CHAPTER X.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE TEMPORARY HUSBAND
MAN’S age is of man’s life a thing apart; ’tis woman’s whole existence.” Thus saith the poet and thus saith I. The three years that Angela Bish was twenty-three were the happiest in her life. But as this didn’t happen till she was twenty-nine we can’t tell about it now. For Angie was now much younger than she was at twenty-three. She was only twenty-four.
And still Angie was unwed. She didn’t, in fact, have a single husband. But who wants one that is single, anyway? Other girls had married again and again and again. Angie had never had a nibble to her name.
I see a lady in the rear of the room raising her hand. Why not? you ask. Well, you see, Angie was one of those feverish females who turn into a quivering jelly upon seeing a man, with whipped cream on top. She was so sweet that after one taste of her you had to rush right off and eat sand. When she met a man she was so soft that she almost ran. The man ran, also.
Yet Angie was pretty enough, too. She had a mild Alderney expression on her face that was very restful. You always felt that she was just about to moo. But she never did; that was perhaps her only charm.
Only once in her life had Angie been kissed. The perpetraitor had been immediately removed to the Psychopathic Ward and treated with chopped ice; but to Angela Bish the event was so solemn and holy that she had not washed that kiss off her lips for a month, and on that last day you could distinctly see twenty-eight coffee rings surrounding her mouth.
One kiss in twenty-four years works out to about 1-8760 of a kiss per day. Now, no girl can live on such a pittance—at least, not in New York. She is bound to show traces of malnutrition, even if it doesn’t eventually run into glanders or the Willies. The effect upon Angie was terrible. She couldn’t use a telephone unless a man had recently pressed his moustache against the mouthpiece. It made her ill. She had to use a moustache cup for eating her soup.
Are there any more questions? No?—then we must proceed with our tale, like a mouse or a zebra.
The most beautiful things about Angie, except her wonderful capacity for being married, were her appetite and her hope. She had, the day before the story commences—yes, it has really commenced, at last—demonstrated both of these qualities by inserting the following advertisement in the evening paper, under the heading Male Help Wanted.
WANTED, A HUSBAND. Apply in person, to A. Bish, 2001 Avenue B., between 6 o’clock. Only experienced men desired. No Chinamen.
And outside her door she had pinned a Notice: Line Forms to Right.
But alas, husbands don’t come as easily as that, do they, Lillian? One can’t telephone for them and have them delivered C. O. D. wrapped in waxed paper in a neat box. One has to go out and catch them, like alligators or colds. But Angie didn’t know. She really didn’t know anything about Life, except what she saw on picture post cards. She was just a Nice Girl, with a few adenoids.
So Angie waited—and what is more pathetic than a waitress!
So Angela waited, also, manicuring her teeth, and counting her fingers, never quite able to decide whether or not she had made a mistake in the total.
So waited Angela Bish, waited while she seemed to see her youth departing, softly, silently, like a hall roomer who hasn’t paid his rent.
Came a day (we’re not saying “there came” this season) when Angie decided to open her last package of cyanide—when—when—a knock on her chamber door sent her blood pressure up to 313.
“Yes!” Instinctively Angie had yelled it out before he had had time to change his mind, if he had had one. That day she would have married any man, or any day. She would have married anyone who was even partly a man—a mandrake, or amanuensis.
Now I suppose, dear little reader, you are smiling and expecting some rich, handsome marcelled hero to enter. Well, so was Angie. Her semi-tropical fancy had already pictured him, a baby grand Chesterfield, richly upholstered in Scotch tweeds, with, perhaps, if it wasn’t hoping too much, carved Louis XIV legs. He would have semi-circular eyebrows and be a Marathon, non-stop kissist and convincing cuddler.
Together in the gloaming, Oh, my Darling, they would jointly and severally entwine upon the cosy couch, and talk fudge talk and doll’s dialect till their arteries began to harden.
