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Indiscretions of Archie

by P. G. Wodehouse · English · Gutenberg #3756 · 432,428 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Indiscretions of Archie

Author: P. G. Wodehouse


        
Release date: June 25, 2008 [eBook #3756]
                Most recently updated: August 13, 2021

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK INDISCRETIONS OF ARCHIE ***




Indiscretions of Archie

by P. G. Wodehouse


Contents

 CHAPTER I. DISTRESSING SCENE
 CHAPTER II. A SHOCK FOR MR BREWSTER
 CHAPTER III. MR BREWSTER DELIVERS SENTENCE
 CHAPTER IV. WORK WANTED
 CHAPTER V. STRANGE EXPERIENCES OF AN ARTIST’S MODEL
 CHAPTER VI. THE BOMB
 CHAPTER VII. MR ROSCOE SHERRIFF HAS AN IDEA
 CHAPTER VIII. A DISTURBED NIGHT FOR DEAR OLD SQUIFFY
 CHAPTER IX. A LETTER FROM PARKER
 CHAPTER X. DOING FATHER A BIT OF GOOD
 CHAPTER XI. SALVATORE CHOOSES THE WRONG MOMENT
 CHAPTER XII. BRIGHT EYES—AND A FLY
 CHAPTER XIII. RALLYING ROUND PERCY
 CHAPTER XIV. THE SAD CASE OF LOONEY BIDDLE
 CHAPTER XV. SUMMER STORMS
 CHAPTER XVI. ARCHIE ACCEPTS A SITUATION
 CHAPTER XVII. BROTHER BILL’S ROMANCE
 CHAPTER XVIII. THE SAUSAGE CHAPPIE
 CHAPTER XIX. REGGIE COMES TO LIFE
 CHAPTER XX. THE-SAUSAGE-CHAPPIE-CLICKS
 CHAPTER XXI. THE GROWING BOY
 CHAPTER XXII. WASHY STEPS INTO THE HALL OF FAME
 CHAPTER XXIII. MOTHER’S KNEE
 CHAPTER XXIV. THE MELTING OF MR CONNOLLY
 CHAPTER XXV. THE WIGMORE VENUS
 CHAPTER XXVI. A TALE OF A GRANDFATHER




It wasn’t Archie’s fault really. Its true he went to America and fell
in love with Lucille, the daughter of a millionaire hotel proprietor
and if he did marry her—well, what else was there to do?

From his point of view, the whole thing was a thoroughly good egg; but
Mr. Brewster, his father-in-law, thought differently, Archie had
neither money nor occupation, which was distasteful in the eyes of the
industrious Mr. Brewster; but the real bar was the fact that he had
once adversely criticised one of his hotels.

Archie does his best to heal the breach; but, being something of an
ass, genus priceless, he finds it almost beyond his powers to placate
“the man-eating fish” whom Providence has given him as a father-in-law




P. G. Wodehouse

AUTHOR OF “THE LITTLE WARRIOR,” “A DAMSEL IN DISTRESS,” “UNEASY MONEY,”
ETC.

NEW YORK GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY COPYRIGHT,1921, BY GEORGE H, DORAN
COMPANY COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY INTERNATIONAL MAGAZINE COMPANY
(COSMOPOLITAN MAGAZINE)
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA




DEDICATION
TO
B. W. KING-HALL

My dear Buddy,—

We have been friends for eighteen years. A considerable proportion of
my books were written under your hospitable roof. And yet I have never
dedicated one to you. What will be the verdict of Posterity on this?
The fact is, I have become rather superstitious about dedications. No
sooner do you label a book with the legend—


TO MY
BEST FRIEND
X

than X cuts you in Piccadilly, or you bring a lawsuit against him.
There is a fatality about it. However, I can’t imagine anyone
quarrelling with you, and I am getting more attractive all the time, so
let’s take a chance.

Yours ever,
P. G. WODEHOUSE.




CHAPTER I.
DISTRESSING SCENE


“I say, laddie!” said Archie.

“Sir?” replied the desk-clerk alertly. All the employes of the Hotel
Cosmopolis were alert. It was one of the things on which Mr. Daniel
Brewster, the proprietor, insisted. And as he was always wandering
about the lobby of the hotel keeping a personal eye on affairs, it was
never safe to relax.

“I want to see the manager.”

“Is there anything I could do, sir?”

Archie looked at him doubtfully.

“Well, as a matter of fact, my dear old desk-clerk,” he said, “I want
to kick up a fearful row, and it hardly seems fair to lug you into it.
Why you, I mean to say? The blighter whose head I want on a charger is
the bally manager.”

At this point a massive, grey-haired man, who had been standing close
by, gazing on the lobby with an air of restrained severity, as if
daring it to start anything, joined in the conversation.

“I am the manager,” he said.

His eye was cold and hostile. Others, it seemed to say, might like
Archie Moffam, but not he. Daniel Brewster was bristling for combat.
What he had overheard had shocked him to the core of his being. The
Hotel Cosmopolis was his own private, personal property, and the thing
dearest to him in the world, after his daughter Lucille. He prided
himself on the fact that his hotel was not like other New York hotels,
which were run by impersonal companies and shareholders and boards of
directors, and consequently lacked the paternal touch which made the
Cosmopolis what it was. At other hotels things went wrong, and clients
complained. At the Cosmopolis things never went wrong, because he was
on the spot to see that they didn’t, and as a result clients never
complained. Yet here was this long, thin, string-bean of an Englishman
actually registering annoyance and dissatisfaction before his very
eyes.

“What is your complaint?” he enquired frigidly.

Archie attached himself to the top button of Mr. Brewster’s coat, and
was immediately dislodged by an irritable jerk of the other’s
substantial body.

“Listen, old thing! I came over to this country to nose about in search
of a job, because there doesn’t seem what you might call a general
demand for my services in England. Directly I was demobbed, the family
started talking about the Land of Opportunity and shot me on to a
liner. The idea was that I might get hold of something in America—”

He got hold of Mr. Brewster’s coat-button, and was again shaken off.

“Between ourselves, I’ve never done anything much in England, and I
fancy the family were getting a bit fed. At any rate, they sent me over
here—”

Mr. Brewster disentangled himself for the third time.

“I would prefer to postpone the story of your life,” he said coldly,
“and be informed what is your specific complaint against the Hotel
Cosmopolis.”

“Of course, yes. The jolly old hotel. I’m coming to that. Well, it was
like this. A chappie on the boat told me that this was the best place
to stop at in New York—”

“He was quite right,” said Mr. Brewster.

“Was he, by Jove! Well, all I can say, then, is that the other New York
hotels must be pretty mouldy, if this is the best of the lot! I took a
room here last night,” said Archie quivering with self-pity, “and there
was a beastly tap outside somewhere which went drip-drip-drip all night
and kept me awake.”

Mr. Brewster’s annoyance deepened. He felt that a chink had been found
in his armour. Not even the most paternal hotel-proprietor can keep an
eye on every tap in his establishment.

“Drip-drip-drip!” repeated Archie firmly. “And I put my boots outside
the door when I went to bed, and this morning they hadn’t been touched.
I give you my solemn word! Not touched.”

“Naturally,” said Mr. Brewster. “My employés are honest.”

“But I wanted them cleaned, dash it!”

“There is a shoe-shining parlour in the basement. At the Cosmopolis
shoes left outside bedroom doors are not cleaned.”

“Then I think the Cosmopolis is a bally rotten hotel!”

Mr. Brewster’s compact frame quivered. The unforgivable insult had been
offered. Question the legitimacy of Mr. Brewster’s parentage, knock Mr.
Brewster down and walk on his face with spiked shoes, and you did not
irremediably close all avenues to a peaceful settlement. But make a
remark like that about his hotel, and war was definitely declared.

“In that case,” he said, stiffening, “I must ask you to give up your
room.”

“I’m going to give it up! I wouldn’t stay in the bally place another
minute.”

Mr. Brewster walked away, and Archie charged round to the cashier’s
desk to get his bill. It had been his intention in any case, though for
dramatic purposes he concealed it from his adversary, to leave the
hotel that morning. One of the letters of introduction which he had
brought over from England had resulted in an invitation from a Mrs. van
Tuyl to her house-party at Miami, and he had decided to go there at
once.

“Well,” mused Archie, on his way to the station, “one thing’s certain.
I’ll never set foot in _that_ bally place again!”

But nothing in this world is certain.




CHAPTER II.
A SHOCK FOR MR. BREWSTER


Mr. Daniel Brewster sat in his luxurious suite at the Cosmopolis,
smoking one of his admirable cigars and chatting with his old friend,
Professor Binstead. A stranger who had only encountered Mr. Brewster in
the lobby of the hotel would have been surprised at the appearance of
his sitting-room, for it had none of the rugged simplicity which was
the keynote of its owner’s personal appearance. Daniel Brewster was a
man with a hobby. He was what Parker, his valet, termed a connoozer.
His educated taste in Art was one of the things which went to make the
Cosmopolis different from and superior to other New York hotels. He had
personally selected the tapestries in the dining-room and the various
paintings throughout the building. And in his private capacity he was
an enthusiastic collector of things which Professor Binstead, whose
tastes lay in the same direction, would have stolen without a twinge of
conscience if he could have got the chance.

The professor, a small man of middle age who wore tortoiseshell-rimmed
spectacles, flitted covetously about the room, inspecting its treasures
with a glistening eye. In a corner, Parker, a grave, lean individual,
bent over the chafing-dish, in which he was preparing for his employer
and his guest their simple lunch.

“Brewster,” said Professor Binstead, pausing at the mantelpiece.

Mr. Brewster looked up amiably. He was in placid mood to-day. Two weeks
and more had passed since the meeting with Archie recorded in the
previous chapter, and he had been able to dismiss that disturbing
affair from his mind. Since then, everything had gone splendidly with
Daniel Brewster, for he had just accomplished his ambition of the
moment by completing the negotiations for the purchase of a site
further down-town, on which he proposed to erect a new hotel. He liked
building hotels. He had the Cosmopolis, his first-born, a summer hotel
in the mountains, purchased in the previous year, and he was toying
with the idea of running over to England and putting up another in
London, That, however, would have to wait. Meanwhile, he would
concentrate on this new one down-town. It had kept him busy and
worried, arranging for securing the site; but his troubles were over
now.

“Yes?” he said.

Professor Binstead had picked up a small china figure of delicate
workmanship. It represented a warrior of pre-khaki days advancing with
a spear upon some adversary who, judging from the contented expression
on the warrior’s face, was smaller than himself.

“Where did you get this?”

“That? Mawson, my agent, found it in a little shop on the east side.”

“Where’s the other? There ought to be another. These things go in
pairs. They’re valueless alone.”

Mr. Brewster’s brow clouded.

“I know that,” he said shortly. “Mawson’s looking for the other one
everywhere. If you happen across it, I give you _carte blanche_ to buy
it for me.”

“It must be somewhere.”

“Yes. If you find it, don’t worry about the expense. I’ll settle up, no
matter what it is.”

“I’ll bear it in mind,” said Professor Binstead. “It may cost you a lot
of money. I suppose you know that.”

“I told you I don’t care what it costs.”

“It’s nice to be a millionaire,” sighed Professor Binstead.

“Luncheon is served, sir,” said Parker.

He had stationed himself in a statutesque pose behind Mr. Brewster’s
chair, when there was a knock at the door. He went to the door, and
returned with a telegram.

“Telegram for you, sir.”

Mr. Brewster nodded carelessly. The contents of the chafing-dish had
justified the advance advertising of their odour, and he was too busy
to be interrupted.

“Put it down. And you needn’t wait, Parker.”

“Very good, sir.”

The valet withdrew, and Mr. Brewster resumed his lunch.

“Aren’t you going to open it?” asked Professor Binstead, to whom a
telegram was a telegram.

“It can wait. I get them all day long. I expect it’s from Lucille,
saying what train she’s making.”

“She returns to-day?”

“Yes, Been at Miami.” Mr. Brewster, having dwelt at adequate length on
the contents of the chafing-dish, adjusted his glasses and took up the
envelope. “I shall be glad—Great Godfrey!”

He sat staring at the telegram, his mouth open. His friend eyed him
solicitously.

“No bad news, I hope?”

Mr. Brewster gurgled in a strangled way.

“Bad news? Bad—? Here, read it for yourself.”

Professor Binstead, one of the three most inquisitive men in New York,
took the slip of paper with gratitude.

“‘Returning New York to-day with darling Archie,’” he read. “‘Lots of
love from us both. Lucille.’” He gaped at his host. “Who is Archie?” he
enquired.

“Who is Archie?” echoed Mr. Brewster helplessly. “Who is—? That’s just
what I would like to know.”

“‘Darling Archie,’” murmured the professor, musing over the telegram.
“‘Returning to-day with darling Archie.’ Strange!”

Mr. Brewster continued to stare before him. When you send your only
daughter on a visit to Miami minus any entanglements and she mentions
in a telegram that she has acquired a darling Archie, you are naturally
startled. He rose from the table with a bound. It had occurred to him
that by neglecting a careful study of his mail during the past week, as
was his bad habit when busy, he had lost an opportunity of keeping
abreast with current happenings. He recollected now that a letter had
arrived from Lucille some time ago, and that he had put it away
unopened till he should have leisure to read it. Lucille was a dear
girl, he had felt, but her letters when on a vacation seldom contained
anything that couldn’t wait a few days for a reading. He sprang for his
desk, rummaged among his papers, and found what he was seeking.

It was a long letter, and there was silence in the room for some
moments while he mastered its contents. Then he turned to the
professor, breathing heavily.

“Good heavens!”

“Yes?” said Professor Binstead eagerly. “Yes?”

“Good Lord!”

“Well?”

“Good gracious!”

“What is it?” demanded the professor in an agony.

Mr. Brewster sat down again with a thud.

“She’s married!”

“Married!”

“Married! To an Englishman!”

“Bless my soul!”

“She says,” proceeded Mr. Brewster, referring to the letter again,
“that they were both so much in love that they simply had to slip off
and get married, and she hopes I won’t be cross. Cross!” gasped Mr.
Brewster, gazing wildly at his friend.

“Very disturbing!”

“Disturbing! You bet it’s disturbing! I don’t know anything about the
fellow. Never heard of him in my life. She says he wanted a quiet
wedding because he thought a fellow looked such a chump getting
married! And I must love him, because he’s all set to love me very
much!”

“Extraordinary!”

Mr. Brewster put the letter down.

“An Englishman!”

“I have met some very agreeable Englishmen,” said Professor Binstead.

“I don’t like Englishmen,” growled Mr. Brewster. “Parker’s an
Englishman.”

“Your valet?”

“Yes. I believe he wears my shirts on the sly,’” said Mr. Brewster
broodingly, “If I catch him—! What would you do about this, Binstead?”

“Do?” The professor considered the point judicially. “Well, really,
Brewster, I do not see that there is anything you can do. You must
simply wait and meet the man. Perhaps he will turn out an admirable
son-in-law.”

“H’m!” Mr. Brewster declined to take an optimistic view. “But an
Englishman, Binstead!” he said with pathos. “Why,” he went on, memory
suddenly stirring, “there was an Englishman at this hotel only a week
or two ago who went about knocking it in a way that would have amazed
you! Said it was a rotten place! _My_ hotel!”

Professor Binstead clicked his tongue sympathetically. He understood
his friend’s warmth.




CHAPTER III.
MR. BREWSTER DELIVERS SENTENCE


At about the same moment that Professor Binstead was clicking his
tongue in Mr. Brewster’s sitting-room, Archie Moffam sat contemplating
his bride in a drawing-room on the express from Miami. He was thinking
that this was too good to be true. His brain had been in something of a
whirl these last few days, but this was one thought that never failed
to emerge clearly from the welter.

Mrs. Archie Moffam, nee Lucille Brewster, was small and slender. She
had a little animated face, set in a cloud of dark hair. She was so
altogether perfect that Archie had frequently found himself compelled
to take the marriage-certificate out of his inside pocket and study it
furtively, to make himself realise that this miracle of good fortune
had actually happened to him.

“Honestly, old bean—I mean, dear old thing,—I mean, darling,” said
Archie, “I can’t believe it!”

“What?”

“What I mean is, I can’t understand why you should have married a
blighter like me.”

Lucille’s eyes opened. She squeezed his hand.

“Why, you’re the most wonderful thing in the world, precious!—Surely
you know that?”

“Absolutely escaped my notice. Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure! You wonder-child! Nobody could see you without
loving you!”

Archie heaved an ecstatic sigh. Then a thought crossed his mind. It was
a thought which frequently came to mar his bliss.

“I say, I wonder if your father will think that!”

“Of course he will!”

“We rather sprung this, as it were, on the old lad,” said Archie
dubiously. “What sort of a man _is_ your father?”

“Father’s a darling, too.”

“Rummy thing he should own that hotel,” said Archie. “I had a frightful
row with a blighter of a manager there just before I left for Miami.
Your father ought to sack that chap. He was a blot on the landscape!”

It had been settled by Lucille during the journey that Archie should be
broken gently to his father-in-law. That is to say, instead of bounding
blithely into Mr. Brewster’s presence hand in hand, the happy pair
should separate for half an hour or so, Archie hanging around in the
offing while Lucille saw her father and told him the whole story, or
those chapters of it which she had omitted from her letter for want of
space. Then, having impressed Mr. Brewster sufficiently with his luck
in having acquired Archie for a son-in-law, she would lead him to where
his bit of good fortune awaited him.

The programme worked out admirably in its earlier stages. When the two
emerged from Mr. Brewster’s room to meet Archie, Mr. Brewster’s general
idea was that fortune had smiled upon him in an almost unbelievable
fashion and had presented him with a son-in-law who combined in almost
equal parts the more admirable characteristics of Apollo, Sir Galahad,
and Marcus Aurelius. True, he had gathered in the course of the
conversation that dear Archie had no occupation and no private means;
but Mr. Brewster felt that a great-souled man like Archie didn’t need
them. You can’t have everything, and Archie, according to Lucille’s
account, was practically a hundred per cent man in soul, looks,
manners, amiability, and breeding. These are the things that count. Mr.
Brewster proceeded to the lobby in a glow of optimism and geniality.

Consequently, when he perceived Archie, he got a bit of a shock.

“Hullo—ullo—ullo!” said Archie, advancing happily.

“Archie, darling, this is father,” said Lucille.

“Good Lord!” said Archie.

There was one of those silences. Mr. Brewster looked at Archie. Archie
gazed at Mr. Brewster. Lucille, perceiving without understanding why
that the big introduction scene had stubbed its toe on some
unlooked-for obstacle, waited anxiously for enlightenment. Meanwhile,
Archie continued to inspect Mr. Brewster, and Mr. Brewster continued to
drink in Archie.

After an awkward pause of about three and a quarter minutes, Mr.
Brewster swallowed once or twice, and finally spoke.

“Lu!”

“Yes, father?”

“Is this true?”

Lucille’s grey eyes clouded over with perplexity and apprehension.

“True?”

“Have you really inflicted this—_this_ on me for a son-in-law?” Mr.
Brewster swallowed a few more times, Archie the while watching with a
frozen fascination the rapid shimmying of his new relative’s
Adam’s-apple. “Go away! I want to have a few words alone with
this—This—_wassyourdamname?_” he demanded, in an overwrought manner,
addressing Archie for the first time.

“I told you, father. It’s Moom.”

“Moom?”

“It’s spelt M-o-f-f-a-m, but pronounced Moom.”

“To rhyme,” said Archie, helpfully, “with Bluffinghame.”

“Lu,” said Mr. Brewster, “run away! I want to speak to-to-to—”

“You called me _this_ before,” said Archie.

“You aren’t angry, father, dear?” said Lucilla.

“Oh no! Oh no! I’m tickled to death!”

When his daughter had withdrawn, Mr. Brewster drew a long breath.

“Now then!” he said.

“Bit embarrassing, all this, what!” said Archie, chattily. “I mean to
say, having met before in less happy circs. and what not. Rum
coincidence and so forth! How would it be to bury the jolly old
hatchet—start a new life—forgive and forget—learn to love each
other—and all that sort of rot? I’m game if you are. How do we go? Is
it a bet?”

Mr. Brewster remained entirely unsoftened by this manly appeal to his
better feelings.

“What the devil do you mean by marrying my daughter?”

Archie reflected.

“Well, it sort of happened, don’t you know! You know how these things
_are!_ Young yourself once, and all that. I was most frightfully in
love, and Lu seemed to think it wouldn’t be a bad scheme, and one thing
led to another, and—well, there you are, don’t you know!”

“And I suppose you think you’ve done pretty well for yourself?”

“Oh, absolutely! As far as I’m concerned, everything’s topping! I’ve
never felt so braced in my life!”

“Yes!” said Mr. Brewster, with bitterness, “I suppose, from your
view-point, everything _is_ ‘topping.’ You haven’t a cent to your name,
and you’ve managed to fool a rich man’s daughter into marrying you. I
suppose you looked me up in Bradstreet before committing yourself?”

This aspect of the matter had not struck Archie until this moment.

“I say!” he observed, with dismay. “I never looked at it like that
before! I can see that, from your point of view, this must look like a
bit of a wash-out!”

“How do you propose to support Lucille, anyway?”

Archie ran a finger round the inside of his collar. He felt
embarrassed, His father-in-law was opening up all kinds of new lines of
thought.

“Well, there, old bean,” he admitted, frankly, “you rather have me!” He
turned the matter over for a moment. “I had a sort of idea of, as it
were, working, if you know what I mean.”

“Working at what?”

“Now, there again you stump me somewhat! The general scheme was that I
should kind of look round, you know, and nose about and buzz to and fro
till something turned up. That was, broadly speaking, the notion!”

“And how did you suppose my daughter was to live while you were doing
all this?”

“Well, I think,” said Archie, “I _think_ we rather expected _you_ to
rally round a bit for the nonce!”

“I see! You expected to live on me?”

“Well, you put it a bit crudely, but—as far as I had mapped anything
out—that WAS what you might call the general scheme of procedure. You
don’t think much of it, what? Yes? No?”

Mr. Brewster exploded.

“No! I do not think much of it! Good God! You go out of my hotel—_my_
hotel—calling it all the names you could think of—roasting it to beat
the band—”

“Trifle hasty!” murmured Archie, apologetically. “Spoke without
thinking. Dashed tap had gone _drip-drip-drip_ all night—kept me
awake—hadn’t had breakfast—bygones be bygones—!”

