The box from japan, p.24
The Box from Japan, page 24
Sitting on the red and green striped wooden bench at the top of the steps was a girl. She was young, not more than twenty. A striking costume of black silk, the very essence of Parisian chicness, encased her slender form. Black silk stockings, just visible beneath the hem of her skirt, merged into black patent leather slippers, each fastened with a single jet buckle. A smart little hat of black silk crowned the jet-black bobbed hair that fell from her head in entrancing curls. Below the curls a pair of the most captivating dark eyes looked forth—long-lashed eyes of hue so purplish-black that they seemed like curtains made of the same material as the rest of her artistic costume. And as Halsey, fascinated by the impression he received of taste and femininity combined, strode up the steps he caught sight of a black alligator traveling bag peeping forth from back of her slim ankles.
She looked curiously at him as he took forth his bunch of keys.
“I beg your pardon,” she said, “but perhaps you can tell me when I can find the landlord—or landlady as the case may be—in?”
He turned in the vestibule. “The landlady,” he informed her with a smile, “in this case is Mrs. Morely. Mrs. Morely, I’m sorry to say, won’t be back until late tonight, She’s out of town.” He gazed down solicitously at her. He saw signs in her of physical fatigue. “You’ve rung, of course,” he added. “But our negro maid happens to be off on Wednesdays.”
The girl’s eyes had clouded up at his news about the landlady. “I am very tired,” she announced, and he could detect plainly the weariness and fag in her voice, “and the sign”—she pointed at the “room-for-rent” sign in the transom above the doorway—“suggested that I might get accommodations here. But I suppose I shall have to return tonight or tomorrow.”
He jingled the keys. For the three years he had been with Mrs. Morely potential lodgers of both sexes had been calling at No. 810½ and leaving with the remark that they would return later. But in forty-nine cases out of fifty, Halsey reflected, they never returned. Indeed, there were too many room-to-rent signs strewn over the big roaring city of Chicago to make it necessary to hunt far for accommodations. Standing in the vestibule he looked down at the girl; at her slender silk-clad form and at the purple wells that looked up at him as though their owner were dead tired. And then and there a sudden feeling was born in him that to have such a dainty little creature as this girl for a neighbor in a chill, formal Chicago roominghouse, would be “a consummation devoutly to be wished!”
“I should be glad to show you Mrs. Morely’s back parlor,” he said eagerly. “The rent is—is—er—$4 a week. Just follow me, if you will.”
He led the way to the back parlor and threw open the door, revealing the room now filled with the first rays of the afternoon sunshine; the latticed silk-curtained casements which, now drawn tightly together, concealed the automatic inadoor bed, the gleaming electrical fixtures, the graceful mahogany furniture without a speck of dust on it, the built-in radio panel flush with the very wall in which it was built, the soft Persian rug showing up, on the polished hardwood floor, in all its brilliant colors.
“Oh!” she exclaimed breathlessly. “What—what a wonderful room. And is it—really—only $4 a week?”
He looked down at her searchingly, quizzically. He felt a surge of red burning over his entire face and forehead. “That’s—well—the price,” he stammered; and after an embarrassed pause he hastened to add: “If—if I do say it myself, Mrs. Morely’s rooms are well worth what she asks for them.” And to cover up his confusion he pressed the upper one of the two pearl push-buttons which controlled the automatic inadoor bed.
He watched her with growing curiosity as her eyes stared in helpless amazement at the simple operation by which the two latticed doors, geared at their tops to an invisible motor now purring barely audibly, opened wide, and the great bronzed inadoor bed swung majestically outward into the room, and then, once in place, commenced slowly and dignifiedly to let itself down; with which he pressed the undermost of the two buttons near his shoulder, arresting the bed immediately in its descent, so that, in fact, it returned slowly to its vertical position, then swung as by the operation of an invisible pushing hand back into its closet, and the latticed doors drew silently back upon it once more, shutting it entirely out as the concealed motor finally stopped with a soft click of its relaying mechanism. Her red lips were agape at the mechanical performance. She managed to collect herself together: “My—my goodness! How—how wonderfully convenient.”