But, oh dear! You know how different real life is to what it would be if it were not different. The door opened, and something entered. Reader, close your eyes. It was chubby, and talked as if his epiglottis was full of cabinet pudding—or even stewed bananas. At sight of his pale blue necktie, in Angie’s heart mortification had already set in. But Angie was brave, and the blood twinkled in her veins. After all, a husband was always a husband, even when he lisped.
“I would like,” he said, if indeed we must call him he, which we really must, temporarily, at least, “I would like to find a female with a lavender soul!”
“What colored sole?” Angie asked, dreadfully.
“Lavender.”
Hoping against hope, Angie meditatively took off one slipper. But what color her sole proved to be, I hesitate to say. Yet it was not lavender; I’m terribly sure of that. Angie’s stockings, you see, were rather scarcely, that week, and besides she had been for hours absent-mindedly wandering about in the coal bin, trying to find a pet poached egg. And even the Duchess of Westminster, you know, might have got a little dusty, mightn’t she not have might?
Angie’s visitor looked modestly away. He hadn’t been so shocked since a missionary had told him that there were savage tribes in Central Africa who had never been manicured.
“Not the soul of your foot,” he explained, “What I want to see, my dear, is your psychic self. That’s the current slang you know, for your inmost ego.”
“I had ’em all pulled out,” said Angie, “when I was sixteen. They gave me cankers. Don’t you think marriage is a beautiful disease?”
Her caller pretended to blow his nose. He was really surreptitiously powdering it with a marshmallow. You never can tell, nowadays. And as he proceeded, he watched the girl closely.
“You are far from beautiful,” he admitted; “your face is on wrong. Your eyes are poorly fenestrated, and there is something about your general nasal expression that—you aren’t seasick are you, or anything, are you, Miss Bish?”
Angie wasn’t interested in anything female, including herself. All she wanted was to glue her lips to a man’s and see what happened. But it never did, and so, what Angie wanted to know was, When were they going to be married? She said as much. More. Much more. Much.
“I could make you beautiful,” it was now saying. “Build up a semblance of chin, rearrange your nose, blow up your eyes and—let’s see, two or three coats of rose-pink and a good varnish—one of those you can pour boiling water on, you know, and after sandpapering your cheeks down to a shapely curve—oh, Miss Bish, how I have longed to see what I could do with a really ugly face! How I could improve it, dress it, decorate it to attune with your soul!”
Angie barely listened. She was thinking, When he is once my husband nothing shall part us except jury duty. But, you know how it is, sometimes, in the midst of one’s wildest yearning, when all one’s being is being wafted heavenwards, as on the wings of doves, something, a mere flea, perhaps, or a relapse of hay fever will suddenly bite you on the shoulder. What was it he had said? A word came back, like a cat left behind when you go to the country . . . a word . . . “decorate” . . . ’twas full of sinister meaning.
“What are you?” she demanded. “In heaven’s name, speak! Let me know the worst before I phone for the minister for first aid. Decorate? Did you say decorate? Speak, before we are harnessed for life!”
The being smiled. “Why yes,” said he. “Of course. Why not? I am an Interior Decorator!”
“Good heavens! And I thought you were a man!”
Angela Bish had fainted all over the wash stand. . . .
Twenty years are supposed to have elapsed. Supposed, that is, by you and me, dear reader. Not by Angie. She had no idea that she was now nearing forty-five; no idea that anyone knew it. No one does. In her madness she still thought of herself as a young girl.
Now, in twenty years many things may happen. But nothing had. To be sure, several men had entered her life, but upon seeing her, they had left hurriedly by a rear window. Still she pursued them, still they escaped. Still she smiled, and hoped anew, like a man searching an oyster stew for the oyster.
For the fact was, the sad fact, if you look at it that way, Angela Bish was insane. The shock had completely unsettled her reason.
But there is always a compensation for all misfortunes. In her present state everyone says that she is far, far more intelligent than when she was really sane. Life, now, is one long lucid interval. She has perfect peace—and so do the men. She has a fond delusion. Angie believes that she is married. She is sure of it. So much so, that every man she sees seems to be her husband, trying to escape. And, as husbands are always trying to escape, perhaps Angie may be right, after all!
THE END
