Chapter I: Front Matter

PLEASE STAND BY

By Joseph Ivers Lawrence

“Turn off that horrible jazz, Adolph, and get WXL. It’s thirty-three on the dial, you know,” said Miss Maria Bascom, proprietor and hostess of Wistaria Lodge. “I’ve had nothing but jazz all the afternoon—songs and ukuleles and organs and orchestras, all the time. Seems as if I’d go distracted! Something ought to be done about it.”

“Suppose you try snapping off the switch,” suggested Henry Caddock, dean of the boarding house, who sat at the foot of the table, opposite Miss Bascom. “That’s what I do when I come into the house in the afternoon and there’s no one around, and Adolph has left the thing running. You’ve no idea how peaceful and quiet it makes the house, and it saves electricity.”

“I had an idea that Adolph kept it running most of the time,” said Miss Bascom in a low tone, as the butler busied himself with the radio cabinet in the parlor. “Adolph is very fond of music.”

“Music?” queried Hubert Quirk, on the right of the table.

“If it isn’t music, what is it?” challenged Mrs. Susan Tredmore, on the left of the hostess. “Some very distinguished authorities claim, you know, that jazz is the logical expression of American life—of the tremendous, throbbing, spontaneous action and spirit of the people.”

“Sure! I guess that’s it,” agreed Horace Sheldon, across the table. “That’s the way life and business look to me, all right. It’s something fierce, believe me!”

“Oh, you take a very cynical view of it, Mr. Sheldon,” said Mrs. Tredmore.

“Who wouldn’t?” murmured the laconic Hubert Quirk.

“And what is your view of such things, Dr. Hillary?” persisted the lady.

The college professor smiled benignly, and delicately touched his lips with his napkin.

“I’m inclined to believe that all these things will adjust themselves. A casual survey of history is—er—moderately reassuring—to those who do not expect too much.”

“I’m so glad to hear you say that, Dr. Hillary!” declared the lady, vastly gratified.

“Indeed, yes! Such an opinion from a professor stimulates one’s faith in the eternal verities, doesn’t it?” seconded the newest boarder, Miss Sylvia Stark, who had come to Port Cardinal to teach mathematics in the high school.

“Mm—Monday night,” mused the hostess, “and—er—the Orpheus Gleemen are on at eight o’clock, aren’t they, Mr. Raymond?”

“Yes, Miss Bascom, eight o’clock,” answered Douglas Raymond, the robust baritone of the quartet to which she referred. “Rather nice program tonight, too.”

“‘Rather nice!’” exclaimed Ralph Atwood, from the other end of the table. “That’s it exactly, Doug. Looks like the radio audience everywhere is made up of the inmates of old ladies’ and old men’s homes. Sentimental stuff! Milk toast and weak tea!

“Gosh! I never knew that all the people were so easy to entertain—if they are! Radio! Huh! I don’t mind hearing baseball scores and the stock market, but I’d shut the thing off right there and let it go at that. What’s the big baritone solo feature tonight? ‘My Mother Was a Lady,’ or ‘Asleep in the Deep’?”

“One good thing about radio, Ralph, you _can_ shut it off,” said the baritone a little self-consciously.

“Can you, though?” challenged the other. “I haven’t noticed that. Perhaps so—if you’re a hermit in a cave twenty miles from nowhere.”

“Sorry you have such a hard time, Mr. Atwood,” said Miss Bascom with mild sarcasm. “You remember we put it to a vote when the set was installed, and you all agreed that if just one boarder wanted to listen in, the others must raise no objections; that is, up to eleven o’clock.

“And I notice that you all sit up together frequently until midnight when there’s something good.”

Rice pudding was served, and some second and third cups of coffee; then the boarders began rising and drifting toward the parlor.

“Now that tune!” said Henry Caddock peevishly, cocking his ear toward the loud-speaker on top of the bookcase: “I was fussing with the dial last night and I found five stations all playing that tune at once; you could not get away from it. Next week it’ll be another tune, but they have to run just one or two favorites to death.”

“Ready, Mr. Raymond?” called Dora Perkins, standing at the foot of the stairs in the hall.

“Sure, I’m coming,” answered the baritone, hurrying down the stairs. “We’ve got plenty of time. Good-by, Kitty. See you when I get home.”

