Ain't Angie Awful!/Chapter 5
CHAPTER V.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE PINK PANTALOONS
OH, browf, but it is cold!” said Angie, “browf!—browf!”
And in simple veritude the poor child was frizzified. She was all covered with geese flesh; but then, Angela Bish always was a goose. Anyone is who barks in her sleep.
Nineteen is a terrible age; and the longer you’re nineteen the worse it is; neither girlitude nor yet womanability. Angie hated to think about it. To think about anything at all, in fact, was apt to produce vertigo. She had but one idea—it lived in her head alone, like a cow in a tree. Its name was Get Married.
For to Angie all men were holy. Some had money and some had mastoiditis, but she felt sure she could fit right into any man’s arms and take root. The only trouble was she never had a chance. When men saw Angie coming towards them—always at a gallop—they usually jumped into a taxi and gave the chauffeur ten dollars in advance.
Now Angie was, at this epoch (if it were an epoch, and not a mere spasm), a Collector of Burnt Matches for the Unsold Spaghetti Company. She got a dollar per 10,000—when she got it. But it is hard work collecting burnt matches in Winter, so hard that many have given it up in despair the very first year, and gone in for First Editions or Sheffield Plate, instead. It’s especially hard when you haven’t any friends except old ladies who don’t smoke, and use only two or three matches a day, for lighting the gas stove.
Working from seven in the morning to a similar number p. m. she had, so far, amassed only a scant 5,000. Most of them, besides, were very short and dark complected and some had never been anything but Swedish matches at best. Not a noble hoard. But it was something. Almost anything is.
With this collection, she set out, one day for the Main Office. Boldly she approached the President, a man famous for his side whiskers, raised under glass.
“Well, have you 10,000 already?” he asked without looking up from his Ouija board.
“Alas, no—only 5,000,” Angie was forced to confess.
A bobbed hair stenographer smiled. She was new at the business, so new that she wore no jewelry and went out to the Rest Room to powder her ears. She still thought spaghettis grew in the smaller Venetian canals, and the holes were made by toreadors. She gazed at Angie, with much of her face open. Too much.
“Nothing doing!” said the President. “And don’t come back till you have 10,000; and then don’t. I fear you are infectious. Kindly do not breathe until you have left town. Wink all you want, but don’t breathe.”
Very, very angry was Angie. She didn’t see red, for, among her other accomplishments she was color-blind; but she did bite a piece out of the door knob as she left. It failed, however, to appease her hunger. She was mad all the way home—so mad that the train conductor thought seriously of muzzling her, but didn’t, on account of the expense.
So now you know why Angela Bish, gazing so violently at the demised fireplace in her small apartment, this cold ten o’clock, felt so gizzardless and unfastened in the small of the back. The temperature was far below par, and already Angie’s hair was frozen.Only 5,000 in six weeks! Why, it would have been cheaper she thought to buy new matches and burn them herself! More fun, too; especially on a day like the aforesaid. And wouldn’t they make just as good spaghetti as the real ones growing on the sidewalk and in the gutters? No one need ever know.
We have spoken of a fireplace, just as if Angie was really living. Pardon the prevarication. Angie’s room rent had not been paid for some time—her landlady said even longer—and she was now dwelling in two pine packing cases in an alley behind a garage. As only simple portieres of gunny sacking protected her from the curiosity of the limousines which prowled about her domicile, she had to be very careful what she ate.
For many days she had been nourished on the paste she begged from benevolent bill-posters, and occasional scrapings from 24-sheets of Theda Bara and other highly indigestible stars, and she was beginning to feel the need of simpler food less exciting to a person of her spontaneous temperament. Still, she was happy enough, except for the nail on the floor of the box very near where she was most fond of sitting down, and a knot hole which had established a direct communication between a February breeze and her left ear. As she did not entertain much company she could keep her feet usually in the dining room.
She had named her new abode “The Pines.”
This rustic tranquillity was bifurcated, one tremendous afternoon, by the arrival of a pair of pompous pink pantaloons containing one “Mr. Frimp,” a small, smiling object surmounted by a shock of longish black hair such as is often found on Chinese, and the tails of Percheron stallions.
“Surely,” said Mr. Frimp, holding Angie off with one hand, “there is not another woman in the world with a face like that. Even one is improbable. Two were quite impossible. Then you must be, indeed you are, aren’t you, Miss Angela Bish?”