“Do you think so?” he laughed. “Well I have one just like it, but I had to fuss with my estimable landlady nearly six months to get her to give me a good old-fashioned mahogany fourposter that stands always in position. When I want to plump down on my back and think a bit, I don’t want to push a lot of buttons.”
“That is—you just want to plump?” she said.
“That’s it,” he agreed. “And thanks to the old bricked-up flues in this house, which dates, they say, from the 1890’s, I even have built myself a woodburning fireplace.”
“Gracious—you—you don’t like modernity then, do you?”
“Yes, I do—in some respects. Many respects. Now here’s one thing I’m very strong for,” he asserted, “on hot days.” He reached back of him on the wall, and pushed a square red button marked “Refrig,” which stood vertically under an iron wicket built into the same wall near the ceiling. The Niagara of deliciously cooled air which poured down upon their heads from that wicket, was like the air from some forest of Northern Canada itself. “All the rooms are connected thus, of course,” he explained, “to the refrigerating ‘furnace’ in the attic.”
With violet eyes wide open, she was contemplating now the wall where the radio panel was built. “And you have—you have built-in radios in every room?”
“Oh yes,” he said, with almost a disparaging tone in his voice.
“And that—what is that peculiar jointed nickel-plated arm on the panel, that seems to be attached to—to a sort of rubber collar on the—the neck of that big central green knob?” she asked with childlike curiosity.
He smiled, and this time with extreme satisfaction, “That, I am confoundedly happy to say, is part of the Samuelson system for interconnecting radios so that all such diabolic instruments in rooms adjoining each other, as well as under and above one another, are controllable to some extent by each other. In tone only, I mean. That is to say, if any radio is annoying any occupant in any room directly adjoining it anywhere in three-dimensional space—the annoyed neighbor may turn his own Samuelson knob and tune the annoying radio down. Do you see?”
She nodded, but the smile on her lips was not so much the smile of amusement as of surprise. Now she turned to him impulsively. “Four dollars is really more than I can afford,” she stated slowly. “But then this—this is such a wonderful room, that—I’ll take it,” she finished suddenly, “if you can rent it to me in the absence of Mrs. Morely. Will I—I prove quite acceptable to her, do you think?”
“Indeed yes,” he hastened to assure her, his words almost tumbling over each other. “Of course you will be acceptable to her. Of course. Sure! Though to assure that to a 100 percent degree may I—er—just suggest, however, that you don’t complain of Captain Kidd, or make any derogatory remarks about—well—about Ulysses. She is—well—ultra-sensitive where they are concerned.”
“Captain—Kidd! Ulysses?” she echoed helplessly, dark eyes wide with perplexity. “who—who are they?”
“The Captain is her parrot,” he explained quietly. “Rides around on her shoulder, and swears like a trooper. Like three troopers, in fact. Most blasphemous bird, when he wants to be, that I ever saw in my life. Mrs. Morely, however, is a very religious woman; she reads a chapter in her big Bible every evening. And so she has to carry two wax-soaked cotton ear plugs continuously suspended around her neck by a cord, and pop them in pronto when the Captain lets loose. But she resents very highly any comment about his language. In fact, she maintains that he is insane, or has been so for years, and is not morally accountable, therefore, for anything he says or does. However,” Halsey hastened to assure his wide-eyed listener, “you won’t hear the Captain’s language unless, like myself, you perchance to go downstairs occasionally.”
“And Ulysses. What—what must I do—concerning—Ulysses?”
“Yes, Ulysses. Ulysses is her cat with the glass eye.”
“A—glass—eye?” The red lips of this prospective incumbent of the room broke into a hopelessly unrestrained smile this time. A tinkle of merriment rippled from her. “I never heard of such a thing.”