“Oh, good-by,” said little Kitty Granby, a stenographer in the First National Bank, affecting an air of easy indifference, and meeting the sweet smile of Dora Perkins through the hall door with one carefully calculated to be just as sweet and just as feline.

“You know WXL is our own station, right here in Port Cardinal, Miss Stark,” the hostess explained to the new boarder. “And we’re fortunate in having two of the regular staff artists here in our little family. Miss Perkins plays piano solos and accompaniments, and Mr. Raymond is the baritone in the famous Orpheus Gleemen—the wonderful male quartet. They sing three times a week, and Sundays.”

“Which is four times too many,” put in Ralph Atwood impudently. “They are _famous_ in Port Cardinal, Miss Stark, and _wonderful_ in the same town. To the big radio audiences out on the air, they’re one of the things that fill in; folks can listen to ’em when they’re too lazy to get up and shut off the switch.

“Takes all kinds to make a program, I guess. Every radio station ought to be limited to about three hours a day; we might get something good once in awhile.”

The men lighted up pipes, cigars, and cigarettes, and gallantly waited for the women to dispose themselves about the radio end of the parlor in chairs.

It was Miss Stark’s first evening at Wistaria Lodge, and she grew suddenly a little more self-conscious, then fidgety, and finally produced a little tortoise-shell cigarette case.

“Are there—ah—any objections, Miss Bascom?” she inquired of the hostess.

“N-n-n-no! Miss Stark, we’re quite modernistic here—though decently conservative. We have emerged from the Victorian age.”

She produced a cigarette for herself, obviously to put the stranger at ease.

Ottilie Eldom, buyer in a department store, casually brought forth a paper of cigarettes from the handbag in her lap.

“I don’t know much about Victorian ages or any other kind,” she said in her habitual, half-sullen, half-droll manner, “but I’ve been smoking fags for ten years; so don’t get fussed on my account, Miss Stark.”

“You started smoking as a mere child, dear!” exclaimed Etta Upham, the beauty specialist.

“Thanks, awfully, old bean!” returned Miss Eldom. “Yes, it was when my mother was passing me off as sixteen—about the time that horseless buggies were coming in. You remember!”

“No, I don’t remember!” snapped Etta, flushing. “Thank the Lord I’m no older than I am!”

“You should be thankful for that, dear,” agreed Ottilie.

“How about the movie, Kitty?” Ralph Atwood asked the little stenographer. “It’s rotten, as usual, but we’ll escape the radio.”

“Thanks very much, but I think I’ll stay in tonight.”

“How about coming with me, Kitty?” broke in Hubert Quirk. “The show’ll be just as rotten, but you look well walking with me; we’ve got style.”

“No, thank you.”

“Wise kid!” murmured Felix McMasters, the irrepressible. “You knew I was going to ask you, Kitty! You get the show, ice cream, and a taxi home. There’s a new line that runs the mile limit for thirty-five cents. Get on your coat an’ hat.”

“No, thank you,” said Kitty, and her eyes snapped a little, and her little sensitive chin seemed to quiver slightly. “I said I thought I’d stay in tonight.”

“Yeh! The Orpheus Gleemen are on the air!” jeered Ralph.

“And what if they are?” challenged Kitty angrily.

“I’m not taking any blame either way,” said Ralph. “They’re on the air, and I don’t know any way of taking ’em off. But it’s too bad to think any one has to sit here and listen. Dora giving Doug the glad eye as he comes downstairs, and sparking with ’im all the way to the studio—it’s a two-mile walk, isn’t it? And all the way home again, too!

“Any one would think you’d show some independence, Kit, and have a little fun yourself. You don’t get a thing, sitting home and moping over a guy like Doug. I never knew any o’ these male nightingales that weren’t crazy about themselves—an’ you fool flappers play right up to ’em and make ’em a blame sight worse!”

Kitty got up in a rage and flounced across the room, taking a seat by the middle-aged Horace Sheldon, proprietor of a down town cigar store. Mr. Sheldon patted her small left hand with paternal solicitude, and when he quietly made some effort to retain his hold on the hand, she jerked it away and seemed perilously close to tears of mortification and anger.

“There! There they are!” exclaimed Miss Bascom, hushing the company with upraised forefinger.