn't undertake to explain what it means until we can take a solid day for it, and cross our fingers and promise not to quarrel. It's too dangerous a subject to start in a casual walk like this. More people have killed one another because of the peaceful and charitable and humanitarian things that Sunday means than for all the other causes of dispute put together. Wait a minute. Is this Bezzanna's room?"

"We're here," laughed the king.

"I feel like a twisted doughnut!" bewailed Jimmy, looking down at his spirally incased legs. "Gee! I wish I'd saved my safety-razor!"

"Cheer up," encouraged the king, and knocked on the door.

Jimmy gave a downward tug at the skirts of his tunic. The door was opened by a mischievous-eyed vision in a delicate pink Grecian robe, who held open in her hand Jones' Handbook of Modern Shop Practise and Revised-to-the-Minute Formulas!

"Hello, Jimmy!" she cheerily hailed her unexpected caller. "Come right in! You've surprised your own surprise party."

Jimmy, followed by the king, advanced into a pale pink room and batted his eyes, for several bewildering things confronted him. Among these were Agilita Haplee, who was tall and slender and had large soulful eyes; and Lulea Birrquay, who was short and dumpy and wore bright red; and Toopy Polecon, of his American class, who was little and lively and was mostly a movement and a flash of white teeth; and Marsoe Grangro, who was big and stately, but tittered; and a colorless girl, with an unpronounceable name, who hid as much as possible!

Never had Jimmy Smith wished for anything so much as at that moment he wished for trousers and a shave. Meantime he waded through the ceremonies of introduction as best he could, and eventually he might have gained his self-possession and have forgotten--at least in part--his barber poles; but the suddenly discovered presence of another bewildering object in the room saved him the perspiring trouble. That astonishing object was nothing less than a shiny, new, nickel-trimmed, drop-head, mahogany cabinet, roller-bearing, exhibition sample, Warbler sewing-machine! He almost hugged it--it seemed so like a face from home.

"Is this yours?" Bezzanna wanted to know, "I just had it opened for you."

"I never saw it before; so it's yours," he assured her, having already clutched Jones' Handbook. "It looks like cabled money to me though. We make all the machinery that the Warbler Sewing Machine Company uses in the manufacture of this machine, in the Eureka Machine Works."

"Fine business!" the princess gleefully rejoined. "Then you're right there with the goods."

He had already seated himself eagerly before the exhibition sample, with the king a quiveringly interested spectator on the opposite side of him; but now he turned shocked eyes on Bezzanna.

"Look here, kiddy," he protested, with a sidelong glance at the girls who could not understand, "you've picked up an awful line of slang."

"Slang?" she repeated. "I don't get you."

"Slang," he carefully explained--"well, slang is the poetry of a man in a hurry; but it's considered rather rough work for ladies in our set."

"I don't know yet why I'm in Dutch," retorted the princess, puzzled; "but I do know that you handed me all the American I use."

"All right--rub it in!" he returned, properly defeated. "I might know I'd get the worst of it; but just the same I see I shall have to give you some advanced lessons in plain and fancy parlor conversation. Meantime I'm going to be polite. I'm going to thank you for not having fussed up with this until you knew whether it was mine or not." He grinned into the shuttle groove, where there was a knotted tangle of oiled thread.

"All right--get back," she permitted him. "I'll admit that I couldn't work it. I know what it's for though. It's to make clothes. I saw that from the pictures." And she spread before him the much-thumbed pages of the Warbler Instruction Book, printed in five languages, but not in Isolian. "But none of them shows me how to fix it so all the thread doesn't curl up down in that little hole."

"I never saw this particular shuttle movement myself; but give me just a minute and I'll pass you a demonstration."

He bent over the machine and extracted the shuttle from its tangle. The brown-bearded countenance of the king came within microscopical range. The air round him grew stuffy, but still Jimmy Smith, blissful in having a piece of accurate mechanism in his hand once more, worked on in profound concentration.

"There!" he exclaimed at last. "I guess that's tied with a pink ribbon and ready to go out on the next delivery. Where's some cloth?" And he looked up to find himself hemmed tightly in by fluffy pink and blue and red and yellow and white robes, and surrounded by six flushed-cheeked, sparkling-eyed and eager girlish faces, with the hand of Bezzanna on the back of his chair, the crook of her arm touching his shoulder, and her head bent so close to his that her curls tickled his hair. He caught his breath rather sharply at that last, but he smiled up at her with a frank friendliness that won the king's instant approval and confidence.

"Some cloth for the professor," Jimmy pompously demanded; and, laughing, Bezzanna ran and brought it--some queerly shaped pieces, the edges of which he placed together and slipped under the needle-foot. He ran the seam half-way down, amid the "Ohs!" and "Ahs!" of the admiring feminine circle; then he broke the needle. He put another one in and threaded it, but Bezzanna drove him away from the machine.