“Don’t interrupt! I say, you go out of my hotel, knocking it as no one
has ever knocked it since it was built, and you sneak straight off and
marry my daughter without my knowledge.”

“Did think of wiring for blessing. Slipped the old bean, somehow. You
know how one forgets things!”

“And now you come back and calmly expect me to fling my arms round you
and kiss you, and support you for the rest of your life!”

“Only while I’m nosing about and buzzing to and fro.”

“Well, I suppose I’ve got to support you. There seems no way out of it.
I’ll tell you exactly what I propose to do. You think my hotel is a
pretty poor hotel, eh? Well, you’ll have plenty of opportunity of
judging, because you’re coming to live here. I’ll let you have a suite
and I’ll let you have your meals, but outside of that—nothing doing!
Nothing doing! Do you understand what I mean?”

“Absolutely! You mean, ‘Napoo!’”

“You can sign bills for a reasonable amount in my restaurant, and the
hotel will look after your laundry. But not a cent do you get out of
me. And, if you want your shoes shined, you can pay for it yourself in
the basement. If you leave them outside your door, I’ll instruct the
floor-waiter to throw them down the air-shaft. Do you understand? Good!
Now, is there anything more you want to ask?”

Archie smiled a propitiatory smile.

“Well, as a matter of fact, I was going to ask if you would stagger
along and have a bite with us in the grill-room?”

“I will not!”

“I’ll sign the bill,” said Archie, ingratiatingly. “You don’t think
much of it? Oh, right-o!”




CHAPTER IV.
WORK WANTED


It seemed to Archie, as he surveyed his position at the end of the
first month of his married life, that all was for the best in the best
of all possible worlds. In their attitude towards America, visiting
Englishmen almost invariably incline to extremes, either detesting all
that therein is or else becoming enthusiasts on the subject of the
country, its climate, and its institutions. Archie belonged to the
second class. He liked America and got on splendidly with Americans
from the start. He was a friendly soul, a mixer; and in New York, that
city of mixers, he found himself at home. The atmosphere of
good-fellowship and the open-hearted hospitality of everybody he met
appealed to him. There were moments when it seemed to him as though New
York had simply been waiting for him to arrive before giving the word
to let the revels commence.

Nothing, of course, in this world is perfect; and, rosy as were the
glasses through which Archie looked on his new surroundings, he had to
admit that there was one flaw, one fly in the ointment, one individual
caterpillar in the salad. Mr. Daniel Brewster, his father-in-law,
remained consistently unfriendly. Indeed, his manner towards his new
relative became daily more and more a manner which would have caused
gossip on the plantation if Simon Legree had exhibited it in his
relations with Uncle Tom. And this in spite of the fact that Archie, as
early as the third morning of his stay, had gone to him and in the most
frank and manly way, had withdrawn his criticism of the Hotel
Cosmopolis, giving it as his considered opinion that the Hotel
Cosmopolis on closer inspection appeared to be a good egg, one of the
best and brightest, and a bit of all right.

“A credit to you, old thing,” said Archie cordially.

“Don’t call me old thing!” growled Mr. Brewster.

“Right-o, old companion!” said Archie amiably.

Archie, a true philosopher, bore this hostility with fortitude, but it
worried Lucille.

“I do wish father understood you better,” was her wistful comment when
Archie had related the conversation.

“Well, you know,” said Archie, “I’m open for being understood any time
he cares to take a stab at it.”

“You must try and make him fond of you.”

“But how? I smile winsomely at him and what not, but he doesn’t
respond.”

“Well, we shall have to think of something. I want him to realise what
an angel you are. You _are_ an angel, you know.”

“No, really?”

“Of course you are.”

“It’s a rummy thing,” said Archie, pursuing a train of thought which
was constantly with him, “the more I see of you, the more I wonder how
you can have a father like—I mean to say, what I mean to say is, I wish
I had known your mother; she must have been frightfully attractive.”

“What would really please him, I know,” said Lucille, “would be if you
got some work to do. He loves people who work.”

“Yes?” said Archie doubtfully. “Well, you know, I heard him
interviewing that chappie behind the desk this morning, who works like
the dickens from early morn to dewy eve, on the subject of a mistake in
his figures; and, if he loved him, he dissembled it all right. Of
course, I admit that so far I haven’t been one of the toilers, but the
dashed difficult thing is to know how to start. I’m nosing round, but
the openings for a bright young man seem so scarce.”

“Well, keep on trying. I feel sure that, if you could only find
something to do, it doesn’t matter what, father would be quite
different.”

It was possibly the dazzling prospect of making Mr. Brewster quite
different that stimulated Archie. He was strongly of the opinion that
any change in his father-in-law must inevitably be for the better. A
chance meeting with James B. Wheeler, the artist, at the Pen-and-Ink
Club seemed to open the way.

To a visitor to New York who has the ability to make himself liked it
almost appears as though the leading industry in that city was the
issuing of two-weeks’ invitation-cards to clubs. Archie since his
arrival had been showered with these pleasant evidences of his
popularity; and he was now an honorary member of so many clubs of
various kinds that he had not time to go to them all. There were the
fashionable clubs along Fifth Avenue to which his friend Reggie van
Tuyl, son of his Florida hostess, had introduced him. There were the
businessmen’s clubs of which he was made free by more solid citizens.
And, best of all, there were the Lambs’, the Players’, the Friars’, the
Coffee-House, the Pen-and-Ink,—and the other resorts of the artist, the
author, the actor, and the Bohemian. It was in these that Archie spent
most of his time, and it was here that he made the acquaintance of J.
B. Wheeler, the popular illustrator.

To Mr. Wheeler, over a friendly lunch, Archie had been confiding some
of his ambitions to qualify as the hero of one of the
Get-on-or-get-out-young-man-step-lively-books.

“You want a job?” said Mr. Wheeler.

“I want a job,” said Archie.

Mr. Wheeler consumed eight fried potatoes in quick succession. He was
an able trencherman.

“I always looked on you as one of our leading lilies of the field,” he
said. “Why this anxiety to toil and spin?”

“Well, my wife, you know, seems to think it might put me one-up with
the jolly old dad if I did something.”

“And you’re not particular what you do, so long as it has the outer
aspect of work?”

“Anything in the world, laddie, anything in the world.”

“Then come and pose for a picture I’m doing,” said J. B. Wheeler. “It’s
for a magazine cover. You’re just the model I want, and I’ll pay you at
the usual rates. Is it a go?”

“Pose?”

“You’ve only got to stand still and look like a chunk of wood. You can
do that, surely?”

“I can do that,” said Archie.

“Then come along down to my studio to-morrow.”

“Right-o!” said Archie.




CHAPTER V.
STRANGE EXPERIENCES OF AN ARTIST’S MODEL


“I say, old thing!”

Archie spoke plaintively. Already he was looking back ruefully to the
time when he had supposed that an artist’s model had a soft job. In the
first five minutes muscles which he had not been aware that he
possessed had started to ache like neglected teeth. His respect for the
toughness and durability of artists’ models was now solid. How they
acquired the stamina to go through this sort of thing all day and then
bound off to Bohemian revels at night was more than he could
understand.

“Don’t wobble, confound you!” snorted Mr. Wheeler.

“Yes, but, my dear old artist,” said Archie, “what you don’t seem to
grasp—what you appear not to realise—is that I’m getting a crick in the
back.”

“You weakling! You miserable, invertebrate worm. Move an inch and I’ll
murder you, and come and dance on your grave every Wednesday and
Saturday. I’m just getting it.”

“It’s in the spine that it seems to catch me principally.”

“Be a man, you faint-hearted string-bean!” urged J. B. Wheeler. “You
ought to be ashamed of yourself. Why, a girl who was posing for me last
week stood for a solid hour on one leg, holding a tennis racket over
her head and smiling brightly withal.”

“The female of the species is more india-rubbery than the male,” argued
Archie.

“Well, I’ll be through in a few minutes. Don’t weaken. Think how proud
you’ll be when you see yourself on all the bookstalls.”

Archie sighed, and braced himself to the task once more. He wished he
had never taken on this binge. In addition to his physical discomfort,
he was feeling a most awful chump. The cover on which Mr. Wheeler was
engaged was for the August number of the magazine, and it had been
necessary for Archie to drape his reluctant form in a two-piece bathing
suit of a vivid lemon colour; for he was supposed to be representing
one of those jolly dogs belonging to the best families who dive off
floats at exclusive seashore resorts. J. B. Wheeler, a stickler for
accuracy, had wanted him to remove his socks and shoes; but there
Archie had stood firm. He was willing to make an ass of himself, but
not a silly ass.

“All right,” said J. B. Wheeler, laying down his brush. “That will do
for to-day. Though, speaking without prejudice and with no wish to be
offensive, if I had had a model who wasn’t a weak-kneed,
jelly-backboned son of Belial, I could have got the darned thing
finished without having to have another sitting.”

“I wonder why you chappies call this sort of thing ‘sitting,’” said
Archie, pensively, as he conducted tentative experiments in osteopathy
on his aching back. “I say, old thing, I could do with a restorative,
if you have one handy. But, of course, you haven’t, I suppose,” he
added, resignedly. Abstemious as a rule, there were moments when Archie
found the Eighteenth Amendment somewhat trying.

J. B. Wheeler shook his head.

“You’re a little previous,” he said. “But come round in another day or
so, and I may be able to do something for you.” He moved with a certain
conspirator-like caution to a corner of the room, and, lifting to one
side a pile of canvases, revealed a stout barrel, which he regarded
with a fatherly and benignant eye. “I don’t mind telling you that, in
the fullness of time, I believe this is going to spread a good deal of
sweetness and light.”

“Oh, ah,” said Archie, interested. “Home-brew, what?”

“Made with these hands. I added a few more raisins yesterday, to speed
things up a bit. There is much virtue in your raisin. And, talking of
speeding things up, for goodness’ sake try to be a bit more punctual
to-morrow. We lost an hour of good daylight to-day.”

“I like that! I was here on the absolute minute. I had to hang about on
the landing waiting for you.”

“Well, well, that doesn’t matter,” said J. B. Wheeler, impatiently, for
the artist soul is always annoyed by petty details. “The point is that
we were an hour late in getting to work. Mind you’re here to-morrow at
eleven sharp.”

It was, therefore, with a feeling of guilt and trepidation that Archie
mounted the stairs on the following morning; for in spite of his good
resolutions he was half an hour behind time. He was relieved to find
that his friend had also lagged by the wayside. The door of the studio
was ajar, and he went in, to discover the place occupied by a lady of
mature years, who was scrubbing the floor with a mop. He went into the
bedroom and donned his bathing suit. When he emerged, ten minutes
later, the charwoman had gone, but J. B. Wheeler was still absent.
Rather glad of the respite, he sat down to kill time by reading the
morning paper, whose sporting page alone he had managed to master at
the breakfast table.

There was not a great deal in the paper to interest him. The usual
bond-robbery had taken place on the previous day, and the police were
reported hot on the trail of the Master-Mind who was alleged to be at
the back of these financial operations. A messenger named Henry Babcock
had been arrested and was expected to become confidential. To one who,
like Archie, had never owned a bond, the story made little appeal. He
turned with more interest to a cheery half-column on the activities of
a gentleman in Minnesota who, with what seemed to Archie, as he thought
of Mr. Daniel Brewster, a good deal of resource and public spirit, had
recently beaned his father-in-law with the family meat-axe. It was only
after he had read this through twice in a spirit of gentle approval
that it occurred to him that J. B. Wheeler was uncommonly late at the
tryst. He looked at his watch, and found that he had been in the studio
three-quarters of an hour.

Archie became restless. Long-suffering old bean though he was, he
considered this a bit thick. He got up and went out on to the landing,
to see if there were any signs of the blighter. There were none. He
began to understand now what had happened. For some reason or other the
bally artist was not coming to the studio at all that day. Probably he
had called up the hotel and left a message to this effect, and Archie
had just missed it. Another man might have waited to make certain that
his message had reached its destination, but not woollen-headed
Wheeler, the most casual individual in New York.

Thoroughly aggrieved, Archie turned back to the studio to dress and go
away.

His progress was stayed by a solid, forbidding slab of oak. Somehow or
other, since he had left the room, the door had managed to get itself
shut.

“Oh, dash it!” said Archie.

The mildness of the expletive was proof that the full horror of the
situation had not immediately come home to him. His mind in the first
few moments was occupied with the problem of how the door had got that
way. He could not remember shutting it. Probably he had done it
unconsciously. As a child, he had been taught by sedulous elders that
the little gentleman always closed doors behind him, and presumably his
subconscious self was still under the influence. And then, suddenly, he
realised that this infernal, officious ass of a subconscious self had
deposited him right in the gumbo. Behind that closed door, unattainable
as youthful ambition, lay his gent’s heather-mixture with the green
twill, and here he was, out in the world, alone, in a lemon-coloured
bathing suit.

In all crises of human affairs there are two broad courses open to a
man. He can stay where he is or he can go elsewhere. Archie, leaning on
the banisters, examined these alternatives narrowly. If he stayed where
he was he would have to spend the night on this dashed landing. If he
legged it, in this kit, he would be gathered up by the constabulary
before he had gone a hundred yards. He was no pessimist, but he was
reluctantly forced to the conclusion that he was up against it.

It was while he was musing with a certain tenseness on these things
that the sound of footsteps came to him from below. But almost in the
first instant the hope that this might be J. B. Wheeler, the curse of
the human race, died away. Whoever was coming up the stairs was
running, and J. B. Wheeler never ran upstairs. He was not one of your
lean, haggard, spiritual-looking geniuses. He made a large income with
his brush and pencil, and spent most of it in creature comforts. This
couldn’t be J. B. Wheeler.

It was not. It was a tall, thin man whom he had never seen before. He
appeared to be in a considerable hurry. He let himself into the studio
on the floor below, and vanished without even waiting to shut the door.

He had come and disappeared in almost record time, but, brief though
his passing had been, it had been long enough to bring consolation to
Archie. A sudden bright light had been vouchsafed to Archie, and he now
saw an admirably ripe and fruity scheme for ending his troubles. What
could be simpler than to toddle down one flight of stairs and in an
easy and debonair manner ask the chappie’s permission to use his
telephone? And what could be simpler, once he was at the ’phone, than
to get in touch with somebody at the Cosmopolis who would send down a
few trousers and what not in a kit bag. It was a priceless solution,
thought Archie, as he made his way downstairs. Not even embarrassing,
he meant to say. This chappie, living in a place like this, wouldn’t
bat an eyelid at the spectacle of a fellow trickling about the place in
a bathing suit. They would have a good laugh about the whole thing.

“I say, I hate to bother you—dare say you’re busy and all that sort of
thing—but would you mind if I popped in for half a second and used your
’phone?”

That was the speech, the extremely gentlemanly and well-phrased speech
which Archie had prepared to deliver the moment the man appeared. The
reason he did not deliver it was that the man did not appear. He
knocked, but nothing stirred.

“I say!”

Archie now perceived that the door was ajar, and that on an envelope
attached with a tack to one of the panels was the name “Elmer M. Moon”
He pushed the door a little farther open and tried again.

“Oh, Mr. Moon! Mr. Moon!” He waited a moment. “Oh, Mr. Moon! Mr. Moon!
Are you there, Mr. Moon?”

He blushed hotly. To his sensitive ear the words had sounded exactly
like the opening line of the refrain of a vaudeville song-hit. He
decided to waste no further speech on a man with such an unfortunate
surname until he could see him face to face and get a chance of
lowering his voice a bit. Absolutely absurd to stand outside a
chappie’s door singing song-hits in a lemon-coloured bathing suit. He
pushed the door open and walked in; and his subconscious self, always
the gentleman, closed it gently behind him.

“Up!” said a low, sinister, harsh, unfriendly, and unpleasant voice.

“Eh?” said Archie, revolving sharply on his axis.

He found himself confronting the hurried gentleman who had run
upstairs. This sprinter had produced an automatic pistol, and was
pointing it in a truculent manner at his head. Archie stared at his
host, and his host stared at him.

“Put your hands up,” he said.

“Oh, right-o! Absolutely!” said Archie. “But I mean to say—”

The other was drinking him in with considerable astonishment. Archie’s
costume seemed to have made a powerful impression upon him.

“Who the devil are you?” he enquired.

“Me? Oh, my name’s—”

“Never mind your name. What are you doing here?”

“Well, as a matter of fact, I popped in to ask if I might use your
’phone. You see—”

A certain relief seemed to temper the austerity of the other’s gaze. As
a visitor, Archie, though surprising, seemed to be better than he had
expected.

“I don’t know what to do with you,” he said, meditatively.

“If you’d just let me toddle to the ’phone—”

“Likely!” said the man. He appeared to reach a decision. “Here, go into
that room.”

He indicated with a jerk of his head the open door of what was
apparently a bedroom at the farther end of the studio.

“I take it,” said Archie, chattily, “that all this may seem to you not
a little rummy.”

“Get on!”

“I was only saying—”

“Well, I haven’t time to listen. Get a move on!”

The bedroom was in a state of untidiness which eclipsed anything which
Archie had ever witnessed. The other appeared to be moving house. Bed,
furniture, and floor were covered with articles of clothing. A silk
shirt wreathed itself about Archie’s ankles as he stood gaping, and, as
he moved farther into the room, his path was paved with ties and
collars.

“Sit down!” said Elmer M. Moon, abruptly.

“Right-o! Thanks,” said Archie, “I suppose you wouldn’t like me to
explain, and what not, what?”

“No!” said Mr. Moon. “I haven’t got your spare time. Put your hands
behind that chair.”

Archie did so, and found them immediately secured by what felt like a
silk tie. His assiduous host then proceeded to fasten his ankles in a
like manner. This done, he seemed to feel that he had done all that was
required of him, and he returned to the packing of a large suitcase
which stood by the window.

“I say!” said Archie.

Mr. Moon, with the air of a man who has remembered something which he
had overlooked, shoved a sock in his guest’s mouth and resumed his
packing. He was what might be called an impressionist packer. His aim
appeared to be speed rather than neatness. He bundled his belongings
in, closed the bag with some difficulty, and, stepping to the window,
opened it. Then he climbed out on to the fire-escape, dragged the
suit-case after him, and was gone.

Archie, left alone, addressed himself to the task of freeing his
prisoned limbs. The job proved much easier than he had expected. Mr.
Moon, that hustler, had wrought for the moment, not for all time. A
practical man, he had been content to keep his visitor shackled merely
for such a period as would permit him to make his escape unhindered. In
less than ten minutes Archie, after a good deal of snake-like writhing,
was pleased to discover that the thingummy attached to his wrists had
loosened sufficiently to enable him to use his hands. He untied himself
and got up.

He now began to tell himself that out of evil cometh good. His
encounter with the elusive Mr. Moon had not been an agreeable one, but
it had had this solid advantage, that it had left him right in the
middle of a great many clothes. And Mr. Moon, whatever his moral
defects, had the one excellent quality of taking about the same size as
himself. Archie, casting a covetous eye upon a tweed suit which lay on
the bed, was on the point of climbing into the trousers when on the
outer door of the studio there sounded a forceful knocking.

“Open up here!”




CHAPTER VI.
THE BOMB


Archie bounded silently out into the other room and stood listening
tensely. He was not a naturally querulous man, but he did feel at this
point that Fate was picking on him with a somewhat undue severity.

“In th’ name av th’ Law!”

There are times when the best of us lose our heads. At this juncture
Archie should undoubtedly have gone to the door, opened it, explained
his presence in a few well-chosen words, and generally have passed the
whole thing off with ready tact. But the thought of confronting a posse
of police in his present costume caused him to look earnestly about him
for a hiding-place.

Up against the farther wall was a settee with a high, arching back,
which might have been put there for that special purpose. He inserted
himself behind this, just as a splintering crash announced that the
Law, having gone through the formality of knocking with its knuckles,
was now getting busy with an axe. A moment later the door had given
way, and the room was full of trampling feet. Archie wedged himself
against the wall with the quiet concentration of a clam nestling in its
shell, and hoped for the best.

It seemed to him that his immediate future depended for better or for
worse entirely on the native intelligence of the Force. If they were
the bright, alert men he hoped they were, they would see all that junk
in the bedroom and, deducing from it that their quarry had stood not
upon the order of his going but had hopped it, would not waste time in
searching a presumably empty apartment. If, on the other hand, they
were the obtuse, flat-footed persons who occasionally find their way
into the ranks of even the most enlightened constabularies, they would
undoubtedly shift the settee and drag him into a publicity from which
his modest soul shrank. He was enchanted, therefore, a few moments
later, to hear a gruff voice state that th’ mutt had beaten it down th’
fire-escape. His opinion of the detective abilities of the New York
police force rose with a bound.

There followed a brief council of war, which, as it took place in the
bedroom, was inaudible to Archie except as a distant growling noise. He
could distinguish no words, but, as it was succeeded by a general
trampling of large boots in the direction of the door and then by
silence, he gathered that the pack, having drawn the studio and found
it empty, had decided to return to other and more profitable duties. He
gave them a reasonable interval for removing themselves, and then poked
his head cautiously over the settee.

All was peace. The place was empty. No sound disturbed the stillness.

Archie emerged. For the first time in this morning of disturbing
occurrences he began to feel that God was in his heaven and all right
with the world. At last things were beginning to brighten up a bit, and
life might be said to have taken on some of the aspects of a good egg.
He stretched himself, for it is cramping work lying under settees, and,
proceeding to the bedroom, picked up the tweed trousers again.

Clothes had a fascination for Archie. Another man, in similar
circumstances, might have hurried over his toilet; but Archie, faced by
a difficult choice of ties, rather strung the thing out. He selected a
specimen which did great credit to the taste of Mr. Moon, evidently one
of our snappiest dressers, found that it did not harmonise with the
deeper meaning of the tweed suit, removed it, chose another, and was
adjusting the bow and admiring the effect, when his attention was
diverted by a slight sound which was half a cough and half a sniff;
and, turning, found himself gazing into the clear blue eyes of a large
man in uniform, who had stepped into the room from the fire-escape. He
was swinging a substantial club in a negligent sort of way, and he
looked at Archie with a total absence of bonhomie.

“Ah!” he observed.

“Oh, _there_ you are!” said Archie, subsiding weakly against the chest
of drawers. He gulped. “Of course, I can see you’re thinking all this
pretty tolerably weird and all that,” he proceeded, in a propitiatory
voice.

