Of Time and the River (72 page)

“I’d think you’d be getting hungry by that time,” said another of the group, an old man, who was their humorist, with a wink around him at the others. They all laughed appreciatively, and he continued: “You’re sure you didn’t miss anything as you went along—” he winked again and they all laughed dryly, with appreciation.

“No, sir!”—firmly, positively, with an emphatic nod of the head— “I ate every bite of it, Doctor Withers—oh-h, it was so DEE- licious, I just couldn’t bear to see ANYTHING go to waste—only,” regretfully, “I did have to leave my apple-pie—I couldn’t finish it—”

“What!” the humorist exclaimed in mock astonishment. “You mean you left something behind! Why, you hardly ate enough to feed an elephant! You’ll be getting all run down if you starve yourself this way!”—and the jester winked again, and the old women of his audience cackled aridly with appreciative laughter.

“—Well, I know,” the glutton said regretfully, “I just hated to see that good apple-pie go to waste—oh-h! I wish you could have tasted it, Mrs. Martin,—it was simply DEE-licious—‘What’s the matter?’ the girl says to me—the waitress, you know—‘Don’t you like your pie?—I’ll go get you something else if you don’t like it.’—Oh! yes—” with sudden recollection—“oh, yes! she says to me, ‘How’d you like some ice cream?—You can have ice cream instead of pie,’ she says, ‘if you’d rather have it’—‘Oh-h!’ I said,”— spoken with a kind of gasp, the withered old hand upon the meagre stomach—“‘Oh-h!’ I says, ‘I couldn’t!’—She had to laugh, you know, I guess the way I said it. ‘Well, you got enough?’ she said. ‘Oh-h!’ I said,”—again the faint protesting gasp, “‘if I ate another mouthful, I’d pop open! Oh-h!”—Well, it made her laugh, you know, the way I said it—‘I’d POP open!’ I said, ‘I COULDN’T eat another mouthful!’—‘Well, just so long as you got enough!’ she says. ‘We like to see everyone get enough. We want you to be satisfied,’ she said. ‘Oh-h!’ I said,” the faint protesting gasp again, “‘not another MOUTHFUL, my dear! I COULDN’T!’—But, oh-h! Mrs. Martin, if you could have seen that apple-pie! It was DEE- licious! I was sorry to see it go to waste!”

“Well,” said Mrs. Martin, rather tartly, obviously a little envious of the other’s rich adventure—“we had a good meal here at the hotel, too. We had some celery and olives to start off with and then we had some good pea soup and after that we had roast beef and mashed potatoes—wasn’t the roast beef we had tonight delicious, Doctor Withers?” she demanded of this arbiter of taste.

“Well,” he said, smacking his dry lips together drolly, “the only complaint I had to make was that they didn’t bring me the whole cow. I had to ask George for a second helping. . . . Yes, sir, if I never fare any worse than that I’ll have no kick—it was a very good piece of beef—well-cooked, tender, very tasty,” he said with a dry, scientific precision, and again he smacked his leathery lips together with an air of relish.

“—Well, I thought so, too,” said Mrs. Martin, nodding her head with satisfaction at this sign of his agreement “—I thought it was delicious—and then,” she went on reflectively, “we had a nice lettuce and tomato salad, some biscuit tortoni and, of course,” she concluded elegantly, “the demy-tassy.”

“Well, I didn’t have any of the demy-tassy,” said Doctor Withers, the droll wit. “None of your demy-tassy for me! No, sir! I had COFFEE—two big cups of it, too,” he went on with satisfaction. “If I’m going to poison myself I’m going to do a good job of it— none of your little demy-tassys for me!”

And the old women cackled aridly their dry appreciation of his wit.

“—Good evening, Mrs. Buckles,” Doctor Withers continued, getting up and bowing gallantly to a heavily built, arthritic-looking old woman who now approached the group with a stiff and gouty movement. “We missed you tonight. Did you eat in the restaurant?”

“No,” she panted in a wheezing tone, as, with a painful grunt, she lowered her heavily corseted bulk into the chair he offered her. “I didn’t go down—I didn’t have much appetite and I didn’t want to risk it. I had them bring me something in my room—some tea and toast and a little marmalade . . . I didn’t intend to come down at all,” she went on in a discontented tone, “but I got tired of staying up there all alone and I thought I’d just as well—I’d be just as well off down here as I’d be up in my room,” she concluded morosely.