“I am,” said Angie, as she wildly endeavored to suffocate him with her long overdue embraces. “But don’t ask why. It’s chronic, but I still hope to have my last name, at least, cured.” Her hungry eyes burned like roasting chestnuts on an Italian’s frying pan.
“One moment!” The stranger untied her arms from his neck. “What I have to say will probably cause acute convulsions, so I beg you to be calm. Are you married?”
Angie shrieked. “I would give 5,000—”
“Nor engaged?”
“So much indeed am I not so, sir, that it has already threatened to run into insanity, if not more so.”
“Then I love you!”
Angela swooned. And in her ecstasy, it seemed to her that she was drowning in French ice cream covered with chocolate sauce in a new $90 Paris hat. Such bliss sometimes kills; and Angie, her lungs full of vanilla and pistachio, was going down for the third time, when she was slowly but fiercely pinched back to life.
She was still embracing Mr. Primp, but he was gradually removing her with a tire iron.
After tying her securely into her packing case, he nailed down the cover securely, called it a day, and left.
******
Now lightning may seldom strike twice in the same place, but workmen often do. And Mr. Frimp was working Angie to a finish. He struck hard next day. So hard that Angie was as tender as a rump steak after treatment with a mallet. But then Angie had always been soft. By this time she was practically liquid.
Came days of divine delight to Angela Bish, in a world of almost Coney Island beauty, with a man she could paw as much as she pleased. Came magic hours when for days her lips were not removed from his. Came Love, in all its transcontinental grandeur!
******
Day by day they wandered together along the curbstones of the great city, marveling at its beautiful cesspools—at the gorgeous gutters, where the banana peel grew so luxuriantly. Or, haply, they strolled towards the East Side and reveled in the fragrant Portuguese fauna of the slums.
At night, scaling some lofty fire escape, high amongst the milk bottles they would together marvel at some heart-broken geranium, alone in the February frosts, or smile at the frozen gold fish in a neglected bowl of ice.
It was cold, so cold that even Angie’s kisses could not always warm them; but, as they sat hand-in-hand on some picturesque ash barrel their mutual shivers thrilled them to the epiglottis. At least they thrilled Angie’s. Mr. Frimp’s were hidden under that mop of Japanese black hair. And you never can tell what ears will do when you take your eyes off them.
And so love at last had come to Angela Bish—love such as poets sing—love such as you hear so much of from the hand-organs.
But, alas, in all the high-class love affairs there is always a Joker.
******
The marriage day had come, arriving promptly at 12.00, midnight.
Angie, cutting smart, diagonalized holes à la Doughnut in the fetching white flour sack that was to be her wedding dress, opened her sleepified eyes to discover Mr. Frimp opening her packing case.
“Angela,” he remarked, “will your love be as subsequent as it is previous?”
Angie frothed at the mouth.
“I need a little cash tonight," Mr. Frimp continuated, “and all the banks have gone to bed. I cannot afford an automobile for our bridal trip, but I can get a really beautiful wheelbarrow cheap. Could you lend me a few thousand till tomorrow?”
A strange sound came from Angie’s ears. “Frimp,” she said, at last, “I have only seven and a half cents to my name. I earned it keeping out of sight of the garbage man. I always give him a pain, and tonight, having acute indigestion, he couldn’t risk seeing me. God knows I need the money for the little trifles women love to have on their wedding day, but—”
“You have no money?” gasped Mr. Frimp.
“Not many money—but they are yours!”
“But that five thousand you told the President of the Spaghetti of?”
“Five thousand? Ah, yes!” And Angie, opening a tin box she always wore about her neck, proudfully displayed her precious hoard of burnt matches. “I thought, when we were married we might stuff a mattress with them—”
But already Mr. Frimp was transformed with rage and disappointedness. With one scornful gest he had torn off his pink pantaloons. Blush not, ladies, underneath was a purple accordion-plated skirt reaching far, far below the hips. Another wrench—like a monkey wrench it was—and his coat and vest came off, and Angie saw, rather than felt, an orange blouse. The silk hat bounced off his head; and from it, Mr. no longer, a female Frimp extracted a green picture hat and set it angrily athwart her head.
It was now the mercenary stenographer from the Spaghetti Company who was no longer there. She was borne away on a despairing sigh. And you would sigh, too, wouldn’t you, if you had had to keep company with a whiting like Angie for a month, free, and pay your own expenses?