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قراءة كتاب The Shriek A Satirical Burlesque

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The Shriek
A Satirical Burlesque

The Shriek A Satirical Burlesque

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دار النشر: Project Gutenberg
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was changed at the last moment. She looks like a boy in skirts, a damned pretty boy—and a damned haughty one.”

“I falter,” said the Englishman courteously, “at an attempt to think of a boy no matter how damned pretty he might be, looking haughty in skirts. But have it your own way, old dear. However, please remember the handicap that Lady Speedway has taken on me and don’t interrupt in the matter of these Mayonnaises. Why, I was brought up right next to ’em, as it were, and——”

“An odd streak in the family?”

“Streak? A psychopathic rainbow, old dear!

“Her father, Sir John Mayonnaise and his wife were so passionately devoted that they had two children born nineteen years apart.

“The first was Lord Tawdry. You’ve seen him?”

“O, quite.”

“There was discouragement for a devoted couple if you like!

“Then when Verbeena was born her mother died immediately.

“Ten seconds later Sir John grasped a big pistol and blew his brains somewhere or other. Nobody criticized the act of Sir John save as to the size of the pistol. Least of all he who is now Lord Tawdry.”

“There was no suicide clause in Sir John’s insurance policy, I take it?”

“What a sharp devil you are! Exactly. And one doesn’t blame Tawd really for what followed regarding Verbeena. That is to say, he turned down about fifty female advisers and decided to bring Verbeena up as a Johnny instead of a Mildred. Can you conceive?”

“Not easily.”

“It was less trouble—it wouldn’t, you know, take up so much of his time. He needed all that for training up on bridge and American poker in order to conserve the old patrimony thing.”

“Brought her up just as a boy?”

“Like a bally nipper! Quite. Ridin’, wrestlin’, boxin’, boatin’, fightin’—wherever she might be duly confident of victory—jumpin’, runnin’, skatin’, skeein’, golfin’, gamblin’—er——”

“No sex at all?”

“Had she any the little dear must have wrestled with it long ago and lost.”

“Ah,” said the American, “that would account for her sang Freud.”

“O, indeed, I assure you, cold as a fish.”

“She probably feels the void?”

“Sir?”

“Figures the hot sands of the desert may warm her up a bit.”

“Frapjous! And yet you see, she goes alone! What in the world her idea is I’m sure I—look—there’s young Butternut after her now! A good lad but not, I think, quite clear above. Really you know he can’t be. For surely must he know that all Verbeena inherited from her father was the pistol Sir John shot himself with. Although, of course, she shares with her brother, Tawdry, the same damned haughty luck at bridge. These two things and a sterling uppercut is all she owns and yet he would marry her!”

“You’d think he’d have a Butternut,” said the American shamelessly, although, after due explanation, the Englishman broke into hilarious laughter.

“You mean, he hadn’t best? I quite agree with you.”

They stood with looks of mild intelligence on their cosmopolitanly caustic countenances at Lord Tawdry and his sister, Verbeena, as they sat predominantly on the platform of the ballroom acting as host and hostess with tremendous haute monde de flair.

Lord Tawdry was six feet two in height, though seated, and half a foot wide and he wore an eight-pound black mustache to show that regardless of Verbeena’s curiously trained character, there was nothing ambisextrous about himself.

His courtesy was so inbred that he kept looking the company over as if he wished they’d all go home and let him go to bed. His sleek head would drop forward sleepily from time to time but always bob up like the balloon it possibly perhaps was maybe.

The distinguished nobleman was, moreover, an awful tramp at wearing a monocle. It was dropping out of his eye every few minutes keeping six servants busy catching it and putting it back. Frequently they took a mean advantage and slapped it back.

Verbeena, you betcher, was different from her brother despite all that had otherwise been done [Pg 10]
[Pg 11]
for and to her. Anybody could see she was violently alive, that she had verve to the crescendo of the fluorescent.


LORD TAWDRY, FROM A PORTRAIT BY HEVVINS IN THE ANCESTRAL CASTLE AT MAYONNAISE-ON-LETTYS.

Strangely enough, she was smaller than her brother. But she had a pair of shoulders did Verbeena and her ball gown revealed the ripple of the steel muscles on her young arms.

Straddling her chair on the platform she kicked up her heels in her boyish, athletic manner and snapped a smoking cigarette into the air every once in a while, catching it by the lighted end in her firm, proud, scornful, obstinate, determined, appealing, impulsive, unsatisfied sweet mouth.

Twice she missed and set fire to her skirt, but what did this boyish, lovely creature care about a skirt?

Her eyes were marvelous. They were crossed between a sea green and a pond blue but her black eyebrows were obviously alike and offered strange contrast to the loose, red, bobbed curls she wore, clubbed about her ears.

In the course of training her Lord Tawdry had always attended to the style in which she wore her hair.

In the company at the Hotel Biscuit dance all the men dropped their partners, even if they weren’t their wives, and trooped toward Verbeena, an international galaxy of adorers comprising Scotch, Irish, Spanish, Scandinavians, Malays, Canadians, Moabites and—well, that will be about enough—but toward all of them who pleaded, some with twanging guitars, others with ukeleles and one with a harmonica for a chance to clasp her boyish beauty in the ardor of a kicky dance, Miss Mayonnaise had but one insouciant, petulant reply:

“Aw, g’wan. Fade!”

Young Butternut stood nearby with his heart in his eyes. He was nodding joyfully and murmuring softly for her ear alone:

“’Attaboy!”

“I say, chappie, what are you cooing about?” finally demanded Miss Mayonnaise.

“Please, old thing, a word alone out on the balcony,” Butternut abjectly amplified.

“You’ve a jolly cheek,” retorted Verbeena lighting another cigarette. “And yet?” she suddenly arose and knocked the pleasing young man for a few feet with a merry clap on the ear. “I’ll take you on. I like you, Butternut. You remind me so much of your sister.”

She pulled out a guinea and started matching him as they passed from the ballroom and out upon the balcony under the ambient, silver light of the romantic moon which was, indeed, shining.

Two minutes later and from the direction of this same window out of which they had passed—you remember, harmlessly matching guineas—sounded a wild, prolonged and subtly syncopated ladylike screech.

A hush came over the crowded room. Regular ladies huddled fearsomely against shaky-kneed, cosmopolitan daredevils while craven waiters went out to see what the trouble was. Somebody tore the hotel doctor away from his absinthe drip and rushed him out too.

A solemn procession returned.

Frightened faces drew apart to let it pass. Frightened eyes gazed upon a white stretcher borne in the center of it. On it was the prone figure of a person whose face was also white.

The figure recumbent

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