“And how IS your cold today, Mrs. Buckles?” one of the old women now asked with a kind of lifeless sympathy. “—Do you feel better?”

“—Oh,” the old woman said morosely, uncertainly, “I suppose so. . . . I think so. . . . Yes, I think it’s a little better. . . . Last night I was afraid it was getting down into my chest, but today it feels better—seems to be more in my head and throat—But I don’t know,” she muttered in a sullen and embittered tone, “it’s that room they’ve given me. I’ll always have it as long as I’ve got to live there in that room. I’ll never get any better till I get my old room back.”

“Did you do what I told you to do?” asked Doctor Withers. “Did you go and dose yourself the way I told you?”

“—No—well,” she said indefinitely, “I’ve been drinking lots of water and trying a remedy a friend of mine down at the Hotel Gridly told me about—it’s a new thing called Inhalo; all you got to do is put it up your nose and breathe it in—she said it did her more good than anything she’d ever tried.”

“I never heard of it,” said Doctor Withers sourly. “Whatever it is, it won’t cure your cold. No, sir!” He shook his head grimly. “Now, I didn’t practise medicine for forty years without finding out SOMETHING about colds! Now, I don’t care anything about your Inhalos or Breathos or Spray-Your-Throatos, or whatever they may call ‘em—any of these newfangled remedies. The only way to get rid of a cold is to have a thorough cleaning-out, and the only way to get a thorough cleaning-out is to dose yourself with castor oil, the way I told you to.—Now you can do as you please,” he said sourly, with a constricted pressure of his thin convex mouth, “it’s no business of mine what you do—if you want to run the risk of coming down with pneumonia it’s your own affair—but if you want to get over that cold you’ll take my advice.”

“Well,” the old woman muttered in her tone of sullen discontent. “—It’s that room I’m in. That’s the trouble. I’ve hated that room ever since they put me in there. I know if I could get my old room back I’d be all right again.”

“Then why don’t you ask Mr. Betts to give it back to you?” said Mrs. Martin. “I’m sure if you went to him and told him that you wanted it, he’d let you have it.”

“No, he wouldn’t!” said Mrs. Buckles bitterly. “I’ve been to him— I’ve asked him. He paid no attention to me—tried to tell me I was better off where I was, that it was a better room, a better bargain!—Here I’ve been living at this place for eight years now, but do you think they show me any consideration? No,” she cried bitterly, “they’re all alike nowadays—out for everything they can get—it’s grab, grab, grab—and they don’t care who you are or how long they’ve known you—if they can get five cents more from someone else, why, out you go! . . . When I came back here from Florida last spring I found my old room taken. . . . I went to Mr. Betts a dozen times and asked to have it back and he always put me off—told me there were some people in there who were leaving soon and I could have it just as soon as they moved out. . . . That was all a put-up job,” she said resentfully. “He didn’t mean a word of it. I see now that he never had any intention of giving me my old room. . . . No! They’ve just found that they can get a dollar or two more a week for it from these fly-by-nights than I could afford to pay—and so, of course, I’m the one that gets turned out!” she said. “That’s the way it goes nowadays!”

“Well,” said Mrs. Martin a trifle acidly, “I’m sure if you went to Mr. Betts in the right way you could get your old room back. He’s always done everything I ever asked him to do for ME. But, of course,” she said pointedly, “you’ve got to approach him in the right way.”

“Oh-h!” said old Mrs. Grey rapturously, “I think Mr. Betts is the NICEST manager they’ve ever had here—so pleasant, so good-NATURED! so WILLING to oblige! Now that other man they had here before he came—what was his name?” she said impatiently. “—Mason, or Watson, or Clarkson—something like that—”

“Wilson,” said Doctor Withers.

“—Oh, yes—Wilson!” said Mrs. Grey. “That’s it—Wilson! I never liked him at ALL,” she said with an accent of scornful depreciation. “You could NEVER get anything out of Wilson. He never did anything you wanted him to do. But Mr. BETTS
I think Mr. Betts is a lovely manager!”

“Well, I haven’t found him so,” said Mrs. Buckles grimly. “I liked Wilson better.”