The policeman attempted no analysis of his emotions, He opened a mouth
which a moment before had looked incapable of being opened except with
the assistance of powerful machinery, and shouted a single word.

“Cassidy!”

A distant voice gave tongue in answer. It was like alligators roaring
to their mates across lonely swamps.

There was a rumble of footsteps in the region of the stairs, and
presently there entered an even larger guardian of the Law than the
first exhibit. He, too, swung a massive club, and, like his colleague,
he gazed frostily at Archie.

“God save Ireland!” he remarked.

The words appeared to be more in the nature of an expletive than a
practical comment on the situation. Having uttered them, he draped
himself in the doorway like a colossus, and chewed gum.

“Where ja get him?” he enquired, after a pause.

“Found him in here attimpting to disguise himself.”

“I told Cap. he was hiding somewheres, but he would have it that he’d
beat it down th’ escape,” said the gum-chewer, with the sombre triumph
of the underling whose sound advice has been overruled by those above
him. He shifted his wholesome (or, as some say, unwholesome) morsel to
the other side of his mouth, and for the first time addressed Archie
directly. “Ye’re pinched!” he observed.

Archie started violently. The bleak directness of the speech roused him
with a jerk from the dream-like state into which he had fallen. He had
not anticipated this. He had assumed that there would be a period of
tedious explanations to be gone through before he was at liberty to
depart to the cosy little lunch for which his interior had been sighing
wistfully this long time past; but that he should be arrested had been
outside his calculations. Of course, he could put everything right
eventually; he could call witnesses to his character and the purity of
his intentions; but in the meantime the whole dashed business would be
in all the papers, embellished with all those unpleasant flippancies to
which your newspaper reporter is so prone to stoop when he sees half a
chance. He would feel a frightful chump. Chappies would rot him about
it to the most fearful extent. Old Brewster’s name would come into it,
and he could not disguise it from himself that his father-in-law, who
liked his name in the papers as little as possible, would be sorer than
a sunburned neck.

“No, I say, you know! I mean, I mean to say!”

“Pinched!” repeated the rather larger policeman.

“And annything ye say,” added his slightly smaller colleague, “will be
used agenst ya ’t the trial.”

“And if ya try t’escape,” said the first speaker, twiddling his club,
“ya’ll getja block knocked off.”

And, having sketched out this admirably clear and neatly-constructed
scenario, the two relapsed into silence. Officer Cassidy restored his
gum to circulation. Officer Donahue frowned sternly at his boots.

“But, I say,” said Archie, “it’s all a mistake, you know. Absolutely a
frightful error, my dear old constables. I’m not the lad you’re after
at all. The chappie you want is a different sort of fellow altogether.
Another blighter entirely.”

New York policemen never laugh when on duty. There is probably
something in the regulations against it. But Officer Donahue permitted
the left corner of his mouth to twitch slightly, and a momentary
muscular spasm disturbed the calm of Officer Cassidy’s granite
features, as a passing breeze ruffles the surface of some bottomless
lake.

“That’s what they all say!” observed Officer Donahue.

“It’s no use tryin’ that line of talk,” said Officer Cassidy.
“Babcock’s squealed.”

“Sure. Squealed ’s morning,” said Officer Donahue.

Archie’s memory stirred vaguely.

“Babcock?” he said. “Do you know, that name seems familiar to me,
somehow. I’m almost sure I’ve read it in the paper or something.”

“Ah, cut it out!” said Officer Cassidy, disgustedly. The two constables
exchanged a glance of austere disapproval. This hypocrisy pained them.
“Read it in th’ paper or something!”

“By Jove! I remember now. He’s the chappie who was arrested in that
bond business. For goodness’ sake, my dear, merry old constables,” said
Archie, astounded, “you surely aren’t labouring under the impression
that I’m the Master-Mind they were talking about in the paper? Why,
what an absolutely priceless notion! I mean to say, I ask you, what!
Frankly, laddies, do I look like a Master-Mind?”

Officer Cassidy heaved a deep sigh, which rumbled up from his interior
like the first muttering of a cyclone.

“If I’d known,” he said, regretfully, “that this guy was going to turn
out a ruddy Englishman, I’d have taken a slap at him with m’ stick and
chanced it!”

Officer Donahue considered the point well taken.

“Ah!” he said, understandingly. He regarded Archie with an unfriendly
eye. “I know th’ sort well! Trampling on th’ face av th’ poor!”

“Ya c’n trample on the poor man’s face,” said Officer Cassidy,
severely; “but don’t be surprised if one day he bites you in the leg!”

“But, my dear old sir,” protested Archie, “I’ve never trampled—”

“One of these days,” said Officer Donahue, moodily, “the Shannon will
flow in blood to the sea!”

“Absolutely! But—”

Officer Cassidy uttered a glad cry.

“Why couldn’t we hit him a lick,” he suggested, brightly, “an’ tell th’
Cap. he resisted us in th’ exercise of our jooty?”

An instant gleam of approval and enthusiasm came into Officer Donahue’s
eyes. Officer Donahue was not a man who got these luminous inspirations
himself, but that did not prevent him appreciating them in others and
bestowing commendation in the right quarter. There was nothing petty or
grudging about Officer Donahue.

“Ye’re the lad with the head, Tim!” he exclaimed admiringly.

“It just sorta came to me,” said Mr. Cassidy, modestly.

“It’s a great idea, Timmy!”

“Just happened to think of it,” said Mr. Cassidy, with a coy gesture of
self-effacement.

Archie had listened to the dialogue with growing uneasiness. Not for
the first time since he had made their acquaintance, he became vividly
aware of the exceptional physical gifts of these two men. The New York
police force demands from those who would join its ranks an extremely
high standard of stature and sinew, but it was obvious that jolly old
Donahue and Cassidy must have passed in first shot without any
difficulty whatever.

“I say, you know,” he observed, apprehensively.

And then a sharp and commanding voice spoke from the outer room.

“Donahue! Cassidy! What the devil does this mean?”

Archie had a momentary impression that an angel had fluttered down to
his rescue. If this was the case, the angel had assumed an effective
disguise—that of a police captain. The new arrival was a far smaller
man than his subordinates—so much smaller that it did Archie good to
look at him. For a long time he had been wishing that it were possible
to rest his eyes with the spectacle of something of a slightly less
out-size nature than his two companions.

“Why have you left your posts?”

The effect of the interruption on the Messrs. Cassidy and Donahue was
pleasingly instantaneous. They seemed to shrink to almost normal
proportions, and their manner took on an attractive deference.

Officer Donahue saluted.

“If ye plaze, sorr—”

Officer Cassidy also saluted, simultaneously.

“’Twas like this, sorr—”

The captain froze Officer Cassidy with a glance and, leaving him
congealed, turned to Officer Donahue.

“Oi wuz standing on th’ fire-escape, sorr,” said Officer Donahue, in a
tone of obsequious respect which not only delighted, but astounded
Archie, who hadn’t known he could talk like that, “accordin’ to
instructions, when I heard a suspicious noise. I crope in, sorr, and
found this duck—found the accused, sorr—in front of the mirror,
examinin’ himself. I then called to Officer Cassidy for assistance. We
pinched—arrested um, sorr.”

The captain looked at Archie. It seemed to Archie that he looked at him
coldly and with contempt.

“Who is he?”

“The Master-Mind, sorr.”

“The what?”

“The accused, sorr. The man that’s wanted.”

“You may want him. I don’t,” said the captain. Archie, though relieved,
thought he might have put it more nicely. “This isn’t Moon. It’s not a
bit like him.”

“Absolutely not!” agreed Archie, cordially. “It’s all a mistake, old
companion, as I was trying to—”

“Cut it out!”

“Oh, right-o!”

“You’ve seen the photographs at the station. Do you mean to tell me you
see any resemblance?”

“If ye plaze, sorr,” said Officer Cassidy, coming to life.

“Well?”

“We thought he’d bin disguising himself, the way he wouldn’t be
recognised.”

“You’re a fool!” said the captain.

“Yes, sorr,” said Officer Cassidy, meekly.

“So are you, Donahue.”

“Yes, sorr.”

Archie’s respect for this chappie was going up all the time. He seemed
to be able to take years off the lives of these massive blighters with
a word. It was like the stories you read about lion-tamers. Archie did
not despair of seeing Officer Donahue and his old college chum Cassidy
eventually jumping through hoops.

“Who are you?” demanded the captain, turning to Archie.

“Well, my name is—”

“What are you doing here?”

“Well, it’s rather a longish story, you know. Don’t want to bore you,
and all that.”

“I’m here to listen. You can’t bore _me_.”

“Dashed nice of you to put it like that,” said Archie, gratefully. “I
mean to say, makes it easier and so forth. What I mean is, you know how
rotten you feel telling the deuce of a long yarn and wondering if the
party of the second part is wishing you would turn off the tap and go
home. I mean—”

“If,” said the captain, “you’re reciting something, stop. If you’re
trying to tell me what you’re doing here, make it shorter and easier.”

Archie saw his point. Of course, time was money—the modern spirit of
hustle—all that sort of thing.

“Well, it was this bathing suit, you know,” he said.

“What bathing suit?”

“Mine, don’t you know. A lemon-coloured contrivance. Rather bright and
so forth, but in its proper place not altogether a bad egg. Well, the
whole thing started, you know, with my standing on a bally pedestal
sort of arrangement in a diving attitude—for the cover, you know. I
don’t know if you have ever done anything of that kind yourself, but it
gives you a most fearful crick in the spine. However, that’s rather
beside the point, I suppose—don’t know why I mentioned it. Well, this
morning he was dashed late, so I went out—”

“What the devil are you talking about?”

Archie looked at him, surprised.

“Aren’t I making it clear?”

“No.”

“Well, you understand about the bathing suit, don’t you? The jolly old
bathing suit, you’ve grasped that, what?”

“No.”

“Oh, I say,” said Archie. “That’s rather a nuisance. I mean to say, the
bathing suit’s what you might call the good old pivot of the whole
dashed affair, you see. Well, you understand about the cover, what?
You’re pretty clear on the subject of the cover?”

“What cover?”

“Why, for the magazine.”

“What magazine?”

“Now there you rather have me. One of these bright little periodicals,
you know, that you see popping to and fro on the bookstalls.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said the captain. He looked
at Archie with an expression of distrust and hostility. “And I’ll tell
you straight out I don’t like the looks of you. I believe you’re a pal
of his.”

“No longer,” said Archie, firmly. “I mean to say, a chappie who makes
you stand on a bally pedestal sort of arrangement and get a crick in
the spine, and then doesn’t turn up and leaves you biffing all over the
countryside in a bathing suit—”

The reintroduction of the bathing suit motive seemed to have the worst
effect on the captain. He flushed darkly.

“Are you trying to josh me? I’ve a mind to soak you!”

“If ye plaze, sorr,” cried Officer Donahue and Officer Cassidy in
chorus. In the course of their professional career they did not often
hear their superior make many suggestions with which they saw eye to
eye, but he had certainly, in their opinion, spoken a mouthful now.

“No, honestly, my dear old thing, nothing was farther from my
thoughts—”

He would have spoken further, but at this moment the world came to an
end. At least, that was how it sounded. Somewhere in the immediate
neighbourhood something went off with a vast explosion, shattering the
glass in the window, peeling the plaster from the ceiling, and sending
him staggering into the inhospitable arms of Officer Donahue.

The three guardians of the Law stared at one another.

“If ye plaze, sorr,” said Officer Cassidy, saluting.

“Well?”

“May I spake, sorr?”

“Well?”

“Something’s exploded, sorr!”

The information, kindly meant though it was, seemed to annoy the
captain.

“What the devil did you think I thought had happened?” he demanded,
with not a little irritation, “It was a bomb!”

Archie could have corrected this diagnosis, for already a faint but
appealing aroma of an alcoholic nature was creeping into the room
through a hole in the ceiling, and there had risen before his eyes the
picture of J. B. Wheeler affectionately regarding that barrel of his on
the previous morning in the studio upstairs. J. B. Wheeler had wanted
quick results, and he had got them. Archie had long since ceased to
regard J. B. Wheeler as anything but a tumour on the social system, but
he was bound to admit that he had certainly done him a good turn now.
Already these honest men, diverted by the superior attraction of this
latest happening, appeared to have forgotten his existence.

“Sorr!” said Officer Donahue.

“Well?”

“It came from upstairs, sorr.”

“Of course it came from upstairs. Cassidy!”

“Sorr?”

“Get down into the street, call up the reserves, and stand at the front
entrance to keep the crowd back. We’ll have the whole city here in five
minutes.”

“Right, sorr.”

“Don’t let anyone in.”

“No, sorr.”

“Well, see that you don’t. Come along, Donahue, now. Look slippy.”

“On the spot, sorr!” said Officer Donahue.

A moment later Archie had the studio to himself. Two minutes later he
was picking his way cautiously down the fire-escape after the manner of
the recent Mr. Moon. Archie had not seen much of Mr. Moon, but he had
seen enough to know that in certain crises his methods were sound and
should be followed. Elmer Moon was not a good man; his ethics were poor
and his moral code shaky; but in the matter of legging it away from a
situation of peril and discomfort he had no superior.




CHAPTER VII.
MR. ROSCOE SHERRIFF HAS AN IDEA


Archie inserted a fresh cigarette in his long holder and began to smoke
a little moodily. It was about a week after his disturbing adventures
in J. B. Wheeler’s studio, and life had ceased for the moment to be a
thing of careless enjoyment. Mr. Wheeler, mourning over his lost
home-brew and refusing, like Niobe, to be comforted, has suspended the
sittings for the magazine cover, thus robbing Archie of his life-work.
Mr. Brewster had not been in genial mood of late. And, in addition to
all this, Lucille was away on a visit to a school-friend. And when
Lucille went away, she took with her the sunshine. Archie was not
surprised at her being popular and in demand among her friends, but
that did not help him to become reconciled to her absence.

He gazed rather wistfully across the table at his friend, Roscoe
Sherriff, the Press-agent, another of his Pen-and-Ink Club
acquaintances. They had just finished lunch, and during the meal
Sherriff, who, like most men of action, was fond of hearing the sound
of his own voice and liked exercising it on the subject of himself, had
been telling Archie a few anecdotes about his professional past. From
these the latter had conceived a picture of Roscoe Sherriff’s life as a
prismatic thing of energy and adventure and well-paid withal—just the
sort of life, in fact, which he would have enjoyed leading himself. He
wished that he, too, like the Press-agent, could go about the place
“slipping things over” and “putting things across.” Daniel Brewster, he
felt, would have beamed upon a son-in-law like Roscoe Sherriff.

“The more I see of America,” sighed Archie, “the more it amazes me. All
you birds seem to have been doing things from the cradle upwards. I
wish I could do things!”

“Well, why don’t you?”

Archie flicked the ash from his cigarette into the finger-bowl.

“Oh, I don’t know, you know,” he said, “Somehow, none of our family
ever have. I don’t know why it is, but whenever a Moffam starts out to
do things he infallibly makes a bloomer. There was a Moffam in the
Middle Ages who had a sudden spasm of energy and set out to make a
pilgrimage to Jerusalem, dressed as a wandering friar. Rum ideas they
had in those days.”

“Did he get there?”

“Absolutely not! Just as he was leaving the front door his favourite
hound mistook him for a tramp—or a varlet, or a scurvy knave, or
whatever they used to call them at that time—and bit him in the fleshy
part of the leg.”

“Well, at least he started.”

“Enough to make a chappie start, what?”

Roscoe Sherriff sipped his coffee thoughtfully. He was an apostle of
Energy, and it seemed to him that he could make a convert of Archie and
incidentally do himself a bit of good. For several days he had been,
looking for someone like Archie to help him in a small matter which he
had in mind.

“If you’re really keen on doing things,” he said, “there’s something
you can do for me right away.”

Archie beamed. Action was what his soul demanded.

“Anything, dear boy, anything! State your case!”

“Would you have any objection to putting up a snake for me?”

“Putting up a snake?”

“Just for a day or two.”

“But how do you mean, old soul? Put him up where?”

“Wherever you live. Where do you live? The Cosmopolis, isn’t it? Of
course! You married old Brewster’s daughter. I remember reading about
it.”

“But, I say, laddie, I don’t want to spoil your day and disappoint you
and so forth, but my jolly old father-in-law would never let me keep a
snake. Why, it’s as much as I can do to make him let me stop on in the
place.”

“He wouldn’t know.”

“There’s not much that goes on in the hotel that he doesn’t know,” said
Archie, doubtfully.

“He mustn’t know. The whole point of the thing is that it must be a
dead secret.”

Archie flicked some more ash into the finger-bowl.

“I don’t seem absolutely to have grasped the affair in all its aspects,
if you know what I mean,” he said. “I mean to say—in the first
place—why would it brighten your young existence if I entertained this
snake of yours?”

“It’s not mine. It belongs to Mme. Brudowska. You’ve heard of her, of
course?”

“Oh yes. She’s some sort of performing snake female in vaudeville or
something, isn’t she, or something of that species or order?”

“You’re near it, but not quite right. She is the leading exponent of
high-brow tragedy on any stage in the civilized world.”

“Absolutely! I remember now. My wife lugged me to see her perform one
night. It all comes back to me. She had me wedged in an orchestra-stall
before I knew what I was up against, and then it was too late. I
remember reading in some journal or other that she had a pet snake,
given her by some Russian prince or other, what?”

“That,” said Sherriff, “was the impression I intended to convey when I
sent the story to the papers. I’m her Press-agent. As a matter of fact,
I bought Peter-its name’s Peter-myself down on the East Side. I always
believe in animals for Press-agent stunts. I’ve nearly always had good
results. But with Her Nibs I’m handicapped. Shackled, so to speak. You
might almost say my genius is stifled. Or strangled, if you prefer it.”

“Anything you say,” agreed Archie, courteously, “But how? Why is your
what-d’you-call-it what’s-its-named?”

“She keeps me on a leash. She won’t let me do anything with a kick in
it. If I’ve suggested one rip-snorting stunt, I’ve suggested twenty,
and every time she turns them down on the ground that that sort of
thing is beneath the dignity of an artist in her position. It doesn’t
give a fellow a chance. So now I’ve made up my mind to do her good by
stealth. I’m going to steal her snake.”

“Steal it? Pinch it, as it were?”

“Yes. Big story for the papers, you see. She’s grown very much attached
to Peter. He’s her mascot. I believe she’s practically kidded herself
into believing that Russian prince story. If I can sneak it away and
keep it away for a day or two, she’ll do the rest. She’ll make such a
fuss that the papers will be full of it.”

“I see.”

“Wow, any ordinary woman would work in with me. But not Her Nibs. She
would call it cheap and degrading and a lot of other things. It’s got
to be a genuine steal, and, if I’m caught at it, I lose my job. So
that’s where you come in.”

“But where am I to keep the jolly old reptile?”

“Oh, anywhere. Punch a few holes in a hat-box, and make it up a
shakedown inside. It’ll be company for you.”

“Something in that. My wife’s away just now and it’s a bit lonely in
the evenings.”

“You’ll never be lonely with Peter around. He’s a great scout. Always
merry and bright.”

“He doesn’t bite, I suppose, or sting or what-not?”

“He may what-not occasionally. It depends on the weather. But, outside
of that, he’s as harmless as a canary.”

“Dashed dangerous things, canaries,” said Archie, thoughtfully. “They
peck at you.”

“Don’t weaken!” pleaded the Press-agent

“Oh, all right. I’ll take him. By the way, touching the matter of
browsing and sluicing. What do I feed him on?”

“Oh, anything. Bread-and-milk or fruit or soft-boiled egg or
dog-biscuit or ants’-eggs. You know—anything you have yourself. Well,
I’m much obliged for your hospitality. I’ll do the same for you another
time. Now I must be getting along to see to the practical end of the
thing. By the way, Her Nibs lives at the Cosmopolis, too. Very
convenient. Well, so long. See you later.”

Archie, left alone, began for the first time to have serious doubts. He
had allowed himself to be swayed by Mr. Sherriff’s magnetic
personality, but now that the other had removed himself he began to
wonder if he had been entirely wise to lend his sympathy and
co-operation to the scheme. He had never had intimate dealings with a
snake before, but he had kept silkworms as a child, and there had been
the deuce of a lot of fuss and unpleasantness over them. Getting into
the salad and what-not. Something seemed to tell him that he was asking
for trouble with a loud voice, but he had given his word and he
supposed he would have to go through with it.

He lit another cigarette and wandered out into Fifth Avenue. His
usually smooth brow was ruffled with care. Despite the eulogies which
Sherriff had uttered concerning Peter, he found his doubts increasing.
Peter might, as the Press-agent had stated, be a great scout, but was
his little Garden of Eden on the fifth floor of the Cosmopolis Hotel
likely to be improved by the advent of even the most amiable and
winsome of serpents? However—

“Moffam! My dear fellow!”

The voice, speaking suddenly in his ear from behind, roused Archie from
his reflections. Indeed, it roused him so effectually that he jumped a
clear inch off the ground and bit his tongue. Revolving on his axis, he
found himself confronting a middle-aged man with a face like a horse.
The man was dressed in something of an old-world style. His clothes had
an English cut. He had a drooping grey moustache. He also wore a grey
bowler hat flattened at the crown—but who are we to judge him?

“Archie Moffam! I have been trying to find you all the morning.”

Archie had placed him now. He had not seen General Mannister for
several years—not, indeed, since the days when he used to meet him at
the home of young Lord Seacliff, his nephew. Archie had been at Eton
and Oxford with Seacliff, and had often visited him in the Long
Vacation.

“Halloa, General! What ho, what ho! What on earth are you doing over
here?”

“Let’s get out of this crush, my boy.” General Mannister steered Archie
into a side-street, “That’s better.” He cleared his throat once or
twice, as if embarrassed. “I’ve brought Seacliff over,” he said,
finally.

“Dear old Squiffy here? Oh, I say! Great work!”

General Mannister did not seem to share his enthusiasm. He looked like
a horse with a secret sorrow. He coughed three times, like a horse who,
in addition to a secret sorrow, had contracted asthma.

“You will find Seacliff changed,” he said. “Let me see, how long is it
since you and he met?”

Archie reflected.

“I was demobbed just about a year ago. I saw him in Paris about a year
before that. The old egg got a bit of shrapnel in his foot or
something, didn’t he? Anyhow, I remember he was sent home.”

“His foot is perfectly well again now. But, unfortunately, the enforced
inaction led to disastrous results. You recollect, no doubt, that
Seacliff always had a—a tendency;—a—a weakness—it was a family
failing—”

“Mopping it up, do you mean? Shifting it? Looking on the jolly old
stuff when it was red and what not, what?”

