Читать книгу The Jingo - George Randolph Chester - Страница 8

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Toopy Polecon and Tedoyah, whom Jimmy Smith had rechristened Teddy because of his expansive teeth, came racing up the terrace to where Bezzanna sat against one of the prancing stone goats which ornamented the approach to the big stone palace, and they jerked her unceremoniously to the ground.

With silent scorn for the extreme silliness of children of the absurdly young ages of seventeen and sixteen, she quietly climbed up again and leaned her waving and curling brown hair against the golden yellow of the goat. Not finding the exact comfortable spot which she had previously enjoyed, she shifted her head until she found it, and noting that her russet-brown robe trailed gracefully against the yellow of the stone, she folded her hands upon her lap, and cast her gloomy gaze down across the valley, at nothing in particular.

With the vivid green of the spring-time waving beside her, and a dash of scarlet at her throat, she was far too richly colored to be the extreme picture of melancholy she had meant to appear, and after a moment of puzzling over her present pose, Toopy and Teddy jerked her down again.

"Come on, Betsy Ann," begged Teddy. "We've had a violent quarrel about a hole in the ground. I say it's a snake-hole--"

"It isn't. It was made with a stick," interrupted Toopy with much vim.

"Bring the hole here and I'll tell you what it is," offered Betsy Ann without a trace of a smile, and started to climb back on her perch.

"I'm afraid we'd break it," retorted Teddy, and was angry because nobody snickered.

"Come on, please!" begged Toopy, regarding her friend with wistful eyes. "Tedoyah's dreadfully dull when you're not with us. What's the matter?"

"I want to think," replied Bezzanna gloomily.

"What about?"

"Nothing."

"I know," blurted the exasperated Teddy. "She's angry with Jimmy."'

"It isn't true," denied Bezzanna coldly. "People have to be worth while for one to be angry with them."

"Then why did you burn up the two extra costumes you had started to make for him?" demanded Tedoyah.

"I didn't feel like finishing them," was the lofty reply.

Toopy's black eyes snapped, but she was a wise little lady and she kept her tongue behind her teeth; however, she slyly nudged Tedoyah, and that reckless person walked straight into the fire.

"It's because he didn't wear the butterfly suit," he gleefully accused her. "It's because he borrowed your sewing-machine to make some for himself. It's because he has shut himself up for two days now, and won't see anybody but brother and me. It's because--"

Bezzanna jumped down to the steps and started with frigid determination toward the front door.

"Wait!" called Teddy, intuitively scared. "Where are you going?"

"To feed the goats."

Toopy was surprised to see the intrepid Tedoyah turn pale.

"My cherry cakes!" he gasped, and started after his sister. "Don't, Bezzanna! You only baked them for me this morning, and I haven't tasted one of them yet."

Hearing Tedoyah coming after her, Bezzanna broke immediately into a run, dashed through the little door at the side of the big ones, slammed it after her and tried to bolt it, relinquished that idea when she felt Tedoyah's resistless weight on the outside, flew up the stairs and back toward her own sitting-room, where she had her own strictly personal and private amateur oven built into the side of her own fireplace.

Tedoyah, with Toopy a close third, caught up with her just in front of Jimmy's door, which the king had, at that moment, abruptly opened, and all three of the young people stopped aghast, all other interests forgotten in the amazing sight which met their eyes! Jimmy Smith, squatted on the floor at his open window and looking intently into a basin of water, had his face covered with some white substance streaked with red, and was scraping it off with a remarkably bright knife.

"What's he doing?" asked Toopy in breathless horror, as the king closed the door from the outside.

"Shaving," answered the king solemnly. "It means removing the hair from the face. Jimmy is a remarkable man. He tells me that, from a close study of the bearded nations, he has discovered that their virility all runs to whiskers." The king looked about his audience gravely, immature as they were; for he had a serious matter on his mind. "Jimmy strongly urges me to remove my beard, but it seems to be a very painful and dangerous process, for he has already cut himself three times, and has used several American words which I do not yet understand. I think that I shall learn them; however, for they seem to be very useful, and to give him a great deal of satisfaction."

"How does he do it?" inquired the awestricken Toopy, to the great gratification of Bezzanna, who was dying to ask the same question, but would not.

They had, all of them, by this time, descended the stairs, and now they walked out on the big stone terrace, Teddy reflecting, with a guilty grin, that this lucky interruption had probably saved his cherry cakes.

"Shaving requires, first of all, a very sharp knife," explained the king, pondering on the mysteries to which he had been a recent witness. "Jimmy refused both the gold and the silver ones I offered him, and took instead coarse iron which before my own eyes he turned into steel. After he was through with all his heating and cooling operations the knife was so hard that, when he dropped it, a corner of it broke off!"

"I don't see anything so remarkable in that," commented Bezzanna disdainfully.

