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Updated: May 22, 2025
Some one outside had passed his narrow window; feet were heard on the back porch and hands at the kitchen door. Peter was out as quickly as Cope himself; and the women, in differing stages of dress and half-dress, followed at once. While Mrs. Phillips and Carolyn were clinging to Cope, who had rushed out in undershirt and trousers, Peter had a short tussle on the porch with the intruder.
Any man who can look handsome in a dirty baseball suit is an Adonis. There is something about the baggy pants, and the Micawber-shaped collar, and the skull-fitting cap, and the foot or so of tan, or blue, or pink undershirt sleeve sticking out at the arms, that just naturally kills a man's best points. Then too, a baseball suit requires so much in the matter of leg.
This consisted of Juan, a cheery, slight fellow in a blue undershirt and speckled cotton trousers of uncertain age, who was waiter, chambermaid, porter, bath-boy, sweeper, general swipe, possibly cook, and in all but name proprietor; the nominal one being a spherical native on the down-grade of life who never moved twice in the same day if it could be avoided, leaving the establishment to run itself, and accepting phlegmatically what money it pleased Providence to send him.
The balm of heavenly silence pervaded the house, and in its beneficent atmosphere he worked in his undershirt, inhaling inspiration and the aroma of whale-oil, soap, and carbolic solutions. Neither Kathleen nor his sister being present to limit his operations, the entire house was becoming a vast mess.
He was a big Hie'land laddie, and he wore naught but his kilt and his semmet his undershirt. He had on his steel helmet, and it shaded a face that had not been shaved or washed for days. His great, brawny arms were folded across his chest, and he was smoking his pipe. And he stood there as quiet and unconcerned as if he had been a village smith gazing down a quiet country road.
An American officer at the club that evening had just been telling us about a native prisoner captured by his command sometime before in one of the smaller islands, who, when searched, had been found to be wearing next his skin a sort of undershirt on which was roughly painted a crude map of certain of the islands of the archipelago.
For that matter, there was very little heat anywhere in the building, except in the cooking rooms and such places and it was the men who worked in these who ran the most risk of all, because whenever they had to pass to another room they had to go through ice-cold corridors, and sometimes with nothing on above the waist except a sleeveless undershirt.
There was not much difficulty about the fit. A cotton undershirt, a blue jacket with silver buttons, a red sash, white breeches, loose at the knee, and a pair of sandals, and I was fully attired. Stockings I had to dispense with. They were not in vogue at San Cristobal. When I was ready, the servant, who had acted as my valet, conducted me to the dining-room, where I found Angela and the abbé.
Last of all, having slipped his feet out of the wonderful shoes, he pulled off the trousers, and stood, a pathetic little figure, in an old undershirt of Grandpa's, the sleeves of which he had shortened, and a pair of Grandpa's underdrawers, similarly cut to knee length. Barber stared at the underclothes. "Who said y' could wear my old man's things?" he asked. "N nobody."
Then he idly viewed the passing show before him. It was past mid-afternoon and dry and dusty. The keen edge of the sun had slightly dulled, but a Negro, seated high up on a pile of shabby furniture on a moving van, mopped a shining black face with the end of a very dirty undershirt sleeve.
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