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Peck's Bad Boy Abroad, a fiction by George W. Peck |
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Chapter 7. The Bad Boy And His Dad Eat Fog... |
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_ CHAPTER VII. The Bad Boy and His Dad Eat Fog--Call on Astor--A Dynamite Outrage
Dear Old Man: Well, sir, if a court sentenced me to live in this town, I would appeal the case, and ask the judge to temper his sentence with mercy, and hang me. Say, the fog here is so thick you have to feel around like a blind goddess, and when you show up through the fog you look about eighteen feet high, and you are so wet you want to be run through a clothes wringer every little while. For two days we never left the hotel, but looked out of the windows waiting for the fog to go by, and watching the people swim through it, without turning a hair. Dad was for going right to the Lord Mayor and lodging a complaint, and demanding that the fog be cleared off, so an American citizen could go about town and blow in his money, but I told him he could be arrested for treason. He come mighty near being arrested on the cars from Liverpool to London. When we got off the steamer and tried to find the widow who robbed dad of his watch and roll of money, but never found her, we were about the last passengers to reach the train, and when we got ready to get on we found these English cars that open on the sides, and they put you into a box stall with some other live stock, and lock you in, and once in a while a guard opens the door to see if you are dead from suffocation, or have been murdered by the other passengers. Dad kicked on going in one of the kennels the first thing, and said he wanted a parlor car; but the guard took dad by the pants and gave him a shove, and tossed me in on top of dad, and two other passengers and a woman in the compartment snickered, and dad wanted to fight all of 'em except the woman, but he concluded to mash her. When the door closed clad told the guard he would walk on his neck when the door opened, and that he was not an entry in a dog show, and he wanted a kennel all to himself, and asked for dog biscuit. Gee, but that guard was mad, and he gave dad a look that started the train going. I whispered to dad to get out his revolver, because the other passengers looked like hold up men, and he took his revolver out of his satchel and put it in his pistol pocket, and looked fierce, and the woman began to act faint, while the passengers seemed to be preparing to jump on dad if he got violent. When the train stopped at the first station I got out and told the guard that the old gentleman in there was from Helena, Montana, and that he had a reputation from St. Paul to Portland, and then I held up both hands the way train robbers make passengers hold up their hands. When I went back in the car dad was talking to the woman about her resembling a woman he used to know in the states, and he was just going to ask her how long she had been so beautiful, when the guard came to the side door and called the woman out into another stall, and then one of the passengers pulled out a pair of handcuffs and told dad he might as well surrender, because he was a Scotland yard detective and had spotted dad as an American embezzler, and if he drew that gun he had in his pocket there would be a dead Yankee in about four minutes. Well, I thought dad had nerve before, but he beat the band, right there. He unbuttoned his overcoat and put his finger on a Grand Army button in his buttonhole, and said, "Gentlemen, I am an American citizen, visiting the crowned heads of the old world, with credentials from the President of the United States, and day after tomorrow I have a date to meet your king, on official business that means much to the future peace of our respective countries. Lay a hand on me and you hang from the yard arm of an American battleship." Well, sir, I have seen a good many bluffs in my time, but I never saw the equal of that, for the detective turned white, and apologized, and asked dad and I out to luncheon at the next station, and we went and ate all there was, and when the time was up the detective disappeared and dad had to pay for the luncheon, but he kicked all the way to London, and the guard would not listen to his complaints, but told him if he tried to hold up the train he would be thrown out the window and run over by the train. We had the compartment to ourselves the rest of the way to London, except about an hour, when the guard shoved in a farmer who smelled like cows, and dad tried to get in a quarrel with him, about English roast beef coming from America, but the man didn't have his arguing clothes on, so dad began to find fault with me, and the man told dad to let up on the kid or he would punch his bloody 'ed off. That settled it, when the man dropped his "h," dad thought he was one of the nobility, and he got quite chummy with the Englishman, and then we got to London, and dad had a quarrel about his baggage, and after threatening to have a lot of fights he got his trunk on the roof of a cab, and in about an hour we got to the hotel, and then the fog began an engagement. If the fog here ever froze stiff, the town would look like a piece of ice with fish frozen in. Gee, but I would like to have it freeze in front of our hotel, so I could take an ax and go out and chop a frozen girl out, and thaw her till she came to. Say, old man, if anybody ever wants to treat you to a trip to Europe, don't come here, but go to some place where they don't think they can speak English. You can understand a Nitalian or a Frenchman, or a Dutchman, who can't speak English, and knows he can't, better than you can an Englishman who thinks he can speak English, and can't, "don't you know." Everything is "don't you know." If a servant gives you an evening paper, he says, "'Ere's your paiper, don't you know," and if a man should--I don't say they would, but if a man _should_ give you a civil