"You don't know how to sew!" she chided him. "I want to do it."

She finished that seam with grace and ease; and as she bent over her work, in a pose most effective for the display of the beautiful curve from the base of her ear to her smooth shoulder, Jimmy Smith wondered what it was that made her so much prettier than all these other girls--or, in fact, than any girl he had ever seen. She was a corker! He hated to admit it; but never, even at home, in the land that produces more beautiful and attractive and delightful women than all the rest of the world put together, had he seen such an amazing collection of beauty selfishly appropriated by one person. Bright as a dollar, too! He was worried about it, until at last he found the right explanation, and then he was satisfied. The original castaways who had founded Isola must have been Americans!

Bezzanna removed the delicate pink satin-finished cloth from the machine, studied the seam with a little frown and an adorable pucker of her rosy lips, and bit off the ends of the thread with her glistening white teeth. She seized a third piece of cloth, put the edges together and inserted them in the machine with an intense interest that showed that she would prefer to do nothing but this for the remainder of the day.

An imploring clamor rose from the bevy of excited girls. It was evident they were begging to sew!

"You see!" triumphed Jimmy to the king. "You and I can't escape from a business opportunity every hour from now on. To-morrow you get me a likely bunch of boys for instruction, and we'll put out subagents right away for the Warbler sewing-machine. You see how the women will eat it up, don't you? We can put one in every family in Isola, even if the lady of the house has to mortgage the plush album to make the first payment. You and I will handle the general agency, the sole labor of which consists in pocketing half the commission; and it won't interfere for a minute with the glass company and the soap factory, or any other of our corporations."

"I get you," responded the king, with equal enthusiasm. "I'm aching so to get busy that my arm hurts."

"Gee! Old Scout, you're a hummer in picking up American!" complimented Jimmy.

Bezzanna finished the second seam, removed her work and held it out proudly for inspection. Jimmy Smith had a queer sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach. That delicately tinted, shiny pink garment was a pair of bathing trunks of about his size.

"Now I'm next!" she exclaimed, turning to him brightly. "I couldn't understand how they made such cute little even stitches in your clothes."

She turned animatedly to the girls and began to explain something; then they all chattered excitedly at once. Suddenly she sprang up from the machine and ran out of the room.

"Betsy Ann!" called Jimmy in agony--but she was gone. He sprang to follow her; but his hip was in no present condition for speed, as it reminded him with a sharp pang. "Stop her, King!" he begged. "If she brings those darn trunks up here I'll cave in!"

"I don't get you," puzzled the king; but he went. The room being cleared of the proprietor, the rest of the girls pounced on that Warbler sewing-machine; and, demanding of Jimmy singly and in groups to be shown, they put it to the extreme speed test, gurgling over it so much that Jimmy fully expected them to send home for their things and stay right there.

The king was the first to return.

"I got away with it," he reassuringly laughed to Jimmy. "I hid them in an empty vase--but I don't see why."

Bezzanna returned by another door.

"Here they are!" she said, glowing with the happy certainty of approbation. "I made them myself, intending to spring them on you the first warm day," and she held out, for his delighted inspection and approval, a pair of light blue bathing trunks, trimmed with pink ribbons and embroidered with dainty butterflies. "Your national costume is so cute!" she bubbled, and turned, with charming effervescence, to the eager girls to show them the creation and to discuss with them the immense superiority of the neat, swift and handy machine-stitch over tedious handwork.

"That settles it!" hissed Jimmy fiercely to the king as he limped to the door. "I have to have pants!"

"Oh, Jimmy!" called Bezzanna, hurrying to him and holding forth the dainty garment. She looked up at him with clear eyes, so full of pleading that they could have compelled him to crack a safe. "Do go and put them on--won't you? I'm dippy to know if they fit, and the girls want to see how you look in them. Why, how red your face is! The room is too warm. Oh, you're all in!" And her tone became so sympathetic that it removed Jimmy's last prop.

"I'm afraid I'll have to lie down again," he miserably lied; and, taking the infernal trunks with such mumbled thanks as he could command, he crawled feebly from the torture chamber and made the king help him get ready to retire. "I hate this confounded bed, but I have to make good!" he groaned as he thumped in to the accompaniment of the king's aggravating laughter. "There's one thing certain!" he savagely exclaimed, as with vigor he propped himself on one elbow. "I want that machine and some plain dark cloth down here to-night; for I'm not going to leave this room again until I figure me out some pants."

"I'll see if I can borrow it from Betsy Ann," chuckled the king. "By the way, Jimmy, if we sell a lot of those machines where are we to get them?"

"By George, I hadn't thought of that!" exclaimed Jimmy, sitting straight up in bed. "Why, that's a cinch!" he added cheerfully after a moment of thought. "We'll organize a company and manufacture them!"