Chapter XIII
Private Life
IT seems to me it's highly suitable that I should get to the edge of telling about Mr. Dallas' misfortunate visitations just as Chapter the Thirteenth is starting, which, as everybody knows full well already, thirteen is the unluckiest number there is in the whole alphabet.
When you projects with old Lady Thirteen you flirts with sudden disaster. With Mr. Dallas, though, his troubles don't come on all at once, like a stroke; they comes on sort of gradual, one behind the other, like the symptoms of a lingering complaint.
Up to a certain point everything with us has gone along very lovely, the same as usual, with parties occurring regular at the apartment and the Japanee boy cooking up fancy mixtures, and me serving drinks by the drove. Thanksgiving time we has a special blow-out with twelve setting down to the table at once.
But Christmas is when we cuts loose and just naturally out-todos all previous todos. All day long folks is dropping in to sample the available refreshments and most of 'em likes the sample so well they camps right there till far into the night. I mingles up a big glass reservoir full of egg-nog, which it seems to give 'special satisfaction to one and all. The way these here guests of ours bails it up you'd think they was in a sinking skiff half a mile from shore. As he ladles out the first batch Mr. Dallas states that this here egg-nog is made according to a recipe which has been handed down in his family since right after the Revolutionizing War. But when she's took the second helping, Miss O'Brien, who's got a mighty peart way about her of saying things, allows that it shore must be older even than that—she says she's willing to bet it had a good deal to do with bringing on the revolution.
Of all the crowd that Mr. Dallas is in with, I likes her the best. She's got a powerful high temper and is prone to flare up when matters don't go to suit her; but it seems like to me she ain't devoting so much of her time as some of the others is to seeing what she can get for nothing. Sometimes I catches her looking at Mr. Dallas like as if she's sort of sorry for him on account of some reason or other. But to look at him on this Christmas Day, doing his entertainingest best, you'd think nothing had ever bothered him and that nothing ever would. As long as that egg-nog holds out he's bound and determined the party shall be a success. Which it is!
But Mr. Bellows he ain't got no storage room for egg-nogs. Seemingly he figures that all them eggs and that rich cream and sugar and stuff will take up space which is needed for chambering the hard liquor. He just sets off in a corner with a bottle of Scotch and a bottle of squirtwater handy by, curing his drought, or striving to. He may not be such very good company but one thing they've got to say for him—he's a man of regular habits. You may not like the habits, but they certainly is regular. I hears Mrs. Gaylord saying once that Mr. Bellows can hold any given number of drinks, sort of pressing her voice down on the word "given." She don't need to say it twice, neither, so far as I personally is concerned.
I got her the first time.
It's maybe two or three days after Christmas—anyhow it's somewheres around the middle of Christmas week—that I first takes notice of a sort of a change coming over Mr. Dallas' feelings. When there's nobody else round but just me and him he acts plumb bothered. His appetite is more picky-and-choosy than it used to be; and by these signs I can tell something is on his mind a-preying. On New Year's Eve he goes forth with his friends for a party but first they all stops by our place for what they calls appetizers and whilst they is gathered together it comes out that him and Miss Bill-Lee is now engaged. Not no regular announcement is made but all of a sudden, seems like, everybody present appears to know how things stand with him and her. Also, Miss Bill-Lee starts in treating him more or less like he belonged to her. I don't scarcely know how to state it in words, but it's like as if up until now she's been holding a piece of property under mortgage but has finally decided for to foreclose on it and is eager for the papers to be fixed up in order for to begin making improvements and alterations. She's what you might call proprietary.
Well, I can't say the news is much of a shock to me, seeing what has been the general drift of events since last August when we first got here. But, on the other hand, neither I can't say that, considering everything, I'm actually overcome with joyfulness on Mr. Dallas' personal account.
I can't keep from thinking to myself that he's fixing to marry himself off into a mighty different set of folks from the kind he was born and brung up amongst. And I can't keep from thinking what a sight of difference there is betwixt this here Miss DeWitt and Miss Henrietta Farrell, which, as I said before, he was courting her before we moved to New York. One of 'em sort of puts me in mind of a rosebud picked out of the garden in the dew of the morning and the other, which I means by that, Miss De Witt, reminds me of one of these here big pale magnolia blooms which has growed on the edge of a swamp. I ain't meaning no disrespect by having these thoughts; only I can't keep from having 'em.
I reckon it's having them ideas floating round in my head which makes me study Mr. Dallas 'specially close that New Year's Eve. For all that he's laughing and joking and carrying on, I figures that way down deep insides of him he ain't entirely happy over what's come out. By my calculations, he ain't got the true feelings which a forthcoming bridegroom should have. As near as I can judge, he ain't hopeful so much as he's sort of resignated. Also and furthermore, likewise, he's got a kind of a puzzled-up beflusterated look on his face as if he'd been took up short by something he wasn't exactly expecting to happen so soon, if at all. It ain't exactly bewildedment and it ain't exactly distressfulness; but it's something that's distant kinsfolks to both of 'em.