answer, when you asked him the name of a street, he would look at you as though you were a cannibal, and say, "Regent street, don't you know," and then he would act as though you had broken him of his rest. Dad asked more than a dozen men where Bill Astor lived, and of all the population of London I don't believe anybody knows, except one newsboy. We rode half a day on top of a bus, through streets so crowded that the horses had to creep, and dad hung on for fear the bus would be tipped over, and finally we got out into the suburbs, where the rich people live, and dad said we were right on the trail of King Edward, and we got off and loitered around, and dad saw a beautiful place, with a big iron fence, and a gate as big as a railroad bridge, and dad asked a newsboy who lived there, and the boy made up a face at dad and said, "H'astor, you bloke," and he put out his hand for a tip. It was the first civil answer dad had received in London, so he gave the boy a dollar. The boy fell over on the sidewalk, dead, and dad started to go away for fear he would be arrested for murder, but I kicked the boy on the pants, and he got up and yelled some kind of murdered English, and more than a dozen newsboys came on a gallop, and when the boy told them what had happened they all wanted dad to ask them questions. I told the boys dad was Andrew Carnegie, and that he was giving away millions of dollars, so when dad got to the gate of the beautiful H'astor place, the boys yelled Andrew Carnegie, and a flunkey flunked the gate open and dad and I went in, and walked up to the house. Astor was on the veranda, smoking a Missouri corn cob pipe, and drinking American beer, and seemed to be wishing he was back home in America. Dad marched right up to the veranda, like a veteran soldier, and Astor could see dad was an American by the dandruff on his coat collar, and Astor said, "You are an American citizen and you are welcome. Once I was like you, and didn't care a continental dam for anybody, but in a moment of passion I renounced my country, swore allegiance to this blawsted country, and everybody hates me here, and I don't dare go home to collect my rent for fear I will be quarantined at Ellis Island and sent back to England as an undesirable emigrant who has committed a crime, and is not welcome in the land where I was born. Old man, have a glass of Milwaukee beer and let's talk of your home and my birthplace, and forget that there is such a country as England." Dad sat down on the porch, and I went out on the lawn chasing peacocks and treeing guinea hens, and setting dogs on the swans, until a butler or a duke or something took me by the collar and shook me till my teeth got loose, and he took me back to the veranda and sat me down on the bottom step so hard my hair raised right up stiff, like a porcupine. Then I listened to dad and Astor talk about America, and I never saw a man who seemed to be so ashamed that he was a brevet Englishman, as he did. He said he had so much money that it made his headache to hear the interest accumulate, nights, when he couldn't sleep, and yet he had no more enjoyment than Dreyfus did on Devil's Island. He had automobiles that would fill our exposition building, horses and carriages by the score, but he never enjoyed a ride about London, because only one person in ten thousand knew him, and those who did looked upon him with pity and contempt because he had renounced his country to get solid with the English aristocracy, and nobody would speak to him unless they wanted to borrow money, and if they did borrow money from him he was afraid they would pay it back, and make him trouble counting it. He told dad he wanted to get back into America, and become a citizen again of that grand old country of the stars and stripes, and asked dad how he could do it, for he said he had rather work in a slaughter house in America than be a grand duke in England. I never saw dad look so sorry for a man as he did for Astor, and he told him the only way was to sell out his ranch in London and go back on an emigrant ship, take out his first papers, vote the democratic ticket and eventually become a citizen. Astor was thinking over the proposition, and dad had asked him if he was not afraid of dynamiters, when he shuddered and said every day he expected to be blown sky high, and finally he smelled something burning and said the smell reminded him of an American 4th of July. You see, I had been sitting still on the step of the veranda so long I got nervous, for something exciting, so I took a giant firecracker out of my pocket and lit the long tail, and shoved it under the porch and looked innocent, and just then one of the flunkies with the tightest pants you ever saw came along and patted me on the head and said I was a nice boy, and that made me mad, and when he went to sit down beside me on the step I took my horse chestnut out of my pocket and put it on the step just where he sat down, and how it happened to come out so I don't know, it must have been Providence. You see just as the flunkey flunked on the chestnut burr, the fire cracker went off, and the man jumped up and said '"Ells-fire, h'am blowed," and he had his hands on his pants, and the air was full of smoke, and dad got on his knees and said, "Now I lay me," and Mr. Astor fainted all over a rocking chair and tipped beer bottles on the veranda and more than forty servants came, and I told dad to come on, and we got outside the gate, ahead of the police, and got a cab and drove quicker than scat to the hotel, and I ast dad what he thought it was that went off, and he said "You can search me," but he said he had got enough of trying to reform escaped Americans, and we got in the hotel and laid low, and the newspapers told about a dynamite outrage, and laid it to anarchists. Well I must close, cause we are going to see the American minister and get a date to meet King' Edward. We won't do a thing to Edward. Yours, Hennery. _ |
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