“Neither did anybody else,” he said gravely. “But such is the case. Ulysses had his right eye ripped out, and part of its lid torn away, some years ago by another alley Tom-cat, and there being no such things as glass eyes for cats, Mrs. Morely had an old cast-off human glass eye ground down to proper size to put in his head—in his eye-socket, that is. Ulysses is compelled to wear the artificial eye in the evening, and it’s—well—being a blue eye, with an ordinary sized black pupil, it’s a horrible match for the other, which is an ordinary yellow eye with the typical vertical feline slit. When Ulysses sleeps on her lap, that open blue eye stares you out of countenance. And so whatever you do, don’t laugh out loud at Ulysses in her presence—in fact, don’t pass any remark whatsoever about him. It—it just riles her fearfully. A very estimable and harmless old Frenchman—Monsieur Daladier—who lives on the top floor, a teacher of French in the Berlitz Schools by vocation, and a cartographer by avocation—at least he’s constructed a globe of the earth, fully 8 feet in diameter, quite perfect too, they say, and tinted and lettered in every direction—made the mistake of shaking the ancient cumbersome sword-cane he carries always as protection against our fast-shooting Chicago thugs, at Ulysses, and saying in English ‘Scat, you! Weez your won eye, you geev me ze creeps!’ The negro maid here overheard him and reported it, and I may say that the old gentleman nearly lost his room; would have lost it, in fact, had it not been for the necessity of having his 8-foot globe moved out the same way it originally came in here—by way of the attic skylight.”
“I see,” she nodded, her own eyes still faintly smiling, seemingly in spite of herself. “This—this is a very entertaining place, I must say, Are all the people here as interesting as the old gentleman you describe?”
“Some are more or less interesting, yes. Others, no. Twenty or so guests altogether. The rooms upstairs are a little more plentiful because of the way the house extends back. And we’ve four stories, in the bargain, if you perchance noted. To tell you the truth, I don’t even know all the folks in this house. They come. And they go. Only,” he warned with a grin, “don’t you go—without adequate cause, if you do decide to remain. That is, in simpler language, don’t snicker out loud at Ulysses, and don’t say anything about or against him to anybody in the place.”
“I won’t,” she stated. “I’ll—I’ll watch my step—with his feline Highness! Well, as I say, I will take the room. I don’t see how I could possibly withstand it. Do you require references? If so—”
He waved a hand. “I hardly think so. In fact,” he added, “I believe I could tell you more of yourself than you would be able to tell me.” He took in her appearance. “You have come to Chicago from a small town in eastern Illinois where you were a dressmaker’s assistant. You arrived early this morning. You intend to remain some time—or fear you may have to. You read French—to some extent, I believe. And you have been tramping the streets of Chicago a good part at the morning. You—”
He stopped short, amused by the look of utter incredulity and wonder on her face, and puzzled by a peculiar something back of that look which he could not fathom.
“How—why—” she stammered. “Why, I have never seen you before in my life. And yet—” She paused. “How—what made you come—to those conclusions about me?”
“I’d—well—if it’s all the same to you,” he countered, “I’d—I’d rather not go into it. But exactly how right am I? Or how wrong?”
“But you’ve got to tell me,” she demanded. “And—and unless you do, I—I won’t tell you how close you are.”
“But you see,” he explained unhappily, “in any bunch of deductions about anybody—like those I just rattled off—a lot of personal observations and—well, ratiocinations, one calls them—enter, don’t you know. Kind of embarrassing you see, to explain things that are—that way.”
“Please explain them,” she demanded firmly, “I—I request that.”
He gave a helpless gesture with his hands. He had gotten himself in for it now with his simple deductive prestidigitation.