“Exactly.”

Archie nodded.

“Dear old Squiffy was always rather a lad for the wassail-bowl. When I
met him in Paris, I remember, he was quite tolerably blotto.”

“Precisely. And the failing has, I regret to say, grown on him since he
returned from the war. My poor sister was extremely worried. In fact,
to cut a long story short, I induced him to accompany me to America. I
am attached to the British Legation in Washington now, you know.”

“Oh, really?”

“I wished Seacliff to come with me to Washington, but he insists on
remaining in New York. He stated specifically that the thought of
living in Washington gave him the—what was the expression he used?”

“The pip?”

“The pip. Precisely.”

“But what was the idea of bringing him to America?”

“This admirable Prohibition enactment has rendered America—to my
mind—the ideal place for a young man of his views.” The General looked
at his watch. “It is most fortunate that I happened to run into you, my
dear fellow. My train for Washington leaves in another hour, and I have
packing to do. I want to leave poor Seacliff in your charge while I am
gone.”

“Oh, I say! What!”

“You can look after him. I am credibly informed that even now there are
places in New York where a determined young man may obtain
the—er—stuff, and I should be infinitely obliged—and my poor sister
would be infinitely grateful—if you would keep an eye on him.” He
hailed a taxi-cab. “I am sending Seacliff round to the Cosmopolis
to-night. I am sure you will do everything you can. Good-bye, my boy,
good-bye.”

Archie continued his walk. This, he felt, was beginning to be a bit
thick. He smiled a bitter, mirthless smile as he recalled the fact that
less than half an hour had elapsed since he had expressed a regret that
he did not belong to the ranks of those who do things. Fate since then
had certainly supplied him with jobs with a lavish hand. By bed-time he
would be an active accomplice to a theft, valet and companion to a
snake he had never met, and—as far as could gather the scope of his
duties—a combination of nursemaid and private detective to dear old
Squiffy.

It was past four o’clock when he returned to the Cosmopolis. Roscoe
Sherriff was pacing the lobby of the hotel nervously, carrying a small
hand-bag.

“Here you are at last! Good heavens, man, I’ve been waiting two hours.”

“Sorry, old bean. I was musing a bit and lost track of the time.”

The Press-agent looked cautiously round. There was nobody within
earshot.

“Here he is!” he said.

“Who?”

“Peter.”

“Where?” said Archie, staring blankly.

“In this bag. Did you expect to find him strolling arm-in-arm with me
round the lobby? Here you are! Take him!”

He was gone. And Archie, holding the bag, made his way to the lift. The
bag squirmed gently in his grip.

The only other occupant of the lift was a striking-looking woman of
foreign appearance, dressed in a way that made Archie feel that she
must be somebody or she couldn’t look like that. Her face, too, seemed
vaguely familiar. She entered the lift at the second floor where the
tea-room is, and she had the contented expression of one who had tea’d
to her satisfaction. She got off at the same floor as Archie, and
walked swiftly, in a lithe, pantherish way, round the bend in the
corridor. Archie followed more slowly. When he reached the door of his
room, the passage was empty. He inserted the key in his door, turned
it, pushed the door open, and pocketed the key. He was about to enter
when the bag again squirmed gently in his grip.

From the days of Pandora, through the epoch of Bluebeard’s wife, down
to the present time, one of the chief failings of humanity has been the
disposition to open things that were better closed. It would have been
simple for Archie to have taken another step and put a door between
himself and the world, but there came to him the irresistible desire to
peep into the bag now—not three seconds later, but now. All the way up
in the lift he had been battling with the temptation, and now he
succumbed.

The bag was one of those simple bags with a thingummy which you press.
Archie pressed it. And, as it opened, out popped the head of Peter. His
eyes met Archie’s. Over his head there seemed to be an invisible mark
of interrogation. His gaze was curious, but kindly. He appeared to be
saying to himself, “Have I found a friend?”

Serpents, or Snakes, says the Encyclopaedia, are reptiles of the
saurian class Ophidia, characterised by an elongated, cylindrical,
limbless, scaly form, and distinguished from lizards by the fact that
the halves (_rami_) of the lower jaw are not solidly united at the
chin, but movably connected by an elastic ligament. The vertebra are
very numerous, gastrocentrous, and procoelous. And, of course, when
they put it like that, you can see at once that a man might spend hours
with combined entertainment and profit just looking at a snake.

Archie would no doubt have done this; but long before he had time
really to inspect the halves (_rami_) of his new friend’s lower jaw and
to admire its elastic fittings, and long before the gastrocentrous and
procoelous character of the other’s vertebrae had made any real
impression on him, a piercing scream almost at his elbow—startled him
out of his scientific reverie. A door opposite had opened, and the
woman of the elevator was standing staring at him with an expression of
horror and fury that went through, him like a knife. It was the
expression which, more than anything else, had made Mme. Brudowska what
she was professionally. Combined with a deep voice and a sinuous walk,
it enabled her to draw down a matter of a thousand dollars per week.

Indeed, though the fact gave him little pleasure, Archie, as a matter
of fact, was at this moment getting about—including war-tax—two dollars
and seventy-five cents worth of the great emotional star for nothing.
For, having treated him gratis to the look of horror and fury, she now
moved towards him with the sinuous walk and spoke in the tone which she
seldom permitted herself to use before the curtain of act two, unless
there was a whale of a situation that called for it in act one.

“Thief!”

It was the way she said it.

Archie staggered backwards as though he had been hit between the eyes,
fell through the open door of his room, kicked it to with a flying
foot, and collapsed on the bed. Peter, the snake, who had fallen on the
floor with a squashy sound, looked surprised and pained for a moment;
then, being a philosopher at heart, cheered up and began hunting for
flies under the bureau.




CHAPTER VIII.
A DISTURBED NIGHT FOR DEAR OLD SQUIFFY


Peril sharpens the intellect. Archie’s mind as a rule worked in rather
a languid and restful sort of way, but now it got going with a rush and
a whir. He glared round the room. He had never seen a room so devoid of
satisfactory cover. And then there came to him a scheme, a ruse. It
offered a chance of escape. It was, indeed, a bit of all right.

Peter, the snake, loafing contentedly about the carpet, found himself
seized by what the Encyclopaedia calls the “distensible gullet” and
looked up reproachfully. The next moment he was in his bag again; and
Archie, bounding silently into the bathroom, was tearing the cord off
his dressing-gown.

There came a banging at the door. A voice spoke sternly. A masculine
voice this time.

“Say! Open this door!”

Archie rapidly attached the dressing-gown cord to the handle of the
bag, leaped to the window, opened it, tied the cord to a projecting
piece of iron on the sill, lowered Peter and the bag into the depths,
and closed the window again. The whole affair took but a few seconds.
Generals have received the thanks of their nations for displaying less
resource on the field of battle.

He opened the door. Outside stood the bereaved woman, and beside her a
bullet-headed gentleman with a bowler hat on the back of his head, in
whom Archie recognised the hotel detective.

The hotel detective also recognised Archie, and the stern cast of his
features relaxed. He even smiled a rusty but propitiatory smile. He
imagined—erroneously—that Archie, being the son-in-law of the owner of
the hotel, had a pull with that gentleman; and he resolved to proceed
warily lest he jeopardise his job.

“Why, Mr. Moffam!” he said, apologetically. “I didn’t know it was you I
was disturbing.”

“Always glad to have a chat,” said Archie, cordially. “What seems to be
the trouble?”

“My snake!” cried the queen of tragedy. “Where is my snake?”

Archie, looked at the detective. The detective looked at Archie.

“This lady,” said the detective, with a dry little cough, “thinks her
snake is in your room, Mr. Moffam.”

“Snake?”

“Snake’s what the lady said.”

“My snake! My Peter!” Mme. Brudowska’s voice shook with emotion. “He is
here—here in this room.”

Archie shook his head.

“No snakes here! Absolutely not! I remember noticing when I came in.”

“The snake is here—here in this room. This man had it in a bag! I saw
him! He is a thief!”

“Easy, ma’am!” protested the detective. “Go easy! This gentleman is the
boss’s son-in-law.”

“I care not who he is! He has my snake! Here—here in this room!”

“Mr. Moffam wouldn’t go round stealing snakes.”

“Rather not,” said Archie. “Never stole a snake in my life. None of the
Moffams have ever gone about stealing snakes. Regular family tradition!
Though I once had an uncle who kept gold-fish.”

“Here he is! Here! My Peter!”

Archie looked at the detective. The detective looked at Archie. “We
must humour her!” their glances said.

“Of course,” said Archie, “if you’d like to search the room, what? What
I mean to say is, this is Liberty Hall. Everybody welcome! Bring the
kiddies!”

“I will search the room!” said Mme. Brudowska.

The detective glanced apologetically at Archie.

“Don’t blame me for this, Mr. Moffam,” he urged.

“Rather not! Only too glad you’ve dropped in!”

He took up an easy attitude against the window, and watched the empress
of the emotional drama explore. Presently she desisted, baffled. For an
instant she paused, as though about to speak, then swept from the room.
A moment later a door banged across the passage.

“How do they get that way?” queried the detective, “Well, g’bye, Mr.
Moffam. Sorry to have butted in.”

The door closed. Archie waited a few moments, then went to the window
and hauled in the slack. Presently the bag appeared over the edge of
the window-sill.

“Good God!” said Archie.

In the rush and swirl of recent events he must have omitted to see that
the clasp that fastened the bag was properly closed; for the bag, as it
jumped on to the window-sill, gaped at him like a yawning face. And
inside it there was nothing.

Archie leaned as far out of the window as he could manage without
committing suicide. Far below him, the traffic took its usual course
and the pedestrians moved to and fro upon the pavements. There was no
crowding, no excitement. Yet only a few moments before a long green
snake with three hundred ribs, a distensible gullet, and gastrocentrous
vertebras must have descended on that street like the gentle rain from
Heaven upon the place beneath. And nobody seemed even interested. Not
for the first time since he had arrived in America, Archie marvelled at
the cynical detachment of the New Yorker, who permits himself to be
surprised at nothing.

He shut the window and moved away with a heavy heart. He had not had
the pleasure of an extended acquaintanceship with Peter, but he had
seen enough of him to realise his sterling qualities. Somewhere beneath
Peter’s three hundred ribs there had lain a heart of gold, and Archie
mourned for his loss.

Archie had a dinner and theatre engagement that night, and it was late
when he returned to the hotel. He found his father-in-law prowling
restlessly about the lobby. There seemed to be something on Mr.
Brewster’s mind. He came up to Archie with a brooding frown on his
square face.

“Who’s this man Seacliff?” he demanded, without preamble. “I hear he’s
a friend of yours.”

“Oh, you’ve met him, what?” said Archie. “Had a nice little chat
together, yes? Talked of this and that, no!”

“We have not said a word to each other.”

“Really? Oh, well, dear old Squiffy is one of those strong, silent
fellers you know. You mustn’t mind if he’s a bit dumb. He never says
much, but it’s whispered round the clubs that he thinks a lot. It was
rumoured in the spring of nineteen-thirteen that Squiffy was on the
point of making a bright remark, but it never came to anything.”

Mr. Brewster struggled with his feelings.

“Who _is_ he? You seem to know him.”

“Oh yes. Great pal of mine, Squiffy. We went through Eton, Oxford, and
the Bankruptcy Court together. And here’s a rummy coincidence. When
they examined _me_, I had no assets. And, when they examined Squiffy,
_he_ had no assets! Rather extraordinary, what?”

Mr. Brewster seemed to be in no mood for discussing coincidences.

“I might have known he was a friend of yours!” he said, bitterly.
“Well, if you want to see him, you’ll have to do it outside my hotel.”

“Why, I thought he was stopping here.”

“He is—to-night. To-morrow he can look for some other hotel to break
up.”

“Great Scot! Has dear old Squiffy been breaking the place up?”

Mr. Brewster snorted.

“I am informed that this precious friend of yours entered my grill-room
at eight o’clock. He must have been completely intoxicated, though the
head waiter tells me he noticed nothing at the time.”

Archie nodded approvingly.

“Dear old Squiffy was always like that. It’s a gift. However woozled he
might be, it was impossible to detect it with the naked eye. I’ve seen
the dear old chap many a time whiffled to the eyebrows, and looking as
sober as a bishop. Soberer! When did it begin to dawn on the lads in
the grill-room that the old egg had been pushing the boat out?”

“The head waiter,” said Mr. Brewster, with cold fury, “tells me that he
got a hint of the man’s condition when he suddenly got up from his
table and went the round of the room, pulling off all the table-cloths,
and breaking everything that was on them. He then threw a number of
rolls at the diners, and left. He seems to have gone straight to bed.”

“Dashed sensible of him, what? Sound, practical chap, Squiffy. But
where on earth did he get the—er—materials?”

“From his room. I made enquiries. He has six large cases in his room.”

“Squiffy always was a chap of infinite resource! Well, I’m dashed sorry
this should have happened, don’t you know.”

“If it hadn’t been for you, the man would never have come here.” Mr.
Brewster brooded coldly. “I don’t know why it is, but ever since you
came to this hotel I’ve had nothing but trouble.”

“Dashed sorry!” said Archie, sympathetically.

“Grrh!” said Mr. Brewster.

Archie made his way meditatively to the lift. The injustice of his
father-in-law’s attitude pained him. It was absolutely rotten and all
that to be blamed for everything that went wrong in the Hotel
Cosmopolis.

While this conversation was in progress, Lord Seacliff was enjoying a
refreshing sleep in his room on the fourth floor. Two hours passed. The
noise of the traffic in the street below faded away. Only the rattle of
an occasional belated cab broke the silence. In the hotel all was
still. Mr. Brewster had gone to bed. Archie, in his room, smoked
meditatively. Peace may have been said to reign.

At half-past two Lord Seacliff awoke. His hours of slumber were always
irregular. He sat up in bed and switched the light on. He was a
shock-headed young man with a red face and a hot brown eye. He yawned
and stretched himself. His head was aching a little. The room seemed to
him a trifle close. He got out of bed and threw open the window. Then,
returning to bed, he picked up a book and began to read. He was
conscious of feeling a little jumpy, and reading generally sent him to
sleep.

Much has been written on the subject of bed-books. The general
consensus of opinion is that a gentle, slow-moving story makes the best
opiate. If this be so, dear old Squiffy’s choice of literature had been
rather injudicious. His book was _The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes_,
and the particular story which he selected for perusal was the one
entitled, “The Speckled Band.” He was not a great reader, but, when he
read, he liked something with a bit of zip to it.

Squiffy became absorbed. He had read the story before, but a long time
back, and its complications were fresh to him. The tale, it may be
remembered, deals with the activities of an ingenious gentleman who
kept a snake, and used to loose it into people’s bedrooms as a
preliminary to collecting on their insurance. It gave Squiffy pleasant
thrills, for he had always had a particular horror of snakes. As a
child, he had shrunk from visiting the serpent house at the Zoo; and,
later, when he had come to man’s estate and had put off childish
things, and settled down in real earnest to his self-appointed mission
of drinking up all the alcoholic fluid in England, the distaste for
Ophidia had lingered. To a dislike for real snakes had been added a
maturer shrinking from those which existed only in his imagination. He
could still recall his emotions on the occasion, scarcely three months
before, when he had seen a long, green serpent which a majority of his
contemporaries had assured him wasn’t there.

Squiffy read on:—

“Suddenly another sound became audible—a very gentle, soothing sound,
like that of a small jet of steam escaping continuously from a kettle.”


Lord Seacliff looked up from his book with a start. Imagination was
beginning to play him tricks. He could have sworn that he had actually
heard that identical sound. It had seemed to come from the window. He
listened again. No! All was still. He returned to his book and went on
reading.

“It was a singular sight that met our eyes. Beside the table, on a
wooden chair, sat Doctor Grimesby Rylott, clad in a long dressing-gown.
His chin was cocked upward and his eyes were fixed in a dreadful, rigid
stare at the corner of the ceiling. Round his brow he had a peculiar
yellow band, with brownish speckles, which seemed to be bound tightly
round his head.”
    “I took a step forward. In an instant his strange head-gear began
    to move, and there reared itself from among his hair the squat,
    diamond-shaped head and puffed neck of a loathsome serpent...”


“Ugh!” said Squiffy.

He closed the book and put it down. His head was aching worse than
ever. He wished now that he had read something else. No fellow could
read himself to sleep with this sort of thing. People ought not to
write this sort of thing.

His heart gave a bound. There it was again, that hissing sound. And
this time he was sure it came from the window.

He looked at the window, and remained staring, frozen. Over the sill,
with a graceful, leisurely movement, a green snake was crawling. As it
crawled, it raised its head and peered from side to side, like a
shortsighted man looking for his spectacles. It hesitated a moment on
the edge of the sill, then wriggled to the floor and began to cross the
room. Squiffy stared on.

It would have pained Peter deeply, for he was a snake of great
sensibility, if he had known how much his entrance had disturbed the
occupant of the room. He himself had no feeling but gratitude for the
man who had opened the window and so enabled him to get in out of the
rather nippy night air. Ever since the bag had swung open and shot him
out onto the sill of the window below Archie’s, he had been waiting
patiently for something of the kind to happen. He was a snake who took
things as they came, and was prepared to rough it a bit if necessary;
but for the last hour or two he had been hoping that somebody would do
something practical in the way of getting him in out of the cold. When
at home, he had an eiderdown quilt to sleep on, and the stone of the
window-sill was a little trying to a snake of regular habits. He
crawled thankfully across the floor under Squiffy’s bed. There was a
pair of trousers there, for his host had undressed when not in a frame
of mind to fold his clothes neatly and place them upon a chair. Peter
looked the trousers over. They were not an eiderdown quilt, but they
would serve. He curled up in them and went to sleep. He had had an
exciting day, and was glad to turn in.

After about ten minutes, the tension of Squiffy’s attitude relaxed. His
heart, which had seemed to suspend its operations, began beating again.
Reason reasserted itself. He peeped cautiously under the bed. He could
see nothing.

Squiffy was convinced. He told himself that he had never really
believed in Peter as a living thing. It stood to reason that there
couldn’t really be a snake in his room. The window looked out on
emptiness. His room was several stories above the ground. There was a
stern, set expression on Squiffy’s face as he climbed out of bed. It
was the expression of a man who is turning over a new leaf, starting a
new life. He looked about the room for some implement which would carry
out the deed he had to do, and finally pulled out one of the
curtain-rods. Using this as a lever, he broke open the topmost of the
six cases which stood in the corner. The soft wood cracked and split.
Squiffy drew out a straw-covered bottle. For a moment he stood looking
at it, as a man might gaze at a friend on the point of death. Then,
with a sudden determination, he went into the bathroom. There was a
crash of glass and a gurgling sound.

Half an hour later the telephone in Archie’s room rang. “I say, Archie,
old top,” said the voice of Squiffy.

“Halloa, old bean! Is that you?”

“I say, could you pop down here for a second? I’m rather upset.”

“Absolutely! Which room?”

“Four-forty-one.”

“I’ll be with you eftsoons or right speedily.”

“Thanks, old man.”

“What appears to be the difficulty?”

“Well, as a matter of fact, I thought I saw a snake!”

“A snake!”

“I’ll tell you all about it when you come down.”

Archie found Lord Seacliff seated on his bed. An arresting aroma of
mixed drinks pervaded the atmosphere.

“I say! What?” said Archie, inhaling.

“That’s all right. I’ve been pouring my stock away. Just finished the
last bottle.”

“But why?”

“I told you. I thought I saw a snake!”

“Green?”

Squiffy shivered slightly.

“Frightfully green!”

Archie hesitated. He perceived that there are moments when silence is
the best policy. He had been worrying himself over the unfortunate case
of his friend, and now that Fate seemed to have provided a solution, it
would be rash to interfere merely to ease the old bean’s mind. If
Squiffy was going to reform because he thought he had seen an imaginary
snake, better not to let him know that the snake was a real one.

“Dashed serious!” he said.

“Bally dashed serious!” agreed Squiffy. “I’m going to cut it out!”

“Great scheme!”

“You don’t think,” asked Squiffy, with a touch of hopefulness, “that it
could have been a real snake?”

“Never heard of the management supplying them.”

“I thought it went under the bed.”

“Well, take a look.”

Squiffy shuddered.

“Not me! I say, old top, you know, I simply can’t sleep in this room
now. I was wondering if you could give me a doss somewhere in yours.”

“Rather! I’m in five-forty-one. Just above. Trot along up. Here’s the
key. I’ll tidy up a bit here, and join you in a minute.”

Squiffy put on a dressing-gown and disappeared. Archie looked under the
bed. From the trousers the head of Peter popped up with its usual
expression of amiable enquiry. Archie nodded pleasantly, and sat down
on the bed. The problem of his little friend’s immediate future wanted
thinking over.

He lit a cigarette and remained for a while in thought. Then he rose.
An admirable solution had presented itself. He picked Peter up and
placed him in the pocket of his dressing-gown. Then, leaving the room,
he mounted the stairs till he reached the seventh floor. Outside a room
half-way down the corridor he paused.

From within, through the open transom, came the rhythmical snoring of a
good man taking his rest after the labours of the day. Mr. Brewster was
always a heavy sleeper.

“There’s always a way,” thought Archie, philosophically, “if a chappie
only thinks of it.”

His father-in-law’s snoring took on a deeper note. Archie extracted
Peter from his pocket and dropped him gently through the transom.




CHAPTER IX.
A LETTER FROM PARKER


As the days went by and he settled down at the Hotel Cosmopolis,
Archie, looking about him and revising earlier judgments, was inclined
to think that of all his immediate circle he most admired Parker, the
lean, grave valet of Mr. Daniel Brewster. Here was a man who, living in
the closest contact with one of the most difficult persons in New York,
contrived all the while to maintain an unbowed head, and, as far as one
could gather from appearances, a tolerably cheerful disposition. A
great man, judge him by what standard you pleased. Anxious as he was to
earn an honest living, Archie would not have changed places with Parker
for the salary of a movie-star.

It was Parker who first directed Archie’s attention to the hidden
merits of Pongo. Archie had drifted into his father-in-law’s suite one
morning, as he sometimes did in the effort to establish more amicable
relations, and had found it occupied only by the valet, who was dusting
the furniture and bric-a-brac with a feather broom rather in the style
of a man-servant at the rise of the curtain of an old-fashioned farce.
After a courteous exchange of greetings, Archie sat down and lit a
cigarette. Parker went on dusting.