"Nothing remarkable?" reproached the king. "You don't understand. Steel is now the most valuable metal in the kingdom. I tremble lest something might sometime happen to Jimmy."

"Please, how does he shave?" pleaded Toopy, whose patience was well-nigh exhausted.

"That part of it was simple enough, when he once had a knife which would cut a hair," replied the king. "He merely boiled one of the roots which we rub on our hands when we wash, and rubbed the suds well on his face, to soften the hair, and sliced it off. I presume one gets used to it. He says that he will get a better edge on the next knife, and make me what he calls a safety-razor."

"I hope you are not thinking of shaving," instantly objected Bezzanna.

"I don't know," mused the king. "There seems something so clean about it.

"If you do I'll never kiss you again," declared Bezzanna. "Do you want to look like a boy?"

"You don't approve of it, then?" guessed the king in surprise. "Why I thought you liked Jimmy's beardless face."

"I like a man to look like a man," she stonily maintained.

"Don't you get the bug that friend Jimmy isn't all man!" promptly defended Tedoyah. "He's some Jimmy, if you'll leave it to me!"

"Can no one talk of anything but Jimmy?" demanded Bezzanna. "I hear nothing else but Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy, from morning till night! By the way, brother, how--how do they look?"

The king looked at her puzzled for a moment, and then he laughed.

"You mean his trousers?"

"Pants;" corrected Teddy.

"No, he assures me that trousers is the correct indoor word," insisted the king.

Bezzanna waited for him to say more. Toopy also waited, and glanced at her friend. The princess was starting to walk away, with much dignity.

"How do they look?" asked Toopy.

The king checked a chuckle.

"He is coming down as soon as he washes his face, and you may judge for yourselves."

The door opened and Jimmy Smith came among them, a fine-featured gentleman--except for the recent scars which were now four--erect and clear-eyed and ruddy-faced, and clad in the cap and tunic of a fastidious Isolian to well below the waist; but from there down fastidiousness ceased.

The girls gave one awestricken glance, then giggled, then ran, and, long after the flash of brown and the flash of red had disappeared amid the shrubbery, they could be heard shrieking!

Jimmy looked down at his own sartorial creation with extreme disfavor.

"I know they're rotten," he disconsolately observed. "They're as bad as if they had been made by an exclusive London tailor; but I never had a hope that they would create this much sensation."

"They're not as cute as I expected them to be," criticized Teddy with much interest. "Ought they to bulge in front that way?"

"It isn't exactly Fifth Avenue," admitted Jimmy ruefully. "I carved them out by guesswork, and sewed them up by instinct, and they turned out with the going part where the coming part ought to be. Do they look better when I walk backward?" and he tried it.

"They look worse when you move in any direction," decided the king.

"Just the same, I'm going to stick with them," announced Jimmy firmly. "They at least keep me from feeling like a pair of five-cent-counter corkscrews."

"They have one thing in their favor," admitted the king judicially, having in mind his duties as a host; "they can be put on or removed much more quickly than our garments."

"They are the crowning invention of civilization," stoutly maintained Jimmy. "Let's get busy, boys. You promised to show me the workshop, and then to take me out for a squint at your natural resources: Do you know that, before we start manufacturing, or even organizing companies, I may have to invent a currency system for you? I haven't seen any money since I'm here, nor heard anybody talk about it and I'm lonesome."

"I had intended to speak about that," hesitated the king with a worried air, as they walked back toward the stables. "Of course we have a medium of exchange, as you called it the other night, but I have almost none of it, and I do not see how I can invest in all the business enterprises you have suggested."

"Invest!" exclaimed Jimmy, both shocked and pained. "Why, how did you get the idea that you and I were to invest anything? That isn't the American way. We're the promoters, and it's a promoter's business to get other people to put up all the money in exchange for forty-nine per cent. of the stock. The promoter's share is fifty-one per cent. of the profits, most of the credit, and all the fun."

"Is that quite fair to the investor?" wondered the king.

"Certainly," Jimmy promptly assured him. "The investor isn't entitled to more, for he only furnishes the money."

"I think I get you," replied the king slowly. "A man who only has money is not held in very high esteem in America."

"Well, pro rata," amended Jimmy, cautiously. "The real principle is that, if a man is entitled to more, in America, he gets it; and if he doesn't get it he isn't entitled to it."

They paused before the door of a long, one-story, stone building with frequent wide windows, but the king was too deeply interested in this startlingly new code of ethics to go in for a moment.

"Isn't there danger of selfishness behind that system?" he objected.

"The same that there is in a foot race," explained Jimmy earnestly. "Somebody's bound to get left. That's the blessing of every competitive system. If you don't keep on running you might as well not start."

The king looked at him in smiling speculation as he threw open the door.

"If Americans are all like you it can't be such an entirely selfish nation," he decided at last cordially.

