The Case of Jennie Brice | Page 2

got my carpets
ready to lift that morning. That was on the fourth of March, a Sunday.
Mr. Ladley and his wife, Jennie Brice, had the parlor bedroom and the
room behind it. Mrs. Ladley, or Miss Brice, as she preferred to be
known, had a small part at a local theater that kept a permanent
company. Her husband was in that business, too, but he had nothing to
do. It was the wife who paid the bills, and a lot of quarreling they did
about it.
I knocked at the door at ten o'clock, and Mr. Ladley opened it. He was
a short man, rather stout and getting bald, and he always had a cigarette.
Even yet, the parlor carpet smells of them.
"What do you want?" he asked sharply, holding the door open about an
inch.
"The water's coming up very fast, Mr. Ladley," I said. "It's up to the
swinging-shelf in the cellar now. I'd like to take up the carpet and move
the piano."
"Come back in an hour or so," he snapped, and tried to close the door.
But I had got my toe in the crack.
"I'll have to have the piano moved, Mr. Ladley," I said. "You'd better
put off what you are doing."
I thought he was probably writing. He spent most of the day writing,
using the wash-stand as a desk, and it kept me busy with oxalic acid
taking ink-spots out of the splasher and the towels. He was writing a
play, and talked a lot about the Shuberts having promised to star him in
it when it was finished.
"Hell!" he said, and turning, spoke to somebody in the room.
"We can go into the back room," I heard him say, and he closed the
door. When he opened it again, the room was empty. I called in Terry,
the Irishman who does odd jobs for me now and then, and we both got
to work at the tacks in the carpet, Terry working by the window, and I

by the door into the back parlor, which the Ladleys used as a bedroom.
That was how I happened to hear what I afterward told the police.
Some one--a man, but not Mr. Ladley--was talking. Mrs. Ladley broke
in: "I won't do it!" she said flatly. "Why should I help him? He doesn't
help me. He loafs here all day, smoking and sleeping, and sits up all
night, drinking and keeping me awake."
The voice went on again, as if in reply to this, and I heard a rattle of
glasses, as if they were pouring drinks. They always had whisky, even
when they were behind with their board.
"That's all very well," Mrs. Ladley said. I could always hear her, she
having a theatrical sort of voice--one that carries. "But what about the
prying she-devil that runs the house?"
"Hush, for God's sake!" broke in Mr. Ladley, and after that they spoke
in whispers. Even with my ear against the panel, I could not catch a
word.
The men came just then to move the piano, and by the time we had
taken it and the furniture up-stairs, the water was over the kitchen floor,
and creeping forward into the hall. I had never seen the river come up
so fast. By noon the yard was full of floating ice, and at three that
afternoon the police skiff was on the front street, and I was wading
around in rubber boots, taking the pictures off the walls.
I was too busy to see who the Ladleys' visitor was, and he had gone
when I remembered him again. The Ladleys took the second-story front,
which was empty, and Mr. Reynolds, who was in the silk department in
a store across the river, had the room just behind.
I put up a coal stove in a back room next the bathroom, and managed to
cook the dinner there. I was washing up the dishes when Mr. Reynolds
came in. As it was Sunday, he was in his slippers and had the colored
supplement of a morning paper in his hand.

"What's the matter with the Ladleys?" he asked. "I can't read for their
quarreling."
"Booze, probably," I said. "When you've lived in the flood district as
long as I have, Mr. Reynolds, you'll know that the rising of the river is
a signal for every man in the vicinity to stop work and get full. The
fuller the river, the fuller the male population."
"Then this flood will likely make 'em drink themselves to death!" he
said. "It's a lulu."
"It's the neighborhood's annual debauch. The women are busy keeping
the babies from getting drowned in the cellars, or they'd get full, too. I
hope, since it's come this far, it will come