“The guv’nor,” said Parker, breaking the silence, “has some nice little
objay dar, sir.”

“Little what?”

“Objay dar, sir.”

Light dawned upon Archie.

“Of course, yes. French for junk. I see what you mean now. Dare say
you’re right, old friend. Don’t know much about these things myself.”

Parker gave an appreciative flick at a vase on the mantelpiece.

“Very valuable, some of the guv’nor’s things.” He had picked up the
small china figure of the warrior with the spear, and was grooming it
with the ostentatious care of one brushing flies off a sleeping Venus.
He regarded this figure with a look of affectionate esteem which seemed
to Archie absolutely uncalled-for. Archie’s taste in Art was not
precious. To his untutored eye the thing was only one degree less foul
than his father-in-law’s Japanese prints, which he had always observed
with silent loathing. “This one, now,” continued Parker. “Worth a lot
of money. Oh, a lot of money.”

“What, Pongo?” said Archie incredulously.

“Sir?”

“I always call that rummy-looking what-not Pongo. Don’t know what else
you could call him, what!”

The valet seemed to disapprove of this levity. He shook his head and
replaced the figure on the mantelpiece.

“Worth a lot of money,” he repeated. “Not by itself, no.”

“Oh, not by itself?”

“No, sir. Things like this come in pairs. Somewhere or other there’s
the companion-piece to this here, and if the guv’nor could get hold of
it, he’d have something worth having. Something that connoozers would
give a lot of money for. But one’s no good without the other. You have
to have both, if you understand my meaning, sir.”

“I see. Like filling a straight flush, what?”

“Precisely, sir.”

Archie gazed at Pongo again, with the dim hope of discovering virtues
not immediately apparent to the casual observer. But without success.
Pongo left him cold—even chilly. He would not have taken Pongo as a
gift, to oblige a dying friend.

“How much would the pair be worth?” he asked. “Ten dollars?”

Parker smiled a gravely superior smile. “A leetle more than that, sir.
Several thousand dollars, more like it.”

“Do you mean to say,” said Archie, with honest amazement, “that there
are chumps going about loose—absolutely loose—who would pay that for a
weird little object like Pongo?”

“Undoubtedly, sir. These antique china figures are in great demand
among collectors.”

Archie looked at Pongo once more, and shook his head.

“Well, well, well! It takes all sorts to make a world, what!”

What might be called the revival of Pongo, the restoration of Pongo to
the ranks of the things that matter, took place several weeks later,
when Archie was making holiday at the house which his father-in-law had
taken for the summer at Brookport. The curtain of the second act may be
said to rise on Archie strolling back from the golf-links in the cool
of an August evening. From time to time he sang slightly, and wondered
idly if Lucille would put the finishing touch upon the all-rightness of
everything by coming to meet him and sharing his homeward walk.

She came in view at this moment, a trim little figure in a white skirt
and a pale blue sweater. She waved to Archie; and Archie, as always at
the sight of her, was conscious of that jumpy, fluttering sensation
about the heart, which, translated into words, would have formed the
question, “What on earth could have made a girl like that fall in love
with a chump like me?” It was a question which he was continually
asking himself, and one which was perpetually in the mind also of Mr.
Brewster, his father-in-law. The matter of Archie’s unworthiness to be
the husband of Lucille was practically the only one on which the two
men saw eye to eye.

“Hallo—allo—allo!” said Archie. “Here we are, what! I was just hoping
you would drift over the horizon.”

Lucille kissed him.

“You’re a darling,” she said. “And you look like a Greek god in that
suit.”

“Glad you like it.” Archie squinted with some complacency down his
chest. “I always say it doesn’t matter what you pay for a suit, so long
as it’s _right_. I hope your jolly old father will feel that way when
he settles up for it.”

“Where is father? Why didn’t he come back with you?”

“Well, as a matter of fact, he didn’t seem any too keen on my company.
I left him in the locker-room chewing a cigar. Gave me the impression
of having something on his mind.”

“Oh, Archie! You didn’t beat him _again?_”

Archie looked uncomfortable. He gazed out to sea with something of
embarrassment.

“Well, as a matter of fact, old thing, to be absolutely frank, I, as it
were, did!”

“Not badly?”

“Well, yes! I rather fancy I put it across him with some vim and not a
little emphasis. To be perfectly accurate, I licked him by ten and
eight.”

“But you promised me you would let him beat you to-day. You know how
pleased it would have made him.”

“I know. But, light of my soul, have you any idea how dashed difficult
it is to get beaten by your festive parent at golf?”

“Oh, well!” Lucille sighed. “It can’t be helped, I suppose.” She felt
in the pocket of her sweater. “Oh, there’s a letter for you. I’ve just
been to fetch the mail. I don’t know who it can be from. The
handwriting looks like a vampire’s. Kind of scrawly.”

Archie inspected the envelope. It provided no solution.

“That’s rummy! Who could be writing to me?”

“Open it and see.”

“Dashed bright scheme! I will, Herbert Parker. Who the deuce is Herbert
Parker?”

“Parker? Father’s valet’s name was Parker. The one he dismissed when he
found he was wearing his shirts.”

“Do you mean to say any reasonable chappie would willingly wear the
sort of shirts your father—? I mean to say, there must have been some
mistake.”

“Do read the letter. I expect he wants to use your influence with
father to have him taken back.”

“_My_ influence? With your _father_? Well, I’m dashed. Sanguine sort of
Johnny, if he does. Well, here’s what he says. Of course, I remember
jolly old Parker now—great pal of mine.”

Dear Sir,—It is some time since the undersigned had the honour of
conversing with you, but I am respectfully trusting that you may recall
me to mind when I mention that until recently I served Mr. Brewster,
your father-in-law, in the capacity of valet. Owing to an unfortunate
misunderstanding, I was dismissed from that position and am now
temporarily out of a job. “How art thou fallen from Heaven, O Lucifer,
son of the morning!” (Isaiah xiv. 12.)


“You know,” said Archie, admiringly, “this bird is hot stuff! I mean to
say he writes dashed well.”

It is not, however, with my own affairs that I desire to trouble you,
dear sir. I have little doubt that all will be well with me and that I
shall not fall like a sparrow to the ground. “I have been young and now
am old; yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed
begging bread” (Psalms xxxvii. 25). My object in writing to you is as
follows. You may recall that I had the pleasure of meeting you one
morning in Mr. Brewster’s suite, when we had an interesting talk on the
subject of Mr. B.’s _objets d’art_. You may recall being particularly
interested in a small china figure. To assist your memory, the figure
to which I allude is the one which you whimsically referred to as
Pongo. I informed you, if you remember, that, could the accompanying
figure be secured, the pair would be extremely valuable.
    I am glad to say, dear sir, that this has now transpired, and is on
    view at Beale’s Art Galleries on West Forty-Fifth Street, where it
    will be sold to-morrow at auction, the sale commencing at
    two-thirty sharp. If Mr. Brewster cares to attend, he will, I
    fancy, have little trouble in securing it at a reasonable price. I
    confess that I had thought of refraining from apprising my late
    employer of this matter, but more Christian feelings have
    prevailed. “If thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him
    drink; for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head”
    (Romans xii. 20). Nor, I must confess, am I altogether uninfluenced
    by the thought that my action in this matter may conceivably lead
    to Mr. B. consenting to forget the past and to reinstate me in my
    former position. However, I am confident that I can leave this to
    his good feeling.


I remain, respectfully yours,
Herbert Parker.


Lucille clapped her hands.

“How splendid! Father _will_ be pleased!”

“Yes. Friend Parker has certainly found a way to make the old dad fond
of him. Wish _I_ could!”

“But you can, silly! He’ll be delighted when you show him that letter.”

“Yes, with Parker. Old Herb. Parker’s is the neck he’ll fall on—not
mine.”

Lucille reflected.

“I wish—” she began. She stopped. Her eyes lit up. “Oh, Archie,
darling, I’ve got an idea!”

“Decant it.”

“Why don’t you slip up to New York to-morrow and buy the thing, and
give it to father as a surprise?”

Archie patted her hand kindly. He hated to spoil her girlish
day-dreams.

“Yes,” he said. “But reflect, queen of my heart! I have at the moment
of going to press just two dollars fifty in specie, which I took off
your father this after-noon. We were playing twenty-five cents a hole.
He coughed it up without enthusiasm—in fact, with a nasty hacking
sound—but I’ve got it. But that’s all I have got.”

“That’s all right. You can pawn that ring and that bracelet of mine.”

“Oh, I say, what! Pop the family jewels?”

“Only for a day or two. Of course, once you’ve got the thing, father
will pay us back. He would give you all the money we asked him for, if
he knew what it was for. But I want to surprise him. And if you were to
go to him and ask him for a thousand dollars without telling him what
it was for, he might refuse.”

“He might!” said Archie. “He might!”

“It all works out splendidly. To-morrow’s the Invitation Handicap, and
father’s been looking forward to it for weeks. He’d hate to have to go
up to town himself and not play in it. But you can slip up and slip
back without his knowing anything about it.”

Archie pondered.

“It sounds a ripe scheme. Yes, it has all the ear-marks of a somewhat
fruity wheeze! By Jove, it _is_ a fruity wheeze! It’s an egg!”

“An egg?”

“Good egg, you know. Halloa, here’s a postscript. I didn’t see it.”

P.S.—I should be glad if you would convey my most cordial respects to
Mrs. Moffam. Will you also inform her that I chanced to meet Mr.
William this morning on Broadway, just off the boat. He desired me to
send his regards and to say that he would be joining you at Brookport
in the course of a day or so. Mr. B. will be pleased to have him back.
“A wise son maketh a glad father” (Proverbs x. 1).


“Who’s Mr. William?” asked Archie.

“My brother Bill, of course. I’ve told you all about him.”

“Oh yes, of course. Your brother Bill. Rummy to think I’ve got a
brother-in-law I’ve never seen.”

“You see, we married so suddenly. When we married, Bill was in Yale.”

“Good God! What for?”

“Not jail, silly. Yale. The university.”

“Oh, ah, yes.”

“Then he went over to Europe for a trip to broaden his mind. You must
look him up to-morrow when you get back to New York. He’s sure to be at
his club.”

“I’ll make a point of it. Well, vote of thanks to good old Parker! This
really does begin to look like the point in my career where I start to
have your forbidding old parent eating out of my hand.”

“Yes, it’s an egg, isn’t it!”

“Queen of my soul,” said Archie enthusiastically, “it’s an omelette!”

The business negotiations in connection with the bracelet and the ring
occupied Archie on his arrival in New York to an extent which made it
impossible for him to call on Brother Bill before lunch. He decided to
postpone the affecting meeting of brothers-in-law to a more convenient
season, and made his way to his favourite table at the Cosmopolis
grill-room for a bite of lunch preliminary to the fatigues of the sale.
He found Salvatore hovering about as usual, and instructed him to come
to the rescue with a minute steak.

Salvatore was the dark, sinister-looking waiter who attended, among
other tables, to the one at the far end of the grill-room at which
Archie usually sat. For several weeks Archie’s conversations with the
other had dealt exclusively with the bill of fare and its contents; but
gradually he had found himself becoming more personal. Even before the
war and its democratising influences, Archie had always lacked that
reserve which characterises many Britons; and since the war he had
looked on nearly everyone he met as a brother. Long since, through the
medium of a series of friendly chats, he had heard all about
Salvatore’s home in Italy, the little newspaper and tobacco shop which
his mother owned down on Seventh Avenue, and a hundred other personal
details. Archie had an insatiable curiosity about his fellow-man.

“Well done,” said Archie.

“Sare?”

“The steak. Not too rare, you know.”

“Very good, sare.”

Archie looked at the waiter closely. His tone had been subdued and sad.
Of course, you don’t expect a waiter to beam all over his face and give
three rousing cheers simply because you have asked him to bring you a
minute steak, but still there was something about Salvatore’s manner
that disturbed Archie. The man appeared to have the pip. Whether he was
merely homesick and brooding on the lost delights of his sunny native
land, or whether his trouble was more definite, could only be
ascertained by enquiry. So Archie enquired.

“What’s the matter, laddie?” he said sympathetically. “Something on
your mind?”

“Sare?”

“I say, there seems to be something on your mind. What’s the trouble?”

The waiter shrugged his shoulders, as if indicating an unwillingness to
inflict his grievances on one of the tipping classes.

“Come on!” persisted Archie encouragingly. “All pals here. Barge along,
old thing, and let’s have it.”

Salvatore, thus admonished, proceeded in a hurried undertone—with one
eye on the headwaiter—to lay bare his soul. What he said was not very
coherent, but Archie could make out enough of it to gather that it was
a sad story of excessive hours and insufficient pay. He mused awhile.
The waiter’s hard case touched him.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said at last. “When jolly old Brewster comes
back to town—he’s away just now—I’ll take you along to him and we’ll
beard the old boy in his den. I’ll introduce you, and you get that
extract from Italian opera off your chest which you’ve just been
singing to me, and you’ll find it’ll be all right. He isn’t what you
might call one of my greatest admirers, but everybody says he’s a
square sort of cove and he’ll see you aren’t snootered. And now,
laddie, touching the matter of that steak.”

The waiter disappeared, greatly cheered, and Archie, turning, perceived
that his friend Reggie van Tuyl was entering the room. He waved to him
to join his table. He liked Reggie, and it also occurred to him that a
man of the world like the heir of the van Tuyls, who had been popping
about New York for years, might be able to give him some much-needed
information on the procedure at an auction sale, a matter on which he
himself was profoundly ignorant.




CHAPTER X.
DOING FATHER A BIT OF GOOD


Reggie Van Tuyl approached the table languidly, and sank down into a
chair. He was a long youth with a rather subdued and deflated look, as
though the burden of the van Tuyl millions was more than his frail
strength could support. Most things tired him.

“I say, Reggie, old top,” said Archie, “you’re just the lad I wanted to
see. I require the assistance of a blighter of ripe intellect. Tell me,
laddie, do you know anything about sales?”

Reggie eyed him sleepily.

“Sales?”

“Auction sales.”

Reggie considered.

“Well, they’re sales, you know.” He checked a yawn. “Auction sales, you
understand.”

“Yes,” said Archie encouragingly. “Something—the name or
something—seemed to tell me that.”

“Fellows put things up for sale you know, and other fellows—other
fellows go in and—and buy ’em, if you follow me.”

“Yes, but what’s the procedure? I mean, what do I do? That’s what I’m
after. I’ve got to buy something at Beale’s this afternoon. How do I
set about it?”

“Well,” said Reggie, drowsily, “there are several ways of bidding, you
know. You can shout, or you can nod, or you can twiddle your fingers—”
The effort of concentration was too much for him. He leaned back limply
in his chair. “I’ll tell you what. I’ve nothing to do this afternoon.
I’ll come with you and show you.”

When he entered the Art Galleries a few minutes later, Archie was glad
of the moral support of even such a wobbly reed as Reggie van Tuyl.
There is something about an auction room which weighs heavily upon the
novice. The hushed interior was bathed in a dim, religious light; and
the congregation, seated on small wooden chairs, gazed in reverent
silence at the pulpit, where a gentleman of commanding presence and
sparkling pince-nez was delivering a species of chant. Behind a gold
curtain at the end of the room mysterious forms flitted to and fro.
Archie, who had been expecting something on the lines of the New York
Stock Exchange, which he had once been privileged to visit when it was
in a more than usually feverish mood, found the atmosphere oppressively
ecclesiastical. He sat down and looked about him. The presiding priest
went on with his chant.

“Sixteen-sixteen-sixteen-sixteen-sixteen—worth three
hundred—sixteen-sixteen-sixteen-sixteen-sixteen—ought to bring five
hundred—sixteen-sixteen-seventeen-seventeen-eighteen-eighteen
nineteen-nineteen-nineteen.”

He stopped and eyed the worshippers with a glittering and reproachful
eye. They had, it seemed, disappointed him. His lips curled, and he
waved a hand towards a grimly uncomfortable-looking chair with insecure
legs and a good deal of gold paint about it. “Gentlemen! Ladies and
gentlemen! You are not here to waste my time; I am not here to waste
yours. Am I seriously offered nineteen dollars for this
eighteenth-century chair, acknowledged to be the finest piece sold in
New York for months and months? Am I—twenty? I thank you.
Twenty-twenty-twenty-twenty. _Your_ opportunity! Priceless. Very few
extant. Twenty-five-five-five-five-thirty-thirty. Just what you are
looking for. The only one in the City of New York.
Thirty-five-five-five-five. Forty-forty-forty-forty-forty. Look at
those legs! Back it into the light, Willie. Let the light fall on those
legs!”

Willie, a sort of acolyte, manœuvred the chair as directed. Reggie van
Tuyl, who had been yawning in a hopeless sort of way, showed his first
flicker of interest.

“Willie,” he observed, eyeing that youth more with pity than reproach,
“has a face like Jo-Jo the dog-faced boy, don’t you think so?”

Archie nodded briefly. Precisely the same criticism had occurred to
him.

“Forty-five-five-five-five-five,” chanted the high-priest. “Once
forty-five. Twice forty-five. Third and last call, forty-five. Sold at
forty-five. Gentleman in the fifth row.”

Archie looked up and down the row with a keen eye. He was anxious to
see who had been chump enough to give forty-five dollars for such a
frightful object. He became aware of the dog-faced Willie leaning
towards him.

“Name, please?” said the canine one.

“Eh, what?” said Archie. “Oh, my name’s Moffam, don’t you know.” The
eyes of the multitude made him feel a little nervous “Er—glad to meet
you and all that sort of rot.”

“Ten dollars deposit, please,” said Willie.

“I don’t absolutely follow you, old bean. What is the big thought at
the back of all this?”

“Ten dollars deposit on the chair.”

“What chair?”

“You bid forty-five dollars for the chair.”

“Me?”

“You nodded,” said Willie, accusingly. “If,” he went on, reasoning
closely, “you didn’t want to bid, why did you nod?”

Archie was embarrassed. He could, of course, have pointed out that he
had merely nodded in adhesion to the statement that the other had a
face like Jo-Jo the dog-faced boy; but something seemed to tell him
that a purist might consider the excuse deficient in tact. He hesitated
a moment, then handed over a ten-dollar bill, the price of Willie’s
feelings. Willie withdrew like a tiger slinking from the body of its
victim.

“I say, old thing,” said Archie to Reggie, “this is a bit thick, you
know. No purse will stand this drain.”

Reggie considered the matter. His face seemed drawn under the mental
strain.

“Don’t nod again,” he advised. “If you aren’t careful, you get into the
habit of it. When you want to bid, just twiddle your fingers. Yes,
that’s the thing. Twiddle!”

He sighed drowsily. The atmosphere of the auction room was close; you
weren’t allowed to smoke; and altogether he was beginning to regret
that he had come. The service continued. Objects of varying
unattractiveness came and went, eulogised by the officiating priest,
but coldly received by the congregation. Relations between the former
and the latter were growing more and more distant. The congregation
seemed to suspect the priest of having an ulterior motive in his
eulogies, and the priest seemed to suspect the congregation of a
frivolous desire to waste his time. He had begun to speculate openly as
to why they were there at all. Once, when a particularly repellent
statuette of a nude female with an unwholesome green skin had been
offered at two dollars and had found no bidders—the congregation
appearing silently grateful for his statement that it was the only
specimen of its kind on the continent—he had specifically accused them
of having come into the auction room merely with the purpose of sitting
down and taking the weight off their feet.

“If your thing—your whatever-it-is, doesn’t come up soon, Archie,” said
Reggie, fighting off with an effort the mists of sleep, “I rather think
I shall be toddling along. What was it you came to get?”

“It’s rather difficult to describe. It’s a rummy-looking sort of
what-not, made of china or something. I call it Pongo. At least, this
one isn’t Pongo, don’t you know—it’s his little brother, but presumably
equally foul in every respect. It’s all rather complicated, I know,
but—hallo!” He pointed excitedly. “By Jove! We’re off! There it is!
Look! Willie’s unleashing it now!”

Willie, who had disappeared through the gold curtain, had now returned,
and was placing on a pedestal a small china figure of delicate
workmanship. It was the figure of a warrior in a suit of armour
advancing with raised spear upon an adversary. A thrill permeated
Archie’s frame. Parker had not been mistaken. This was undoubtedly the
companion-figure to the redoubtable Pongo. The two were identical. Even
from where he sat Archie could detect on the features of the figure on
the pedestal the same expression of insufferable complacency which had
alienated his sympathies from the original Pongo.

The high-priest, undaunted by previous rebuffs, regarded the figure
with a gloating enthusiasm wholly unshared by the congregation, who
were plainly looking upon Pongo’s little brother as just another of
those things.

“This,” he said, with a shake in his voice, “is something very special.
China figure, said to date back to the Ming Dynasty. Unique. Nothing
like it on either side of the Atlantic. If I were selling this at
Christie’s in London, where people,” he said, nastily, “have an
educated appreciation of the beautiful, the rare, and the exquisite, I
should start the bidding at a thousand dollars. This afternoon’s
experience has taught me that that might possibly be too high.” His
pince-nez sparkled militantly, as he gazed upon the stolid throng.
“Will anyone offer me a dollar for this unique figure?”

“Leap at it, old top,” said Reggie van Tuyl. “Twiddle, dear boy,
twiddle! A dollar’s reasonable.”

Archie twiddled.

“One dollar I am offered,” said the high-priest, bitterly. “One
gentleman here is not afraid to take a chance. One gentleman here knows
a good thing when he sees one.” He abandoned the gently sarcastic
manner for one of crisp and direct reproach. “Come, come, gentlemen, we
are not here to waste time. Will anyone offer me one hundred dollars
for this superb piece of—” He broke off, and seemed for a moment almost
unnerved. He stared at someone in one of the seats in front of Archie.
“Thank you,” he said, with a sort of gulp. “One hundred dollars I am
offered! One hundred—one hundred—one hundred—”

Archie was startled. This sudden, tremendous jump, this wholly
unforeseen boom in Pongos, if one might so describe it, was more than a
little disturbing. He could not see who his rival was, but it was
evident that at least one among those present did not intend to allow
Pongo’s brother to slip by without a fight. He looked helplessly at
Reggie for counsel, but Reggie had now definitely given up the
struggle. Exhausted nature had done its utmost, and now he was leaning
back with closed eyes, breathing softly through his nose. Thrown on his
own resources, Archie could think of no better course than to twiddle
his fingers again. He did so, and the high-priest’s chant took on a
note of positive exuberance.

