“Cuff,” Leonidas said suddenly. “We’ll get hold of Cuff and have him stay downstairs in the hall.” Cassie said that Cuff was on sick leave.
“He broke his wrist wrenching a fresh truck driver out of a truck.”
“But a broken wrist won’t matter,” Leonidas said. “Cuff with two broken wrists is still an abler guard than any three men I know. The garage entrance isn’t shoveled, I noticed.”
“No. Jock particularly asked me not to have that or the driveway cleared,” Cassie said, “because he thought you might walk around the house before you came in. And if you saw the door or the drive, you’d guess the surprise right off. He was jubilant because the snow backed so high against the door.”
“And there are no windows in the garage, are there? I thought not” Leonidas said. “I couldn’t remember any. And just that one inside door, where we stood. M’yes. If we plant Cuff in the hall by that adhesive-taped door— Did Dow put the tape back before he left with Jock? Good. With Cuff there, we can proceed to set out on this project with the assurance that no matter how many people may have keys to this house, not one of them will get past Cuff into the garage. Can you call him?”
“Yes. He has a room at my cleaning woman’s. Bill,” she paused with her hand on the receiver, “who else came here that you know of, besides Estelle, and Hattie Round, and that brush man?”
“Just a deluded man,” Leonidas said, “but he came so many times, he seemed like an army. Wanted to take my icebox away, and give me another. I didn’t know people bandied iceboxes from door to door, Cassie!”
“Oh, it’s that racket again!” Cassie said. “They try to sell you a bigger and better one. Or make you give yours for another. They do that to people in new houses, and put in a rebuilt with new paint, and take out your new one. I thought Rutherford had cleaned that up. Oh, dear, it’s Mrs. Tudbury’s fault. All those keys, I mean. We gave her one, and then she had a couple made, and so on and so forth. But Cuff can take care of things—”
The back-door chimes sounded, and at the same time, the Campbells started to tinkle at the front door.
“What do you do in a case like this?” Leonidas asked. “When you’re alone, which do you answer first?”
“The nearest, unless the phone, starts to ring, too, and then I ignore all of them. You take the back door. I’ll take the front. Use the talker, be sure! Nobody must come in!”
It occurred to Leonidas as he hurried to the back door that the talker had never been demonstrated, so he peeked out of the kitchen window.
The massive figure of Cuff Murray stood on the back step.
Leonidas swung open the door.
“Cuff! We were just going to call you— Come in!”
“Hiyah, Bill! Say, Bill, she’s a peach! She’s a wow! Say, I bet you picked her up in Gay Paree, huh?”
Leonidas stared at the barber-pole lipstick which Cuff was holding out to him.
“Where did you get that!” Leonidas didn’t ask it as a question.
“Your wife dropped it just now— Hey, what’s going on in there? You got a party, huh?”
A shrill excited babble had suddenly arisen in the house.
“Well, I’ll duck,” Cuff said, “and come back later, Bill, to meet the wife. Boy, she’s a wow!”
“Cuff!” Leonidas grabbed his arm and hung onto it. “You stay here! Don’t you leave—stand there! Don’t let anyone go downstairs!”
He pushed Cuff towards the door to the boiler room as the babble grew to a din.
”Don’t let anyone past you!” Leonidas said. “No one. Understand?”
Cassie appeared in the kitchen doorway, and was almost immediately shoved to one side by the jostling throng of women that surged behind her.
Leonidas thought he had never seen so many women.
Hastily, he put on his pince-nez.
But they were no mirage. The women were real, and their number was increasing.
Babbling excitedly, and wearing happy, expectant smiles, they invaded his kitchen and filled it, and spilled over into the dining room.
And there were still more. The dining room became a swirling backwater. The radio in the living room blasted at intervals as it was switched from station to station. Leonidas could hear joyful shouts and a grinding sound as his ladder in the study was set in motion. The Campbells kept coming and coming as people played with the front-door bell.
Instinctively, he looked up at the sound of a shower being turned on in the bathroom over his head.
“It’s them.” Cassie had squirmed through the crowd and was bellowing in his ear. “They’re everywhere. All over. They didn’t listen to the talker. Or me. They just opened the door and marched in—and they’re still coming!”
“What for?” Leonidas yelled back at her. “Why?”
“Surprise,” Cassie cupped her hands to her lips. “Surprise!”
Before Leonidas could answer, Cassie was carried away on a sudden, surging wave, which deposited in her place at his side an imposing woman in black, with a corsage of gardenias trailing down her left shoulder.
She started to speak, and magically the room was quiet.
“Mr. Witherall, I’m Mrs. Tudbury, the president of the Tuesday Club! We’ve all had so much to do with your home, we almost feel it’s our very own. And when our dear Harriet Pomeroy Round,” she waited for the little burst of murmured approbation to die down, “and our dear Mrs. Otis, too, told us that you had returned, we just couldn’t resist giving you a surprise tea! We were going to have tea at the auditorium after our lecture-lunch, and then we just thought, what fun it would be to surprise you in your little haven. So we just whisked around, and came, along with our sandwiches and urns.”
Leonidas bowed from the
