Ptomaine Street: The Tale of Warble Petticoat

His lips looked as if they were used to giving orders in restaurants, and he wore clothes which you could never quite forget.

Warble edged toward the stranger, and murmured nothing in particular, but somehow he drifted into the last and only vacant seat at her table.

She whisked him a 2 x 2 napkin, dumped a clatter of flatware at him, and stood, awaiting his order.

The pause becoming lengthy, she murmured with her engaging smile, “Whatcha want to eat?”

“Pleased to eat you,” he responded, looking at her as though she was an agreeable discovery.

Small wonder, for Warble was so peachy and creamy, so sweet and delectable that she was a far more appetizing sight than most viands are. She smiled again—engagingly this time, too.

Thus in the Painted Vale of Huneker, Vamp and Victim beguiled the hours. Thus, and not in treacled cadences, intrigued Mariar and Sir Thomas in the back alley.

“Do you like it here?” asked the doctor.

“Yop. But sometimes I feel wasted—”

“You don’t look wasted—”

“No—” after a hasty glance in the wall mirror.

“Don’t you get sick of the sight of food?”

“Here, oh, no! I don’t know any lovelier sight than our kitchens—yes, yes, sir, I’ll get your pied frotatoes at oneth.”

When Warble was a bit frustrated or embarrassed, she often inverted her initials and lisped. It was one of her ways.

The other clients at her table had no intention of being neglected while their Pickfordian waitress smiled engagingly on a newcomer.

It was the iceman who had hollered. He seemed to be merely a red-faced inanimate object, that worked by strange and compound levers.

Next him was a hat-check girl, a queenly person who communed with something set in the lid of her vanity case, and fed on chicken à la king.

Then there was a newsboy, whose all-observant eyes darted about everywhere, the while he absorbed baked beans and ketchup.

An old maid shopper. She merely brooded over her worn and pencil-scored memorandum, and muttered of fringe and buttons as she spilled tea on her samples of Navy blue foulard.

A blind man. Of no interest save that he had a calm and gentle demeanor and was the only one who didn’t spill things. His face wore a grieved but resigned look, as if something had died in his scrambled eggs. The iceman, who had the hard, set jaw of a prize fighter was successfully eating steak, and he welcomed the incoming fried potatoes, as one greets a new instalment of a serial.

It was a fat and pink and lovely Warble who at last trotted back with Petticoat’s order.

The great specialist had an unbridled passion for pie, and throwing restraint to the winds he had ordered three kinds. The wedges Warble brought were the very widest she could wheedle from the head pie-cutter—and Warble was some wheedler, especially when she coaxed prettily for a big pieth of cuthtard.

Petticoat looked at her again as she came, pie-laden.

Her cap was a bit askew, but her eyes weren’t. In her white linen dress and apron and white cap, her little pink face looked to Petticoat’s appraising glance like a postage stamp on an expanse of white linen envelope.

Little did he think, as he took his custard pie that he was about to put his foot in it. Yet he did.

“May I see you again sometime?” he said, ignoring the hat-check girl’s ogling and the iceman’s cold stare.

Warble made a face at him. It was one of her ways.

“What’s your address?” he asked. “You can ask the Boss—if you really want to know.”

“Want to know! Say, you waitress!”

Of the love-making of Warble and Big Bill Petticoat there is nothing to be reported which may not be read in any Satevepost serial, which may not be heard at any summer resort, in any winter garden. They were zoology and history. Their speech was free silver and their silence was golden.

It was a non-stop courtship. All the plump beauty of youth and all the assured complacence of a well-to-do married man kept them up in the air.

Petticoat wasn’t a married man, but he had their technique.

They took a walk, and followed a roundabout way. Then they sat on a bank, and his arm followed a roundabout way.

She seemed more young and tender than ever, in a simple white muslin frock and blue sash. Her broad-leafed hat was decked with a few pink roses, and roll-top white socks added a good deal to the picture.

Petticoat was charmed.

“Golly, but I love you, Warble!” he cried.

She did not answer, but she touched the upper edge of the wallet in his breast pocket with an exploring gesture.

“You think I’m too darn aesthetic! Well, you’re not, and so we ought to mate. We’re complementary to one another, like air and sunshine or light and shade.”

“Or pork and beans, or pie and cheese.”

“Yes, or like stout and porter—I’ll be the porter, oh—what’s the use of talking? Let my lips talk to you!”

He kissed her cheek, imprinting thereon a Cupid’s bow, by reason of his own addiction to the lipstick.

Warble rubbed it off with the back of her hand, and said, “Oh, pleathe—pleathe.”

She wondered if she ought to have said thank you, but it was only a drifting thought and she turned the other cheek. Then she smiled her engaging smile and they were engaged.

Later in the game, she said, with pretty diffidence, “I would like to thee Butterfly Thenter.” And she blushed like the inside of those pink meat melons.

“I knew it!” and Petticoat produced a pile of Sunday Picture Supplements.

Her cheek nested in his permanent wave, Warble studied the pictures.

They were the last word in artistic architecture. Truly, Butterfly Center, where Petticoat lived, was a veritable Utopia, Arcadia, Spotless Town and Happy Valley all rolled into one. Broad streets, arching trees, sublimated houses, glorified shops—it seemed to Warble like a flitter-work Christmas card from the drug-store.

“How’d you like to scoot up there with me in a fast aeroplane?” he jollied her.

“It might be—a lark—” she dubioused.

“But here’s the picture!” and proudly he exhibited a full length view of his own home.