“Oh, I don’t agree with you, Mrs. Buckles,” Mrs. Grey said with a stony and somewhat hostile emphasis. “I don’t ag-GREE with you at ALL! I think there’s no COMPARISON! I like Mr. Betts SO much better than I like Wilson!”

“Well, I like Wilson better,” said Mrs. Buckles grimly, and for a moment the two old women glared at each other with bitter hostile eyes.

“—Well,” Doctor Withers broke the silence quickly in a diplomatic effort to avert an impending clash, “—what are your plans for the winter, Mrs. Buckles? What have you decided to do? Are you going to Florida again this winter?”

“I don’t know what I’ll do,” old Mrs. Buckles answered in a tone of sullen dejection. “I haven’t decided yet. . . . I had planned to go down to Daytona Beach with Mrs. Wheelwright—that’s my friend at the Hotel Gridly—she had a daughter living in Daytona and we had planned to spend the winter there in order to be near them. But now that’s all fallen through,” she said dejectedly. “Here, at the last moment, when all my plans were made, she decided not to go— says she likes it at the Gridly and it will be cheaper to stay on there than to make a trip to Florida and back. . . . That’s the trouble with people nowadays,” she said bitterly, “you can’t depend on them. They never mean anything they say!” And she lapsed again into a sullen and dejected silence.

“Why aren’t you going to St. Petersburg?” said Mrs. Martin curiously after a brief pause. “I thought that’s where you always spent the winter.”

“It was,” said Mrs. Buckles, “until last winter. But I’ll never go back there again. It’s not the same place any more. I’ve been going to the same hotel down there for more than twenty years—it used to be a lovely place; when I went back there last winter I found the whole place changed. They had ruined it,” she bitterly concluded.

“How was that?” said Doctor Withers curiously. “What had they done to it?”

Mrs. Buckles looked around cautiously and craftily to make sure that in this sinister melting-pot of a million listening ears, she would not be overheard, and then, bending forward painfully, with one old arthritic hand held up beside her mouth, she muttered confidingly to her listeners:

“—I’ll tell you what it is. It’s the JEWS! They get in everywhere,” she whispered ominously. “They ruin EVERYTHING! When I got down there last winter the whole place was overrun with Jews! They had ruined the place!” she hissed. “The place was RUINED!”

At this moment another old woman joined the group. She advanced slowly, leaning on a cane, smiling, and with a movement of spacious benevolence. Everything about this old woman—her big frame, slow movement, broad and tranquil brow, silvery hair parted in the middle, and her sonorous and measured speech, which came deliberately from her mouth in the periods of a cadenced rhetoric— had an imposing and majestic quality. As she approached, everyone greeted her eagerly and with obvious respect, Doctor Withers got up quickly and bent before her with almost obsequious courtesy, she was herself addressed by everyone as “Doctor,” and her position among them seemed to be one of secure and tranquil authority.

This old woman was known to everyone in the hotel as Doctor Thornton. She had been one of the first women physicians in the country and a few years before, after a long and, presumably, successful practice, she had retired to spend the remaining years of her life in the peaceful haven of the Leopold, and to bestow on man, God, nature and the whole universe around her the cadenced and benevolent reflections of her measured rhetoric. She became, by virtue of this tranquil and majestic authority that emanated from her, the centre of every group, young and old, that she approached. She was known to everyone in the hotel, everyone referred to her as “a wonderful old woman,” spoke of her brilliant mind, her ripe philosophy, and her “beautiful English.”

The respect and veneration in which she was held were now instantly apparent as, with a benevolent smile, she slowly approached this company of old people. They greeted her with an eager and excited scraping of chairs, the welcoming tumult of several old voices, speaking eagerly at once: Doctor Withers himself scrambled to his feet, pushed a large chair into the circle and stood by gallantly as, with a slow and stately movement, she settled her large figure into it, and for a moment looked about her over the top of her cane with a tranquil, smiling and benevolent expression.

“WELL, Doctor!” said Mrs. Grey, almost breathlessly. “Where have you been keeping yourself all day long? We’ve MISSED you.”

The others murmured agreement to this utterance, and then leaned forward with eager attentiveness so as not to miss any of the gems of wisdom which would fall from this great woman’s lips.