"I'm only a moderate specimen," loyally affirmed Jimmy. "I wouldn't, for a glimpse of Broadway--and that's being extravagant if you only knew it--have you collect the idea that Americans are a race of sordid dollar chasers. I let them make me believe that when I was a kid, but when I got abroad and saw the things that men would do for a lira or a franc or a shilling, I was tickled stiff to come home where the price was at least a dollar. Dollar chasers? Why, there's no land in the world where they care so little for money, and have so many principles and ideals they won't sell, as in the good old U. S. A.!"

"You seem to think America's some country," laughed the king.

"I'm so strong for it I'm a voluntary nuisance!" emphatically declared Jimmy.

"Strong?" puzzled the king. "That means muscular, doesn't it?"

"That's it exactly," corrected Jimmy earnestly; "muscular. This looks like a handy shack," and he stepped inside the big dark building. "Throw open a window or so, Teddy, and let's pick out a place for the main shafting."

When the flood of light came in, he looked around him with joy.

"This was formerly King Xantobah's main stable," said the king. "He kept the hundred best donkeys in Isola here."

"We'll make it the nursery for a hundred infant industries," promised Jimmy, inspecting with approval the well-packed earthen floor, the heavy stone walls, the numerous windows and the solid rafters.

"Well, look who's here!" exclaimed Tedoyah at the end window.

Up the beautiful winding road from the valley to the park there came, with a jangle of bells, a glittering procession that made the rest of the world seem drab. Ahead, on a tall donkey with golden tassels on its ears, rode a man in a scarlet cloak with a golden helmet, from which flaunted a brilliant bunch of pheasants' tails, and in each hand he carried, its lower end resting upon his stirrup, a long spear, to the paint of which was attached an orange banner embellished with a goat. Behind this human flame came six smaller men on smaller donkeys, but all black-bearded, all scarlet-coated, carrying smaller spears and smaller banners, and flaunting a single pheasant's tail. Following these came eight donkeys caparisoned in scarlet, and drawing a coach of scarlet and gold, embellished with silver goats' heads. On the driver's seat were a gorgeously liveried coachman and footman, and on the scarlet cushions, in stiff state, sat a black-bearded man, attired in modest gold-filigreed gray, with ruffles of soft white lace at his neck and wrists. In the rear of this carriage were four outriders still in the scarlet, but without spears.

"Why didn't you tell me there was a circus in town?" demanded Jimmy; "or is it a street show, or maybe a lodge parade?"

No one answered him.

"Against my express wishes," observed the king to Teddy, in Isolian, as both the brothers stood together at the window, Teddy, with his hand on the king's shoulder, looking with much concern on the gaudy procession which swept nimbly into the park and up the main driveway to the palace.

"It's bully, though," admired Teddy warmly.

"It is a defiance," corrected the king in Isolian. "Do yon realize," and he turned to Teddy with a frown, "that this flaunting display has come by the main road, through the city and the chief villages, across the entire width of Isola; and that these trappings and that coach will be recognized as those of the deposed Xantobah? Do you realize that this passage has stirred up restless speculation throughout the kingdom? Do you realize that it was a daring and an insolent thing to use that goat on those banners?"

"He's of the royal family," argued Tedoyah, also relapsing into Isolian; "and the goat is not prancing."

"No," admitted the king; "but look! It is of a new design. Its forefeet are just rising from the ground."

Teddy gazed blankly out of the window for a moment, then he flushed with anger and started for the door.

"Where are you going?" demanded the king.

"To tear those banners down!"

"Not yet," and the king, smiling affectionately at his brother, restrained him with a firm grasp.

The Princess Bezzanna, looking more charming in her straight and slender symphony of brown and yellow and scarlet than he had ever seen her, Jimmy thought, came out upon the terrace just as the gay cavalcade drew up at the steps, and clapped her pretty hands in delight. The man in the gray and the gold and the frills of white lace sprang out of the coach, and, bearing in his hands a brilliant nosegay, bowed, with the grace of a dancing-master, before the princess, and held up his gift for acceptance.

She took it with equal grace, and then burst into merry laughter. The gallant arose and offered his arm. She rested her hand in it, and looking up into his face and chatting gaily, walked into the palace.

Jimmy Smith, viewing that pretty tableau, was aware of an uncomfortable tightening under his ribs, and unconsciously he looked down in dismay at his amateur trousers. He was suddenly aware of the fact that he wanted this girl himself; wanted her hard, wanted her fiercely, wanted her more than he had ever wanted anything in his life, or had ever expected to, and he realized, moreover, that, in this affair of the nobility, he had not the chance of a yellow rabbit in a dog pound.

"And, by jinks, it's Prince Onion!" he ejaculated to himself, and his brow took on as worried an expression as those of the king and Tedoyah.