“So be it then,” he announced resignedly. “And please don’t be offended.” He paused. “Well, in the first place no one but a girl from an extremely small town would stare at such very common fixtures as the automatically operating inadoor bed and the Samuelson tone control for adjoining radios, which I can assure you are, in one form or another, part of the equipment of every first and second-class roominghouse and every first and second-class hotel of every big city in America. And no one,” he continued, still trying to convey his explanation both politely and neighborly, “but a very wealthy young lady, the daughter—say—of the town banker, or else a dressmaker’s assistant who could put in evenings and evenings of her own time on her own skillful needle work, could afford to own and wear such a marvelous creation of black silk as my eyes behold today for the second time. That is, the first time I beheld it was on the way down town today, in Paquin’s window over on North Michigan Avenue not so very far from this first street south of here, Chicago Avenue, where it was labeled $200 and was marked ‘First importation of this new gown from Paris, by Steamer Ile de France II’d. Only one allotted to each American city.’ Paquin does, I have been definitely assured by an aunt of mine who follows the styles, put the Paris creations onto North Michigan Avenue right off the Rue de Rivoli. And I’d like to add though, as a mere man, that that little fandango of diamond-shaped panels of silk you’ve added around the—the neck, and those little thingumajigs—sort of—sort of upper sleeves coming part way down the regular sleeve—I warned you this would be very pussenel!—goes Monsieur Paquin one better in attaining—well—charmingness. Is that the word? Well, anyway, then,” he hastened to add, discomfited by her clear fixed gaze on him, “as I say, an exclusive gown like that would cost a good deal if bought in any city. Yet if I remember rightly,” he smiled uneasily, “the wearer of that gown was a little—a little hesitant about the price of this room.” He ruminated a minute. “That’s why I postulated the dressmaker assistant theory, and also why I have to postulate that you read French. Indeed—and again, this is thanks to my estimable aunt—I figure that you must subscribe to either L’e Monde Bon Ton or Jasserie Intime des Ateliers Couturiers, the two Parisian style magazines that are published in French and which come weekly by air-mail, and which give the drawings and descriptions of the forthcoming styles even while they are being put together in the Paris shops. Even—even while they are being talked into existence! And—well, am I correct there?”
She nodded corroboration, slowly and wide-eyed. “Yes, I do read—dressmaker French!”
“And now you’re a bit curious about how I surmised that the small town you come from is in Eastern Illinois. Well, that proceeds from the fact of the orange-colored time-table whose corner sticks out from your traveling bag. For you see there happen to be only three transportation lines coming into Chicago that use orange-colored time-tables—I’ve traveled a great deal in connection with my line of work, and I think I know them all. The three lines are the Southwestern Overnight Passenger Air Service, the Trunk 37 of the Associated Steam Lines—it used to be the C. & E. I. or Chicago and Eastern Illinois Railroad, and the St. Ste. Marie Canada Steamship Lines. That shows me that you came from the southwest, east or north. To be precise, though, I note that this time-table is printed in red letters on orange paper instead of black on orange—yes, I once had to help a colorblind passenger on the Southwestern Overnight Air Lines read his time-table, which to him was brown printed on brown, and therefore blank! Which incident, therefore, I always remembered. In fact, when next I had occasion to hop a Southwestern Airways Plane with only a quarter minute to spare, I grabbed from the big time-table rack at the air-field a time-table printed in red on orange—only to find after we were winging south that I had a Trunk No. 37, or C. & E. I. table by mistake! So much for that. Then your red-on-orange time-table, therefore, boils your possible arrivals here down to arrival via Southwestern Airways or via the old Chicago and Eastern Illinois Railroad. The answer as to which it was then would lie, would it not, in the answer to the question as to whether you came here by plane or by steam? Now I am guessing—and now I am getting personal—but from that hesitancy you displayed about the price of this room, I rather grasp that you are conserving, as all of us really should be conserving for the present at least, of that valuable commodity known as money; in which case you would have come here in any event—particularly if the distance were short and the time saving not so great—by steam at 1 cent per mile instead of by plane at 2 cents per mile, which are the fixed rates a benign government has decreed to protect our two great transportation industries.” He paused for breath, “So there you are. That boils your arrival down to Trunk No. 37, or the old C. & E. I. Railroad, which covers only Eastern Illinois. About that early arrival this morning? Quite a few hours have elapsed since the porter brushed you off; and I note that the famous gray dust from Chicago’s quarter-million oil-burning factories—the now ‘dustable-arable’ gray dust which used to be an unremovable greasy film before industrial oil was compelled to be treated synthetically—hasn’t neglected to single you out for a victim as it does the rest of us.” He stopped, feeling a bit sheepish. “Now it’s all absurdly simple, isn’t it? The rabbit wasn’t in the hat at all—it was in a cage under the magician’s table!”