“Two hundred I am offered. Much better! Turn the pedestal round,
Willie, and let them look at it. Slowly! Slowly! You aren’t spinning a
roulette-wheel. Two hundred. Two-two-two-two-two.” He became suddenly
lyrical. “Two-two-two—There was a young lady named Lou, who was
catching a train at two-two. Said the porter, ‘Don’t worry or hurry or
scurry. It’s a minute or two to two-two!’ Two-two-two-two-two!”

Archie’s concern increased. He seemed to be twiddling at this voluble
man across seas of misunderstanding. Nothing is harder to interpret to
a nicety than a twiddle, and Archie’s idea of the language of twiddles
and the high-priest’s idea did not coincide by a mile. The high-priest
appeared to consider that, when Archie twiddled, it was his intention
to bid in hundreds, whereas in fact Archie had meant to signify that he
raised the previous bid by just one dollar. Archie felt that, if given
time, he could make this clear to the high-priest, but the latter gave
him no time. He had got his audience, so to speak, on the run, and he
proposed to hustle them before they could rally.

“Two hundred—two hundred—two—three—thank you,
sir—three-three-three-four-four-five-five-six-six-seven-seven-seven—”

Archie sat limply in his wooden chair. He was conscious of a feeling
which he had only experienced twice in his life—once when he had taken
his first lesson in driving a motor and had trodden on the accelerator
instead of the brake; the second time more recently, when he had made
his first down-trip on an express lift. He had now precisely the same
sensation of being run away with by an uncontrollable machine, and of
having left most of his internal organs at some little distance from
the rest of his body. Emerging from this welter of emotion, stood out
the one clear fact that, be the opposition bidding what it might, he
must nevertheless secure the prize. Lucille had sent him to New York
expressly to do so. She had sacrificed her jewellery for the cause. She
relied on him. The enterprise had become for Archie something almost
sacred. He felt dimly like a knight of old hot on the track of the Holy
Grail.

He twiddled again. The ring and the bracelet had fetched nearly twelve
hundred dollars. Up to that figure his hat was in the ring.

“Eight hundred I am offered. Eight hundred. Eight-eight-eight-eight—”

A voice spoke from somewhere at the back of the room. A quiet, cold,
nasty, determined voice.

“Nine!”

Archie rose from his seat and spun round. This mean attack from the
rear stung his fighting spirit. As he rose, a young man sitting
immediately in front of him rose too and stared likewise. He was a
square-built resolute-looking young man, who reminded Archie vaguely of
somebody he had seen before. But Archie was too busy trying to locate
the man at the back to pay much attention to him. He detected him at
last, owing to the fact that the eyes of everybody in that part of the
room were fixed upon him. He was a small man of middle age, with
tortoise-shell-rimmed spectacles. He might have been a professor or
something of the kind. Whatever he was, he was obviously a man to be
reckoned with. He had a rich sort of look, and his demeanour was the
demeanour of a man who is prepared to fight it out on these lines if it
takes all the summer.

“Nine hundred I am offered. Nine-nine-nine-nine—”

Archie glared defiantly at the spectacled man.

“A thousand!” he cried.

The irruption of high finance into the placid course of the afternoon’s
proceedings had stirred the congregation out of its lethargy. There
were excited murmurs. Necks were craned, feet shuffled. As for the
high-priest, his cheerfulness was now more than restored, and his faith
in his fellow-man had soared from the depths to a very lofty altitude.
He beamed with approval. Despite the warmth of his praise he would have
been quite satisfied to see Pongo’s little brother go at twenty
dollars, and the reflection that the bidding had already reached one
thousand and that his commission was twenty per cent, had engendered a
mood of sunny happiness.

“One thousand is bid!” he carolled. “Now, gentlemen, I don’t want to
hurry you over this. You are all connoisseurs here, and you don’t want
to see a priceless china figure of the Ming Dynasty get away from you
at a sacrifice price. Perhaps you can’t all see the figure where it is.
Willie, take it round and show it to ’em. We’ll take a little
intermission while you look carefully at this wonderful figure. Get a
move on, Willie! Pick up your feet!”

Archie, sitting dazedly, was aware that Reggie van Tuyl had finished
his beauty sleep and was addressing the young man in the seat in front.

“Why, hallo,” said Reggie. “I didn’t know you were back. You remember
me, don’t you? Reggie van Tuyl. I know your sister very well. Archie,
old man, I want you to meet my friend, Bill Brewster. Why, dash it!” He
chuckled sleepily. “I was forgetting. Of course! He’s your—”

“How are you?” said the young man. “Talking of my sister,” he said to
Reggie, “I suppose you haven’t met her husband by any chance? I suppose
you know she married some awful chump?”

“Me,” said Archie.

“How’s that?”

“I married your sister. My name’s Moffam.”

The young man seemed a trifle taken aback.

“Sorry,” he said.

“Not at all,” said Archie.

“I was only going by what my father said in his letters,” he explained,
in extenuation.

Archie nodded.

“I’m afraid your jolly old father doesn’t appreciate me. But I’m hoping
for the best. If I can rope in that rummy-looking little china thing
that Jo-Jo the dog-faced boy is showing the customers, he will be all
over me. I mean to say, you know, he’s got another like it, and, if he
can get a full house, as it were, I’m given to understand he’ll be
bucked, cheered, and even braced.”

The young man stared.

“Are _you_ the fellow who’s been bidding against me?”

“Eh, what? Were you bidding against _me?_”

“I wanted to buy the thing for my father. I’ve a special reason for
wanting to get in right with him just now. Are you buying it for him,
too?”

“Absolutely. As a surprise. It was Lucille’s idea. His valet, a chappie
named Parker, tipped us off that the thing was to be sold.”

“Parker? Great Scot! It was Parker who tipped _me_ off. I met him on
Broadway, and he told me about it.”

“Rummy he never mentioned it in his letter to me. Why, dash it, we
could have got the thing for about two dollars if we had pooled our
bids.”

“Well, we’d better pool them now, and extinguish that pill at the back
there. I can’t go above eleven hundred. That’s all I’ve got.”

“I can’t go above eleven hundred myself.”

“There’s just one thing. I wish you’d let me be the one to hand the
thing over to Father. I’ve a special reason for wanting to make a hit
with him.”

“Absolutely!” said Archie, magnanimously. “It’s all the same to me. I
only wanted to get him generally braced, as it were, if you know what I
mean.”

“That’s awfully good of you.”

“Not a bit, laddie, no, no, and far from it. Only too glad.”

Willie had returned from his rambles among the connoisseurs, and
Pongo’s brother was back on his pedestal. The high-priest cleared his
throat and resumed his discourse.

“Now that you have all seen this superb figure we will—I was offered
one thousand—one thousand-one-one-one-one—eleven hundred. Thank you,
sir. Eleven hundred I am offered.”

The high-priest was now exuberant. You could see him doing figures in
his head.

“You do the bidding,” said Brother Bill.

“Right-o!” said Archie.

He waved a defiant hand.

“Thirteen,” said the man at the back.

“Fourteen, dash it!”

“Fifteen!”

“Sixteen!”

“Seventeen!”

“Eighteen!”

“Nineteen!”

“Two thousand!”

The high-priest did everything but sing. He radiated good will and
bonhomie.

“Two thousand I am offered. Is there any advance on two thousand? Come,
gentlemen, I don’t want to give this superb figure away. Twenty-one
hundred. Twenty-one-one-one-one. This is more the sort of thing I have
been accustomed to. When I was at Sotheby’s Rooms in London, this kind
of bidding was a common-place. Twenty-two-two-two-two-two. One hardly
noticed it. Three-three-three. Twenty-three-three-three. Twenty-three
hundred dollars I am offered.”

He gazed expectantly at Archie, as a man gazes at some favourite dog
whom he calls upon to perform a trick. But Archie had reached the end
of his tether. The hand that had twiddled so often and so bravely lay
inert beside his trouser-leg, twitching feebly. Archie was through.

“Twenty-three hundred,” said the high-priest, ingratiatingly.

Archie made no movement. There was a tense pause. The high-priest gave
a little sigh, like one waking from a beautiful dream.

“Twenty-three hundred,” he said. “Once twenty-three. Twice
twenty-three. Third, last, and final call, twenty-three. Sold at
twenty-three hundred. I congratulate you, sir, on a genuine bargain!”

Reggie van Tuyl had dozed off again. Archie tapped his brother-in-law
on the shoulder.

“May as well be popping, what?”

They threaded their way sadly together through the crowd, and made for
the street. They passed into Fifth Avenue without breaking the silence.

“Bally nuisance,” said Archie, at last.

“Rotten!”

“Wonder who that chappie was?”

“Some collector, probably.”

“Well, it can’t be helped,” said Archie.

Brother Bill attached himself to Archie’s arm, and became
communicative.

“I didn’t want to mention it in front of van Tuyl,” he said, “because
he’s such a talking-machine, and it would have been all over New York
before dinner-time. But you’re one of the family, and you can keep a
secret.”

“Absolutely! Silent tomb and what not.”

“The reason I wanted that darned thing was because I’ve just got
engaged to a girl over in England, and I thought that, if I could hand
my father that china figure-thing with one hand and break the news with
the other, it might help a bit. She’s the most wonderful girl!”

“I’ll bet she is,” said Archie, cordially.

“The trouble is she’s in the chorus of one of the revues over there,
and Father is apt to kick. So I thought—oh, well, it’s no good worrying
now. Come along where it’s quiet, and I’ll tell you all about her.”

“That’ll be jolly,” said Archie.




CHAPTER XI.
SALVATORE CHOOSES THE WRONG MOMENT


Archie reclaimed the family jewellery from its temporary home next
morning; and, having done so, sauntered back to the Cosmopolis. He was
surprised, on entering the lobby, to meet his father-in-law. More
surprising still, Mr. Brewster was manifestly in a mood of
extraordinary geniality. Archie could hardly believe his eyes when the
other waved cheerily to him—nor his ears a moment later when Mr.
Brewster, addressing him as “my boy,” asked him how he was and
mentioned that the day was a warm one.

Obviously this jovial frame of mind must be taken advantage of; and
Archie’s first thought was of the downtrodden Salvatore, to the tale of
whose wrongs he had listened so sympathetically on the previous day.
Now was plainly the moment for the waiter to submit his grievance,
before some ebb-tide caused the milk of human kindness to flow out of
Daniel Brewster. With a swift “Cheerio!” in his father-in-law’s
direction, Archie bounded into the grill-room. Salvatore, the hour for
luncheon being imminent but not yet having arrived, was standing
against the far wall in an attitude of thought.

“Laddie!” cried Archie.

“Sare?”

“A most extraordinary thing has happened. Good old Brewster has
suddenly popped up through a trap and is out in the lobby now. And
what’s still more weird, he’s apparently bucked.”

“Sare?”

“Braced, you know. In the pink. Pleased about something. If you go to
him now with that yarn of yours, you can’t fail. He’ll kiss you on both
cheeks and give you his bank-roll and collar-stud. Charge along and ask
the head-waiter if you can have ten minutes off.”

Salvatore vanished in search of the potentate named, and Archie
returned to the lobby to bask in the unwonted sunshine.

“Well, well, well, what!” he said. “I thought you were at Brookport.”

“I came up this morning to meet a friend of mine,” replied Mr. Brewster
genially. “Professor Binstead.”

“Don’t think I know him.”

“Very interesting man,” said Mr. Brewster, still with the same uncanny
amiability. “He’s a dabbler in a good many things—science, phrenology,
antiques. I asked him to bid for me at a sale yesterday. There was a
little china figure—”

Archie’s jaw fell.

“China figure?” he stammered feebly.

“Yes. The companion to one you may have noticed on my mantelpiece
upstairs. I have been trying to get the pair of them for years. I
should never have heard of this one if it had not been for that valet
of mine, Parker. Very good of him to let me know of it, considering I
had fired him. Ah, here is Binstead.”—He moved to greet the small,
middle-aged man with the tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles who was
bustling across the lobby.—“Well, Binstead, so you got it?”

“Yes.”

“I suppose the price wasn’t particularly stiff?”

“Twenty-three hundred.”

“Twenty-three hundred!” Mr. Brewster seemed to reel in his tracks.
“Twenty-three _hundred!_”

“You gave me carte blanche.”

“Yes, but twenty-three hundred!”

“I could have got it for a few dollars, but unfortunately I was a
little late, and, when I arrived, some young fool had bid it up to a
thousand, and he stuck to me till I finally shook him off at
twenty-three hundred. Why, this is the very man! Is he a friend of
yours?”

Archie coughed.

“More a relation than a friend, what? Son-in-law, don’t you know!”

Mr. Brewster’s amiability had vanished.

“What damned foolery have you been up to _now?_” he demanded. “Can’t I
move a step without stubbing my toe on you? Why the devil did you bid?”

“We thought it would be rather a fruity scheme. We talked it over and
came to the conclusion that it was an egg. Wanted to get hold of the
rummy little object, don’t you know, and surprise you.”

“Who’s we?”

“Lucille and I.”

“But how did you hear of it at all?”

“Parker, the valet-chappie, you know, wrote me a letter about it.”

“Parker! Didn’t he tell you that he had told me the figure was to be
sold?”

“Absolutely not!” A sudden suspicion came to Archie. He was normally a
guileless young man, but even to him the extreme fishiness of the part
played by Herbert Parker had become apparent. “I say, you know, it
looks to me as if friend Parker had been having us all on a bit, what?
I mean to say it was jolly old Herb, who tipped your son off—Bill, you
know—to go and bid for the thing.”

“Bill! Was Bill there?”

“Absolutely in person! We were bidding against each other like the
dickens till we managed to get together and get acquainted. And then
this bird—this gentleman—sailed in and started to slip it across us.”

Professor Binstead chuckled—the care-free chuckle of a man who sees all
those around him smitten in the pocket, while he himself remains
untouched.

“A very ingenious rogue, this Parker of yours, Brewster. His method
seems to have been simple but masterly. I have no doubt that either he
or a confederate obtained the figure and placed it with the auctioneer,
and then he ensured a good price for it by getting us all to bid
against each other. Very ingenious!”

Mr. Brewster struggled with his feelings. Then he seemed to overcome
them and to force himself to look on the bright side.

“Well, anyway,” he said. “I’ve got the pair of figures, and that’s what
I wanted. Is that it in that parcel?”

“This is it. I wouldn’t trust an express company to deliver it. Suppose
we go up to your room and see how the two look side by side.”

They crossed the lobby to the lift.-The cloud was still on Mr.
Brewster’s brow as they stepped out and made their way to his suite.
Like most men who have risen from poverty to wealth by their own
exertions, Mr. Brewster objected to parting with his money
unnecessarily, and it was plain that that twenty-three hundred dollars
still rankled.

Mr. Brewster unlocked the door and crossed the room. Then, suddenly, he
halted, stared, and stared again. He sprang to the bell and pressed it,
then stood gurgling wordlessly.

“Anything wrong, old bean?” queried Archie, solicitously.

“Wrong! Wrong! It’s gone!”

“Gone?”

“The figure!”

The floor-waiter had manifested himself silently in answer to the bell,
and was standing in the doorway.

“Simmons!” Mr. Brewster turned to him wildly. “Has anyone been in this
suite since I went away?”

“No, sir.”

“Nobody?”

“Nobody except your valet, sir—Parker. He said he had come to fetch
some things away. I supposed he had come from you, sir, with
instructions.”

“Get out!”

Professor Binstead had unwrapped his parcel, and had placed the Pongo
on the table. There was a weighty silence. Archie picked up the little
china figure and balanced it on the palm of his hand. It was a small
thing, he reflected philosophically, but it had made quite a stir in
the world.

Mr. Brewster fermented for a while without speaking.

“So,” he said, at last, in a voice trembling with self-pity, “I have
been to all this trouble—”

“And expense,” put in Professor Binstead, gently.

“Merely to buy back something which had been stolen from me! And, owing
to your damned officiousness,” he cried, turning on Archie, “I have had
to pay twenty-three hundred dollars for it! I don’t know why they make
such a fuss about Job. Job never had anything like you around!”

“Of course,” argued Archie, “he had one or two boils.”

“Boils! What are boils?”

“Dashed sorry,” murmured Archie. “Acted for the best. Meant well. And
all that sort of rot!”

Professor Binstead’s mind seemed occupied to the exclusion of all other
aspects of the affair, with the ingenuity of the absent Parker.

“A cunning scheme!” he said. “A very cunning scheme! This man Parker
must have a brain of no low order. I should like to feel his bumps!”

“I should like to give him some!” said the stricken Mr. Brewster. He
breathed a deep breath. “Oh, well,” he said, “situated as I am, with a
crook valet and an imbecile son-in-law, I suppose I ought to be
thankful that I’ve still got my own property, even if I have had to pay
twenty-three hundred dollars for the privilege of keeping it.” He
rounded on Archie, who was in a reverie. The thought of the unfortunate
Bill had just crossed Archie’s mind. It would be many moons, many weary
moons, before Mr. Brewster would be in a suitable mood to listen
sympathetically to the story of love’s young dream. “Give me that
figure!”

Archie continued to toy absently with Pongo. He was wondering now how
best to break this sad occurrence to Lucille. It would be a
disappointment for the poor girl.

“_Give me that figure!_”

Archie started violently. There was an instant in which Pongo seemed to
hang suspended, like Mohammed’s coffin, between heaven and earth, then
the force of gravity asserted itself. Pongo fell with a sharp crack and
disintegrated. And as it did so there was a knock at the door, and in
walked a dark, furtive person, who to the inflamed vision of Mr. Daniel
Brewster looked like something connected with the executive staff of
the Black Hand. With all time at his disposal, the unfortunate
Salvatore had selected this moment for stating his case.

“Get out!” bellowed Mr. Brewster. “I didn’t ring for a waiter.”

Archie, his mind reeling beneath the catastrophe, recovered himself
sufficiently to do the honours. It was at his instigation that
Salvatore was there, and, greatly as he wished that he could have seen
fit to choose a more auspicious moment for his business chat, he felt
compelled to do his best to see him through.

“Oh, I say, half a second,” he said. “You don’t quite understand. As a
matter of fact, this chappie is by way of being downtrodden and
oppressed and what not, and I suggested that he should get hold of you
and speak a few well-chosen words. Of course, if you’d rather—some
other time—”

But Mr. Brewster was not permitted to postpone the interview. Before he
could get his breath, Salvatore had begun to talk. He was a strong,
ambidextrous talker, whom it was hard to interrupt; and it was not for
some moments that Mr. Brewster succeeded in getting a word in. When he
did, he spoke to the point. Though not a linguist, he had been able to
follow the discourse closely enough to realise that the waiter was
dissatisfied with conditions in his hotel; and Mr. Brewster, as has
been indicated, had a short way with people who criticised the
Cosmopolis.

“You’re fired!” said Mr. Brewster.

“Oh, I say!” protested Archie.

Salvatore muttered what sounded like a passage from Dante.

“Fired!” repeated Mr. Brewster resolutely. “And I wish to heaven,” he
added, eyeing his son-in-law malignantly, “I could fire _you!_”

“Well,” said Professor Binstead cheerfully, breaking the grim silence
which followed this outburst, “if you will give me your cheque,
Brewster, I think I will be going. Two thousand three hundred dollars.
Make it open, if you will, and then I can run round the corner and cash
it before lunch. That will be capital!”




CHAPTER XII.
BRIGHT EYES—AND A FLY


The Hermitage (unrivalled scenery, superb cuisine, Daniel Brewster,
proprietor) was a picturesque summer hotel in the green heart of the
mountains, built by Archie’s father-in-law shortly after he assumed
control of the Cosmopolis. Mr. Brewster himself seldom went there,
preferring to concentrate his attention on his New York establishment;
and Archie and Lucille, breakfasting in the airy dining-room some ten
days after the incidents recorded in the last chapter, had consequently
to be content with two out of the three advertised attractions of the
place. Through the window at their side quite a slab of the unrivalled
scenery was visible; some of the superb cuisine was already on the
table; and the fact that the eye searched in vain for Daniel Brewster,
proprietor, filled Archie, at any rate, with no sense of aching loss.
He bore it with equanimity and even with positive enthusiasm. In
Archie’s opinion, practically all a place needed to make it an earthly
Paradise was for Mr. Daniel Brewster to be about forty-seven miles away
from it.

It was at Lucille’s suggestion that they had come to the Hermitage.
Never a human sunbeam, Mr. Brewster had shown such a bleak front to the
world, and particularly to his son-in-law, in the days following the
Pongo incident, that Lucille had thought that he and Archie would for a
time at least be better apart—a view with which her husband cordially
agreed. He had enjoyed his stay at the Hermitage, and now he regarded
the eternal hills with the comfortable affection of a healthy man who
is breakfasting well.

“It’s going to be another perfectly topping day,” he observed, eyeing
the shimmering landscape, from which the morning mists were swiftly
shredding away like faint puffs of smoke. “Just the day you ought to
have been here.”

“Yes, it’s too bad I’ve got to go. New York will be like an oven.”

“Put it off.”

“I can’t, I’m afraid. I’ve a fitting.”

Archie argued no further. He was a married man of old enough standing
to know the importance of fittings.

“Besides,” said Lucille, “I want to see father.” Archie repressed an
exclamation of astonishment. “I’ll be back to-morrow evening. You will
be perfectly happy.”

“Queen of my soul, you know I can’t be happy with you away. You know—”

“Yes?” murmured Lucille, appreciatively. She never tired of hearing
Archie say this sort of thing.

Archie’s voice had trailed off. He was looking across the room.

“By Jove!” he exclaimed. “What an awfully pretty woman!”

“Where?”

“Over there. Just coming in, I say, what wonderful eyes! I don’t think
I ever saw such eyes. Did you notice her eyes? Sort of flashing!
Awfully pretty woman!”

Warm though the morning was, a suspicion of chill descended upon the
breakfast-table. A certain coldness seemed to come into Lucille’s face.
She could not always share Archie’s fresh young enthusiasms.

“Do you think so?”

“Wonderful figure, too!”

“Yes?”

“Well, what I mean to say, fair to medium,” said Archie, recovering a
certain amount of that intelligence which raises man above the level of
the beasts of the field. “Not the sort of type I admire myself, of
course.”

“You know her, don’t you?”

“Absolutely not and far from it,” said Archie, hastily. “Never met her
in my life.”

“You’ve seen her on the stage. Her name’s Vera Silverton. We saw her
in—”

“Of course, yes. So we did. I say, I wonder what she’s doing here? She
ought to be in New York, rehearsing. I remember meeting
what’s-his-name—you know—chappie who writes plays and what not—George
Benham—I remember meeting George Benham, and he told me she was
rehearsing in a piece of his called—I forget the name, but I know it
was called something or other. Well, why isn’t she?”

“She probably lost her temper and broke her contract and came away.
She’s always doing that sort of thing. She’s known for it. She must be
a horrid woman.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t want to talk about her. She used to be married to someone, and
she divorced him. And then she was married to someone else, and he
divorced her. And I’m certain her hair wasn’t that colour two years
ago, and I don’t think a woman ought to make up like that, and her
dress is all wrong for the country, and those pearls can’t be genuine,
and I hate the way she rolls her eyes about, and pink doesn’t suit her
a bit. I think she’s an awful woman, and I wish you wouldn’t keep on
talking about her.”

“Right-o!” said Archie, dutifully.

They finished breakfast, and Lucille went up to pack her bag. Archie
strolled out on to the terrace outside the hotel, where he smoked,
communed with nature, and thought of Lucille. He always thought of
Lucille when he was alone, especially when he chanced to find himself
in poetic surroundings like those provided by the unrivalled scenery
encircling the Hotel Hermitage. The longer he was married to her the
more did the sacred institution seem to him a good egg. Mr. Brewster
might regard their marriage as one of the world’s most unfortunate
incidents, but to Archie it was, and always had been, a bit of all
right. The more he thought of it the more did he marvel that a girl
like Lucille should have been content to link her lot with that of a
Class C specimen like himself. His meditations were, in fact, precisely
what a happily-married man’s meditations ought to be.

He was roused from them by a species of exclamation or cry almost at
his elbow, and turned to find that the spectacular Miss Silverton was
standing beside him. Her dubious hair gleamed in the sunlight, and one
of the criticised eyes was screwed up. The other gazed at Archie with
an expression of appeal.

“There’s something in my eye,” she said.

“No, really!”

“I wonder if you would mind? It would be so kind of you!”

Archie would have preferred to remove himself, but no man worthy of the
name can decline to come to the rescue of womanhood in distress. To
twist the lady’s upper lid back and peer into it and jab at it with the
corner of his handkerchief was the only course open to him. His conduct
may be classed as not merely blameless but definitely praiseworthy.
King Arthur’s knights used to do this sort of thing all the time, and
look what people think of them. Lucille, therefore, coming out of the
hotel just as the operation was concluded, ought not to have felt the
annoyance she did. But, of course, there is a certain superficial
intimacy about the attitude of a man who is taking a fly out of a
woman’s eye which may excusably jar upon the sensibilities of his wife.
It is an attitude which suggests a sort of _rapprochement_ or
_camaraderie_ or, as Archie would have put it, what not.

“Thanks so much!” said Miss Silverton.

“Oh no, rather not,” said Archie.

“Such a nuisance getting things in your eye.”

“Absolutely!”

“I’m always doing it!”

“Rotten luck!”

“But I don’t often find anyone as clever as you to help me.”

Lucille felt called upon to break in on this feast of reason and flow
of soul.

“Archie,” she said, “if you go and get your clubs now, I shall just
have time to walk round with you before my train goes.”

“Oh, ah!” said Archie, perceiving her for the first time. “Oh, ah, yes,
right-o, yes, yes, yes!”

On the way to the first tee it seemed to Archie that Lucille was
distrait and abstracted in her manner; and it occurred to him, not for
the first time in his life, what a poor support a clear conscience is
in moments of crisis. Dash it all, he didn’t see what else he could
have done. Couldn’t leave the poor female staggering about the place
with squads of flies wedged in her eyeball. Nevertheless—

“Rotten thing getting a fly in your eye,” he hazarded at length.
“Dashed awkward, I mean.”

“Or convenient.”

“Eh?”

“Well, it’s a very good way of dispensing with an introduction.”

“Oh, I say! You don’t mean you think—”

“She’s a horrid woman!”

“Absolutely! Can’t think what people see in her.”

“Well, you seemed to enjoy fussing over her!”

“No, no! Nothing of the kind! She inspired me with absolute
what-d’you-call-it—the sort of thing chappies do get inspired with, you
know.”

“You were beaming all over your face.”

“I wasn’t. I was just screwing up my face because the sun was in my
eye.”

“All sorts of things seem to be in people’s eyes this morning!”

Archie was saddened. That this sort of misunderstanding should have
occurred on such a topping day and at a moment when they were to be
torn asunder for about thirty-six hours made him feel—well, it gave him
the pip. He had an idea that there were words which would have
straightened everything out, but he was not an eloquent young man and
could not find them. He felt aggrieved. Lucille, he considered, ought
to have known that he was immune as regarded females with flashing eyes
and experimentally-coloured hair. Why, dash it, he could have extracted
flies from the eyes of Cleopatra with one hand and Helen of Troy with
the other, simultaneously, without giving them a second thought. It was
in depressed mood that he played a listless nine holes; nor had life
brightened for him when he came back to the hotel two hours later,
after seeing Lucille off in the train to New York. Never till now had
they had anything remotely resembling a quarrel. Life, Archie felt, was
a bit of a wash-out. He was disturbed and jumpy, and the sight of Miss
Silverton, talking to somebody on a settee in the corner of the hotel
lobby, sent him shooting off at right angles and brought him up with a
bump against the desk behind which the room-clerk sat.

The room-clerk, always of a chatty disposition, was saying something to
him, but Archie did not listen. He nodded mechanically. It was
something about his room. He caught the word “satisfactory.”

“Oh, rather, quite!” said Archie.

A fussy devil, the room-clerk! He knew perfectly well that Archie found
his room satisfactory. These chappies gassed on like this so as to try
to make you feel that the management took a personal interest in you.
It was part of their job. Archie beamed absently and went in to lunch.
Lucille’s empty seat stared at him mournfully, increasing his sense of
desolation.

He was half-way through his lunch, when the chair opposite ceased to be
vacant. Archie, transferring his gaze from the scenery outside the
window, perceived that his friend, George Benham, the playwright, had
materialised from nowhere and was now in his midst.

“Hallo!” he said.

George Benham was a grave young man whose spectacles gave him the look
of a mournful owl. He seemed to have something on his mind besides the
artistically straggling mop of black hair which swept down over his
brow. He sighed wearily, and ordered fish-pie.

“I thought I saw you come through the lobby just now,” he said.

“Oh, was that you on the settee, talking to Miss Silverton?”

“She was talking to _me_,” said the playwright, moodily.

“What are you doing here?” asked Archie. He could have wished Mr.
Benham elsewhere, for he intruded on his gloom, but, the chappie being
amongst those present, it was only civil to talk to him. “I thought you
were in New York, watching the rehearsals of your jolly old drama.”

“The rehearsals are hung up. And it looks as though there wasn’t going
to be any drama. Good Lord!” cried George Benham, with honest warmth,
“with opportunities opening out before one on every side—with life
extending prizes to one with both hands—when you see coal-heavers
making fifty dollars a week and the fellows who clean out the sewers
going happy and singing about their work—why does a man deliberately
choose a job like writing plays? Job was the only man that ever lived
who was really qualified to write a play, and he would have found it
pretty tough going if his leading woman had been anyone like Vera
Silverton!”

Archie—and it was this fact, no doubt, which accounted for his
possession of such a large and varied circle of friends—was always able
to shelve his own troubles in order to listen to other people’s
hard-luck stories.

“Tell me all, laddie,” he said. “Release the film! Has she walked out
on you?”

“Left us flat! How did you hear about it? Oh, she told you, of course?”

Archie hastened to try to dispel the idea that he was on any such terms
of intimacy with Miss Silverton.

“No, no! My wife said she thought it must be something of that nature
or order when we saw her come in to breakfast. I mean to say,” said
Archie, reasoning closely, “woman can’t come into breakfast here and be
rehearsing in New York at the same time. Why did she administer the
raspberry, old friend?”

Mr. Benham helped himself to fish-pie, and spoke dully through the
steam.

“Well, what happened was this. Knowing her as intimately as you do—”

“I _don’t_ know her!”

“Well, anyway, it was like this. As you know, she has a dog—”

“I didn’t know she had a dog,” protested Archie. It seemed to him that
the world was in conspiracy to link him with this woman.

“Well, she has a dog. A beastly great whacking brute of a bulldog. And
she brings it to rehearsal.” Mr. Benham’s eyes filled with tears, as in
his emotion he swallowed a mouthful of fish-pie some eighty-three
degrees Fahrenheit hotter than it looked. In the intermission caused by
this disaster his agile mind skipped a few chapters of the story, and,
when he was able to speak again, he said, “So then there was a lot of
trouble. Everything broke loose!”

“Why?” Archie was puzzled. “Did the management object to her bringing
the dog to rehearsal?”

“A lot of good that would have done! She does what she likes in the
theatre.”

“Then why was there trouble?”

“You weren’t listening,” said Mr. Benham, reproachfully. “I told you.
This dog came snuffling up to where I was sitting—it was quite dark in
the body of the theatre, you know—and I got up to say something about
something that was happening on the stage, and somehow I must have
given it a push with my foot.”

“I see,” said Archie, beginning to get the run of the plot. “You kicked
her dog.”

“Pushed it. Accidentally. With my foot.”

“I understand. And when you brought off this kick—”

“Push,” said Mr. Benham, austerely.

“This kick or push. When you administered this kick or push—”

“It was more a sort of light shove.”

“Well, when you did whatever you did, the trouble started?”

Mr. Benham gave a slight shiver.

“She talked for a while, and then walked out, taking the dog with her.
You see, this wasn’t the first time it had happened.”

“Good Lord! Do you spend your whole time doing that sort of thing?”

“It wasn’t me the first time. It was the stage-manager. He didn’t know
whose dog it was, and it came waddling on to the stage, and he gave it
a sort of pat, a kind of flick—”

“A slosh?”

“_Not_ a slosh,” corrected Mr. Benham, firmly. “You might call it a
tap—with the promptscript. Well, we had a lot of difficulty smoothing
her over that time. Still, we managed to do it, but she said that if
anything of the sort occurred again she would chuck up her part.”

“She must be fond of the dog,” said Archie, for the first time feeling
a touch of goodwill and sympathy towards the lady.

“She’s crazy about it. That’s what made it so awkward when I
happened—quite inadvertently—to give it this sort of accidental shove.
Well, we spent the rest of the day trying to get her on the ’phone at
her apartment, and finally we heard that she had come here. So I took
the next train, and tried to persuade her to come back. She wouldn’t
listen. And that’s how matters stand.”

“Pretty rotten!” said Archie, sympathetically.

“You can bet it’s pretty rotten—for me. There’s nobody else who can
play the part. Like a chump, I wrote the thing specially for her. It
means the play won’t be produced at all, if she doesn’t do it. So
you’re my last hope!”

Archie, who was lighting a cigarette, nearly swallowed it.

“_I_ am?”

“I thought you might persuade her. Point out to her what a lot hangs on
her coming back. Jolly her along, _you_ know the sort of thing!”

“But, my dear old friend, I tell you I don’t know her!”

Mr. Benham’s eyes opened behind their zareba of glass.

“Well, she knows _you_. When you came through the lobby just now she
said that you were the only real human being she had ever met.”

“Well, as a matter of fact, I did take a fly out of her eye. But—”

“You did? Well, then, the whole thing’s simple. All you have to do is
to ask her how her eye is, and tell her she has the most beautiful eyes
you ever saw, and coo a bit.”

“But, my dear old son!” The frightful programme which his friend had
mapped out stunned Archie. “I simply can’t! Anything to oblige and all
that sort of thing, but when it comes to cooing, distinctly Napoo!”

“Nonsense! It isn’t hard to coo.”

“You don’t understand, laddie. You’re not a married man. I mean to say,
whatever you say for or against marriage—personally I’m all for it and
consider it a ripe egg—the fact remains that it practically makes a
chappie a spent force as a cooer. I don’t want to dish you in any way,
old bean, but I must firmly and resolutely decline to coo.”

Mr. Benham rose and looked at his watch.

“I’ll have to be moving,” he said. “I’ve got to get back to New York
and report. I’ll tell them that I haven’t been able to do anything
myself, but that I’ve left the matter in good hands. I know you will do
your best.”

“But, laddie!”

“Think,” said Mr. Benham, solemnly, “of all that depends on it! The
other actors! The small-part people thrown out of a job! Myself—but no!
Perhaps you had better touch very lightly or not at all on my
connection with the thing. Well, you know how to handle it. I feel I
can leave it to you. Pitch it strong! Good-bye, my dear old man, and a
thousand thanks. I’ll do the same for you another time.” He moved
towards the door, leaving Archie transfixed. Half-way there he turned
and came back. “Oh, by the way,” he said, “my lunch. Have it put on
your bill, will you? I haven’t time to stay and settle. Good-bye!
Good-bye!”




CHAPTER XIII.
RALLYING ROUND PERCY


It amazed Archie through the whole of a long afternoon to reflect how
swiftly and unexpectedly the blue and brilliant sky of life can cloud
over and with what abruptness a man who fancies that his feet are on
solid ground can find himself immersed in Fate’s gumbo. He recalled,
with the bitterness with which one does recall such things, that that
morning he had risen from his bed without a care in the world, his
happiness unruffled even by the thought that Lucille would be leaving
him for a short space. He had sung in his bath. Yes, he had chirruped
like a bally linnet. And now—

Some men would have dismissed the unfortunate affairs of Mr. George
Benham from their mind as having nothing to do with themselves, but
Archie had never been made of this stern stuff. The fact that Mr.
Benham, apart from being an agreeable companion with whom he had
lunched occasionally in New York, had no claims upon him affected him
little. He hated to see his fellowman in trouble. On the other hand,
what could he do? To seek Miss Silverton out and plead with her—even if
he did it without cooing—would undoubtedly establish an intimacy
between them which, instinct told him, might tinge her manner after
Lucille’s return with just that suggestion of Auld Lang Syne which
makes things so awkward.

His whole being shrank from extending to Miss Silverton that inch which
the female artistic temperament is so apt to turn into an ell; and
when, just as he was about to go in to dinner, he met her in the lobby
and she smiled brightly at him and informed him that her eye was now
completely recovered, he shied away like a startled mustang of the
prairie, and, abandoning his intention of worrying the table d’hote in
the same room with the amiable creature, tottered off to the
smoking-room, where he did the best he could with sandwiches and
coffee.

Having got through the time as best he could till eleven o’clock, he
went up to bed.

The room to which he and Lucille had been assigned by the management
was on the second floor, pleasantly sunny by day and at night filled
with cool and heartening fragrance of the pines. Hitherto Archie had
always enjoyed taking a final smoke on the balcony overlooking the
woods, but, to-night such was his mental stress that he prepared to go
to bed directly he had closed the door. He turned to the cupboard to
get his pyjamas.

His first thought, when even after a second scrutiny no pyjamas were
visible, was that this was merely another of those things which happen
on days when life goes wrong. He raked the cupboard for a third time
with an annoyed eye. From every hook hung various garments of
Lucille’s, but no pyjamas. He was breathing a soft malediction
preparatory to embarking on a point-to-point hunt for his missing
property, when something in the cupboard caught his eye and held him
for a moment puzzled.

He could have sworn that Lucille did not possess a mauve _négligé_.
Why, she had told him a dozen times that mauve was a colour which she
did not like. He frowned perplexedly; and as he did so, from near the
window came a soft cough.

Archie spun round and subjected the room to as close a scrutiny as that
which he had bestowed upon the cupboard. Nothing was visible. The
window opening on to the balcony gaped wide. The balcony was manifestly
empty.

“_Urrf!_”

This time there was no possibility of error. The cough had come from
the immediate neighbourhood of the window.

Archie was conscious of a pringly sensation about the roots of his
closely-cropped back-hair, as he moved cautiously across the room. The
affair was becoming uncanny; and, as he tip-toed towards the window,
old ghost stories, read in lighter moments before cheerful fires with
plenty of light in the room, flitted through his mind. He had the
feeling—precisely as every chappie in those stories had had—that he was
not alone.

Nor was he. In a basket behind an arm-chair, curled up, with his
massive chin resting on the edge of the wicker-work, lay a fine
bulldog.

“Urrf!” said the bulldog.

“Good God!” said Archie.

There was a lengthy pause in which the bulldog looked earnestly at
Archie and Archie looked earnestly at the bulldog.

Normally, Archie was a dog-lover. His hurry was never so great as to
prevent him stopping, when in the street, and introducing himself to
any dog he met. In a strange house, his first act was to assemble the
canine population, roll it on its back or backs, and punch it in the
ribs. As a boy, his earliest ambition had been to become a veterinary
surgeon; and, though the years had cheated him of his career, he knew
all about dogs, their points, their manners, their customs, and their
treatment in sickness and in health. In short, he loved dogs, and, had
they met under happier conditions, he would undoubtedly have been on
excellent terms with this one within the space of a minute. But, as
things were, he abstained from fraternising and continued to goggle
dumbly.

And then his eye, wandering aside, collided with the following objects:
a fluffy pink dressing-gown, hung over the back of a chair, an entirely
strange suit-case, and, on the bureau, a photograph in a silver frame
of a stout gentleman in evening-dress whom he had never seen before in
his life.

Much has been written of the emotions of the wanderer who, returning to
his childhood home, finds it altered out of all recognition; but poets
have neglected the theme—far more poignant—of the man who goes up to
his room in an hotel and finds it full of somebody else’s
dressing-gowns and bulldogs.

Bulldogs! Archie’s heart jumped sideways and upwards with a wiggling
movement, turning two somersaults, and stopped beating. The hideous
truth, working its way slowly through the concrete, had at last
penetrated to his brain. He was not only in somebody else’s room, and a
woman’s at that. He was in the room belonging to Miss Vera Silverton.

He could not understand it. He would have been prepared to stake the
last cent he could borrow from his father-in-law on the fact that he
had made no error in the number over the door. Yet, nevertheless, such
was the case, and, below par though his faculties were at the moment,
he was sufficiently alert to perceive that it behoved him to withdraw.

He leaped to the door, and, as he did so, the handle began to turn.

The cloud which had settled on Archie’s mind lifted abruptly. For an
instant he was enabled to think about a hundred times more quickly than
was his leisurely wont. Good fortune had brought him to within easy
reach of the electric-light switch. He snapped it back, and was in
darkness. Then, diving silently and swiftly to the floor, he wriggled
under the bed. The thud of his head against what appeared to be some
sort of joist or support, unless it had been placed there by the maker
as a practical joke, on the chance of this kind of thing happening some
day, coincided with the creak of the opening door. Then the light was
switched on again, and the bulldog in the corner gave a welcoming
woofle.

“And how is mamma’s precious angel?”

Rightly concluding that the remark had not been addressed to himself
and that no social obligation demanded that he reply, Archie pressed
his cheek against the boards and said nothing. The question was not
repeated, but from the other side of the room came the sound of a
patted dog.

“Did he think his muzzer had fallen down dead and was never coming up?”

The beautiful picture which these words conjured up filled Archie with
that yearning for the might-have-been which is always so painful. He
was finding his position physically as well as mentally distressing. It
was cramped under the bed, and the boards were harder than anything he
had ever encountered. Also, it appeared to be the practice of the
housemaids at the Hotel Hermitage to use the space below the beds as a
depository for all the dust which they swept off the carpet, and much
of this was insinuating itself into his nose and mouth. The two things
which Archie would have liked most to do at that moment were first to
kill Miss Silverton—if possible, painfully—and then to spend the
remainder of his life sneezing.

After a prolonged period he heard a drawer open, and noted the fact as
promising. As the old married man, he presumed that it signified the
putting away of hair-pins. About now the dashed woman would be looking
at herself in the glass with her hair down. Then she would brush it.
Then she would twiddle it up into thingummies. Say, ten minutes for
this. And after that she would go to bed and turn out the light, and he
would be able, after giving her a bit of time to go to sleep, to creep
out and leg it. Allowing at a conservative estimate three-quarters of—

“Come out!”

Archie stiffened. For an instant a feeble hope came to him that this
remark, like the others, might be addressed to the dog.

“Come out from under that bed!” said a stern voice. “And mind how you
come! I’ve got a pistol!”

“Well, I mean to say, you know,” said Archie, in a propitiatory voice,
emerging from his lair like a tortoise and smiling as winningly as a
man can who has just bumped his head against the leg of a bed, “I
suppose all this seems fairly rummy, but—”

“For the love of Mike!” said Miss Silverton.

The point seemed to Archie well taken and the comment on the situation
neatly expressed.

“What are you doing in my room?”

“Well, if it comes to that, you know—shouldn’t have mentioned it if you
hadn’t brought the subject up in the course of general chit-chat—what
are you doing in mine?”

“Yours?”

“Well, apparently there’s been a bloomer of some species somewhere, but
this was the room I had last night,” said Archie.

“But the desk-clerk said that he had asked you if it would be quite
satisfactory to you giving it up to me, and you said yes. I come here
every summer, when I’m not working, and I always have this room.”

“By Jove! I remember now. The chappie did say something to me about the
room, but I was thinking of something else and it rather went over the
top. So that’s what he was talking about, was it?”

Miss Silverton was frowning. A moving-picture director, scanning her
face, would have perceived that she was registering disappointment.

“Nothing breaks right for me in this darned world,” she said,
regretfully. “When I caught sight of your leg sticking out from under
the bed, I did think that everything was all lined up for a real find
and, at last, I could close my eyes and see the thing in the papers. On
the front page, with photographs: ‘Plucky Actress Captures Burglar.’
Darn it!”

“Fearfully sorry, you know!”

“I just needed something like that. I’ve got a Press-agent, and I will
say for him that he eats well and sleeps well and has just enough
intelligence to cash his monthly cheque without forgetting what he went
into the bank for, but outside of that you can take it from me he’s not
one of the world’s workers! He’s about as much solid use to a girl with
aspirations as a pain in the lower ribs. It’s three weeks since he got
me into print at all, and then the brightest thing he could think up
was that my favourite breakfast-fruit was an apple. Well, I ask you!”

“Rotten!” said Archie.

“I did think that for once my guardian angel had gone back to work and
was doing something for me. ‘Stage Star and Midnight Marauder,’”
murmured Miss Silverton, wistfully. “‘Footlight Favourite Foils
Felon.’”

“Bit thick!” agreed Archie, sympathetically. “Well, you’ll probably be
wanting to get to bed and all that sort of rot, so I may as well be
popping, what! Cheerio!”

A sudden gleam came into Miss Silverton’s compelling eyes.

“Wait!”

“Eh?”

“Wait! I’ve got an idea!” The wistful sadness had gone from her manner.
She was bright and alert. “Sit down!”

“Sit down?”

“Sure. Sit down and take the chill off the arm-chair. I’ve thought of
something.”

Archie sat down as directed. At his elbow the bulldog eyed him gravely
from the basket.

“Do they know you in this hotel?”

“Know me? Well, I’ve been here about a week.”

“I mean, do they know who you are? Do they know you’re a good citizen?”

“Well, if it comes to that, I suppose they don’t. But—”

“Fine!” said Miss Silverton, appreciatively. “Then it’s all right. We
can carry on!”

“Carry on!”

“Why, sure! All I want is to get the thing into the papers. It doesn’t
matter to me if it turns out later that there was a mistake and that
you weren’t a burglar trying for my jewels after all. It makes just as
good a story either way. I can’t think why that never struck me before.
Here have I been kicking because you weren’t a real burglar, when it
doesn’t amount to a hill of beans whether you are or not. All I’ve got
to do is to rush out and yell and rouse the hotel, and they come in and
pinch you, and I give the story to the papers, and everything’s fine!”

Archie leaped from his chair.

“I say! What!”

“What’s on your mind?” enquired Miss Silverton, considerately. “Don’t
you think it’s a nifty scheme?”

“Nifty! My dear old soul! It’s frightful!”

“Can’t see what’s wrong with it,” grumbled Miss Silverton. “After I’ve
had someone get New York on the long-distance ’phone and give the story
to the papers you can explain, and they’ll let you out. Surely to
goodness you don’t object, as a personal favour to me, to spending an
hour or two in a cell? Why, probably they haven’t got a prison at all
out in these parts, and you’ll simply be locked in a room. A child of
ten could do it on his head,” said Miss Silverton. “A child of six,”
she emended.

“But, dash it—I mean—what I mean to say—I’m married!”

“Yes?” said Miss Silverton, with the politeness of faint interest.
“I’ve been married myself. I wouldn’t say it’s altogether a bad thing,
mind you, for those that like it, but a little of it goes a long way.
My first husband,” she proceeded, reminiscently, “was a travelling man.
I gave him a two-weeks’ try-out, and then I told him to go on
travelling. My second husband—now, _he_ wasn’t a gentleman in any sense
of the word. I remember once—”

“You don’t grasp the point. The jolly old point! You fail to grasp it.
If this bally thing comes out, my wife will be most frightfully sick!”

Miss Silverton regarded him with pained surprise.

“Do you mean to say you would let a little thing like that stand in the
way of my getting on the front page of all the papers—_with_
photographs? Where’s your chivalry?”

“Never mind my dashed chivalry!”

“Besides, what does it matter if she does get a little sore? She’ll
soon get over it. You can put that right. Buy her a box of candy. Not
that I’m strong for candy myself. What I always say is, it may taste
good, but look what it does to your hips! I give you my honest word
that, when I gave up eating candy, I lost eleven ounces the first week.
My second husband—no, I’m a liar, it was my third—my third husband
said—Say, what’s the big idea? Where are you going?”

“Out!” said Archie, firmly. “Bally out!”

A dangerous light flickered in Miss Silverton’s eyes.

“That’ll be all of that!” she said, raising the pistol. “You stay right
where you are, or I’ll fire!”

“Right-o!”

“I mean it!”

“My dear old soul,” said Archie, “in the recent unpleasantness in
France I had chappies popping off things like that at me all day and
every day for close on five years, and here I am, what! I mean to say,
if I’ve got to choose between staying here and being pinched in your
room by the local constabulary and having the dashed thing get into the
papers and all sorts of trouble happening, and my wife getting the wind
up and—I say, if I’ve got to choose—”

“Suck a lozenge and start again!” said Miss Silverton.

“Well, what I mean to say is, I’d much rather take a chance of getting
a bullet in the old bean than that. So loose it off and the best o’
luck!”

Miss Silverton lowered the pistol, sank into a chair, and burst into
tears.

“I think you’re the meanest man I ever met!” she sobbed. “You know
perfectly well the bang would send me into a fit!”

“In that case,” said Archie, relieved, “cheerio, good luck, pip-pip,
toodle-oo, and good-bye-ee! I’ll be shifting!”

“Yes, you will!” cried Miss Silverton, energetically, recovering with
amazing swiftness from her collapse. “Yes, you will, I by no means
suppose! You think, just because I’m no champion with a pistol, I’m
helpless. You wait! Percy!”

“My name is not Percy.”

“I never said it was. Percy! Percy, come to muzzer!”

There was a creaking rustle from behind the arm-chair. A heavy body
flopped on the carpet. Out into the room, heaving himself along as
though sleep had stiffened his joints, and breathing stertorously
through his tilted nose, moved the fine bulldog. Seen in the open, he
looked even more formidable than he had done in his basket.

“Guard him, Percy! Good dog, guard him! Oh, heavens! What’s the matter
with him?”

And with these words the emotional woman, uttering a wail of anguish,
flung herself on the floor beside the animal.

Percy was, indeed, in manifestly bad shape. He seemed quite unable to
drag his limbs across the room. There was a curious arch in his back,
and, as his mistress touched him, he cried out plaintively,

“Percy! Oh, what _is_ the matter with him? His nose is burning!”

Now was the time, with both sections of the enemy’s forces occupied,
for Archie to have departed softly from the room. But never, since the
day when at the age of eleven he had carried a large, damp, and muddy
terrier with a sore foot three miles and deposited him on the best sofa
in his mother’s drawing-room, had he been able to ignore the spectacle
of a dog in trouble.

“He does look bad, what!”

“He’s dying! Oh, he’s dying! Is it distemper? He’s never had
distemper.”

Archie regarded the sufferer with the grave eye of the expert. He shook
his head.

“It’s not that,” he said. “Dogs with distemper make a sort of snifting
noise.”

“But he _is_ making a snifting noise!”

“No, he’s making a snuffling noise. Great difference between snuffling
and snifting. Not the same thing at all. I mean to say, when they snift
they snift, and when they snuffle they—as it were—snuffle. That’s how
you can tell. If you ask _me_”—he passed his hand over the dog’s back.
Percy uttered another cry. “I know what’s the matter with him.”

“A brute of a man kicked him at rehearsal. Do you think he’s injured
internally?”

“It’s rheumatism,” said Archie. “Jolly old rheumatism. That’s all
that’s the trouble.”

“Are you sure?”

“Absolutely!”

“But what can I do?”

“Give him a good hot bath, and mind and dry him well. He’ll have a good
sleep then, and won’t have any pain. Then, first thing to-morrow, you
want to give him salicylate of soda.”

“I’ll never remember that.”—“I’ll write it down for you. You ought to
give him from ten to twenty grains three times a day in an ounce of
water. And rub him with any good embrocation.”

“And he won’t die?”

“Die! He’ll live to be as old as you are!-I mean to say—”

“I could kiss you!” said Miss Silverton, emotionally.

Archie backed hastily.

“No, no, absolutely not! Nothing like that required, really!”

“You’re a darling!”

“Yes. I mean no. No, no, really!”

“I don’t know what to say. What can I say?”

“Good night,” said Archie.

“I wish there was something I could do! If you hadn’t been here, I
should have gone off my head!”

A great idea flashed across Archie’s brain.

“Do you really want to do something?”

“Anything!”

“Then I do wish, like a dear sweet soul, you would pop straight back to
New York to-morrow and go on with those rehearsals.”

Miss Silverton shook her head.

“I can’t do that!”

“Oh, right-o! But it isn’t much to ask, what!”

“Not much to ask! I’ll never forgive that man for kicking Percy!”

“Now listen, dear old soul. You’ve got the story all wrong. As a matter
of fact, jolly old Benham told me himself that he has the greatest
esteem and respect for Percy, and wouldn’t have kicked him for the
world. And, you know it was more a sort of push than a kick. You might
almost call it a light shove. The fact is, it was beastly dark in the
theatre, and he was legging it sideways for some reason or other, no
doubt with the best motives, and unfortunately he happened to stub his
toe on the poor old bean.”

“Then why didn’t he say so?”

“As far as I could make out, you didn’t give him a chance.”

Miss Silverton wavered.

“I always hate going back after I’ve walked out on a show,” she said.
“It seems so weak!”

“Not a bit of it! They’ll give three hearty cheers and think you a
topper. Besides, you’ve got to go to New York in any case. To take
Percy to a vet., you know, what!”

“Of course. How right you always are!” Miss Silverton hesitated again.
“Would you really be glad if I went back to the show?”

“I’d go singing about the hotel! Great pal of mine, Benham. A
thoroughly cheery old bean, and very cut up about the whole affair.
Besides, think of all the coves thrown out of work—the thingummabobs
and the poor what-d’you-call-’ems!”

“Very well.”

“You’ll do it?”

“Yes.”

“I say, you really are one of the best! Absolutely like mother made!
That’s fine! Well, I think I’ll be saying good night.”

“Good night. And thank you so much!”

“Oh, no, rather not!”

Archie moved to the door.

“Oh, by the way.”

“Yes?”

“If I were you, I think I should catch the very first train you can get
to New York. You see—er—you ought to take Percy to the vet. as soon as
ever you can.”

“You really do think of everything,” said Miss Silverton.

“Yes,” said Archie, meditatively.




CHAPTER XIV.
THE SAD CASE OF LOONEY BIDDLE


Archie was a simple soul, and, as is the case with most simple souls,
gratitude came easily to him. He appreciated kind treatment. And when,
on the following day, Lucille returned to the Hermitage, all smiles and
affection, and made no further reference to Beauty’s Eyes and the flies
that got into them, he was conscious of a keen desire to show some
solid recognition of this magnanimity. Few wives, he was aware, could
have had the nobility and what not to refrain from occasionally turning
the conversation in the direction of the above-mentioned topics. It had
not needed this behaviour on her part to convince him that Lucille was
a topper and a corker and one of the very best, for he had been
cognisant of these facts since the first moment he had met her: but
what he did feel was that she deserved to be rewarded in no uncertain
manner. And it seemed a happy coincidence to him that her birthday
should be coming along in the next week or so. Surely, felt Archie, he
could whack up some sort of a not unjuicy gift for that
occasion—something pretty ripe that would make a substantial hit with
the dear girl. Surely something would come along to relieve his chronic
impecuniosity for just sufficient length of time to enable him to
spread himself on this great occasion.

And, as if in direct answer to prayer, an almost forgotten aunt in
England suddenly, out of an absolutely blue sky, shot no less a sum
than five hundred dollars across the ocean. The present was so lavish
and unexpected that Archie had the awed feeling of one who participates
in a miracle. He felt, like Herbert Parker, that the righteous was not
forsaken. It was the sort of thing that restored a fellow’s faith in
human nature. For nearly a week he went about in a happy trance: and
when, by thrift and enterprise—that is to say, by betting Reggie van
Tuyl that the New York Giants would win the opening game of the series
against the Pittsburg baseball team—he contrived to double his capital,
what it amounted to was simply that life had nothing more to offer. He
was actually in a position to go to a thousand dollars for Lucille’s
birthday present. He gathered in Mr. van Tuyl, of whose taste in these
matters he had a high opinion, and dragged him off to a jeweller’s on
Broadway.

The jeweller, a stout, comfortable man, leaned on the counter and
fingered lovingly the bracelet which he had lifted out of its nest of
blue plush. Archie, leaning on the other side of the counter, inspected
the bracelet searchingly, wishing that he knew more about these things;
for he had rather a sort of idea that the merchant was scheming to do
him in the eyeball. In a chair by his side, Reggie van Tuyl, half
asleep as usual, yawned despondently. He had permitted Archie to lug
him into this shop; and he wanted to buy something and go. Any form of
sustained concentration fatigued Reggie.

“Now this,” said the jeweller, “I could do at eight hundred and fifty
dollars.”

“Grab it!” murmured Mr. van Tuyl.

The jeweller eyed him approvingly, a man after his own heart; but
Archie looked doubtful. It was all very well for Reggie to tell him to
grab it in that careless way. Reggie was a dashed millionaire, and no
doubt bought bracelets by the pound or the gross or what not; but he
himself was in an entirely different position.

“Eight hundred and fifty dollars!” he said, hesitating.

“Worth it,” mumbled Reggie van Tuyl.

“More than worth it,” amended the jeweller. “I can assure you that it
is better value than you could get anywhere on Fifth Avenue.”

“Yes?” said Archie. He took the bracelet and twiddled it thoughtfully.
“Well, my dear old jeweller, one can’t say fairer than that, can one—or
two, as the case may be!” He frowned. “Oh, well, all right! But it’s
rummy that women are so fearfully keen on these little thingummies,
isn’t it? I mean to say, can’t see what they see in them. Stones, and
all that. Still, there it is, of course!”

“There,” said the jeweller, “as you say, it is, sir.”

“Yes, there it is!”

“Yes, there it is,” said the jeweller, “fortunately for people in my
line of business. Will you take it with you, sir?”

Archie reflected.

“No. No, not take it with me. The fact is, you know, my wife’s coming
back from the country to-night, and it’s her birthday to-morrow, and
the thing’s for her, and, if it was popping about the place to-night,
she might see it, and it would sort of spoil the surprise. I mean to
say, she doesn’t know I’m giving it her, and all that!”

“Besides,” said Reggie, achieving a certain animation now that the
tedious business interview was concluded, “going to the ball-game this
afternoon—might get pocket picked—yes, better have it sent.”

“Where shall I send it, sir?”

“Eh? Oh, shoot it along to Mrs. Archibald Moffam, at the Cosmopolis.
Not to-day, you know. Buzz it in first thing to-morrow.”

Having completed the satisfactory deal, the jeweller threw off the
business manner and became chatty.

“So you are going to the ball-game? It should be an interesting
contest.”

Reggie van Tuyl, now—by his own standards—completely awake, took
exception to this remark.

“Not a bit of it!” he said, decidedly. “No contest! Can’t call it a
contest! Walkover for the Pirates!”

Archie was stung to the quick. There is that about baseball which
arouses enthusiasm and the partisan spirit in the unlikeliest bosoms.
It is almost impossible for a man to live in America and not become
gripped by the game; and Archie had long been one of its warmest
adherents. He was a whole-hearted supporter of the Giants, and his only
grievance against Reggie, in other respects an estimable young man, was
that the latter, whose money had been inherited from steel-mills in
that city, had an absurd regard for the Pirates of Pittsburg.

“What absolute bally rot!” he exclaimed. “Look what the Giants did to
them yesterday!”

“Yesterday isn’t to-day,” said Reggie.

“No, it’ll be a jolly sight worse,” said Archie. “Looney Biddle’ll be
pitching for the Giants to-day.”

“That’s just what I mean. The Pirates have got him rattled. Look what
happened last time.”

Archie understood, and his generous nature chafed at the innuendo.
Looney Biddle—so-called by an affectionately admiring public as the
result of certain marked eccentricities—was beyond dispute the greatest
left-handed pitcher New York had possessed in the last decade. But
there was one blot on Mr. Biddle’s otherwise stainless scutcheon. Five
weeks before, on the occasion of the Giants’ invasion of Pittsburg, he
had gone mysteriously to pieces. Few native-born partisans, brought up
to baseball from the cradle, had been plunged into a profounder gloom
on that occasion than Archie; but his soul revolted at the thought that
that sort of thing could ever happen again.

“I’m not saying,” continued Reggie, “that Biddle isn’t a very fair
pitcher, but it’s cruel to send him against the Pirates, and somebody
ought to stop it. His best friends should interfere. Once a team gets a
pitcher rattled, he’s never any good against them again. He loses his
nerve.”

The jeweller nodded approval of this sentiment.

“They never come back,” he said, sententiously.

The fighting blood of the Moffams was now thoroughly stirred. Archie
eyed his friend sternly. Reggie was a good chap—in many respects an
extremely sound egg—but he must not be allowed to talk rot of this
description about the greatest left-handed pitcher of the age.

“It seems to me, old companion,” he said, “that a small bet is
indicated at this juncture. How about it?”

“Don’t want to take your money.”

“You won’t have to! In the cool twilight of the merry old summer
evening I, friend of my youth and companion of my riper years, shall be
trousering yours.”

Reggie yawned. The day was very hot, and this argument was making him
feel sleepy again.

“Well, just as you like, of course. Double or quits on yesterday’s bet,
if that suits you.”

For a moment Archie hesitated. Firm as his faith was in Mr. Biddle’s
stout left arm, he had not intended to do the thing on quite this
scale. That thousand dollars of his was earmarked for Lucille’s
birthday present, and he doubted whether he ought to risk it. Then the
thought that the honour of New York was in his hands decided him.
Besides, the risk was negligible. Betting on Looney Biddle was like
betting on the probable rise of the sun in the east. The thing began to
seem to Archie a rather unusually sound and conservative investment. He
remembered that the jeweller, until he drew him firmly but kindly to
earth and urged him to curb his exuberance and talk business on a
reasonable plane, had started brandishing bracelets that cost about two
thousand. There would be time to pop in at the shop this evening after
the game and change the one he had selected for one of those. Nothing
was too good for Lucille on her birthday.

“Right-o!” he said. “Make it so, old friend!”

Archie walked back to the Cosmopolis. No misgivings came to mar his
perfect contentment. He felt no qualms about separating Reggie from
another thousand dollars. Except for a little small change in the
possession of the Messrs. Rockefeller and Vincent Astor, Reggie had all
the money in the world and could afford to lose. He hummed a gay air as
he entered the lobby and crossed to the cigar-stand to buy a few
cigarettes to see him through the afternoon.

The girl behind the cigar counter welcomed him with a bright smile.
Archie was popular with all the employés of the Cosmopolis.

“’S a great day, Mr. Moffam!”

“One of the brightest and best,” agreed Archie. “Could you dig me out
two, or possibly three, cigarettes of the usual description? I shall
want something to smoke at the ball-game.”

“You going to the ball-game?”

“Rather! Wouldn’t miss it for a fortune.”

“No?”

“Absolutely no! Not with jolly old Biddle pitching.”

The cigar-stand girl laughed amusedly.

“Is he pitching this afternoon? Say, that feller’s a nut? D’you know
him?”

“Know him? Well, I’ve seen him pitch and so forth.”

“I’ve got a girl friend who’s engaged to him!”

Archie looked at her with positive respect. It would have been more
dramatic, of course, if she had been engaged to the great man herself,
but still the mere fact that she had a girl friend in that astounding
position gave her a sort of halo.

“No, really!” he said. “I say, by Jove, really! Fancy that!”

“Yes, she’s engaged to him all right. Been engaged close on a coupla
months now.”

“I say! That’s frightfully interesting! Fearfully interesting, really!”

“It’s funny about that guy,” said the cigar-stand girl. “He’s a nut!
The fellow who said there’s plenty of room at the top must have been
thinking of Gus Biddle’s head! He’s crazy about m’ girl friend, y’
know, and, whenever they have a fuss, it seems like he sort of flies
right off the handle.”

“Goes in off the deep end, eh?”

“Yes, _sir!_ Loses what little sense he’s got. Why, the last time him
and m’ girl friend got to scrapping was when he was going on to
Pittsburg to play, about a month ago. He’d been out with her the day he
left for there, and he had a grouch or something, and he started making
low, sneaky cracks about her Uncle Sigsbee. Well, m’ girl friend’s got
a nice disposition, but she c’n get mad, and she just left him flat and
told him all was over. And he went off to Pittsburg, and, when he
started in to pitch the opening game, he just couldn’t keep his mind on
his job, and look what them assassins done to him! Five runs in the
first innings! Yessir, he’s a nut all right!”

Archie was deeply concerned. So this was the explanation of that
mysterious disaster, that weird tragedy which had puzzled the sporting
press from coast to coast.

“Good God! Is he often taken like that?”

“Oh, he’s all right when he hasn’t had a fuss with m’ girl friend,”
said the cigar-stand girl, indifferently. Her interest in baseball was
tepid. Women are too often like this—mere butterflies, with no concern
for the deeper side of life.

“Yes, but I say! What I mean to say, you know! Are they pretty pally
now? The good old Dove of Peace flapping its little wings fairly
briskly and all that?”

“Oh, I guess everything’s nice and smooth just now. I seen m’ girl
friend yesterday, and Gus was taking her to the movies last night, so I
guess everything’s nice and smooth.”

Archie breathed a sigh of relief.

“Took her to the movies, did he? Stout fellow!”

“I was at the funniest picture last week,” said the cigar-stand girl.
“Honest, it was a scream! It was like this—”

Archie listened politely; then went in to get a bite of lunch. His
equanimity, shaken by the discovery of the rift in the peerless one’s
armour, was restored. Good old Biddle had taken the girl to the movies
last night. Probably he had squeezed her hand a goodish bit in the
dark. With what result? Why, the fellow would be feeling like one of
those chappies who used to joust for the smiles of females in the
Middle Ages. What he meant to say, presumably the girl would be at the
game this afternoon, whooping him on, and good old Biddle would be so
full of beans and buck that there would be no holding him.

Encouraged by these thoughts, Archie lunched with an untroubled mind.
Luncheon concluded, he proceeded to the lobby to buy back his hat and
stick from the boy brigand with whom he had left them. It was while he
was conducting this financial operation that he observed that at the
cigar-stand, which adjoined the coat-and-hat alcove, his friend behind
the counter had become engaged in conversation with another girl.

This was a determined looking young woman in a blue dress and a large
hat of a bold and flowery species. Archie happening to attract her
attention, she gave him a glance out of a pair of fine brown eyes,
then, as if she did not think much of him, turned to her companion and
resumed their conversation—which, being of an essentially private and
intimate nature, she conducted, after the manner of her kind, in a
ringing soprano which penetrated into every corner of the lobby.
Archie, waiting while the brigand reluctantly made change for a dollar
bill, was privileged to hear every word.

“Right from the start I seen he was in a ugly mood. _You_ know how he
gets, dearie! Chewing his upper lip and looking at you as if you were
so much dirt beneath his feet! How was _I_ to know he’d lost fifteen
dollars fifty-five playing poker, and anyway, I don’t see where he gets
a licence to work off his grouches on me. And I told him so. I

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