I
A most estimable young man was Muggles: a clean-shaven, spick-and-span,
well-mannered young man--particular as to the brushing of his hat, the
tying of his scarf and the cut of his clothes; more than particular as
to their puttings-on and puttings-off--sack-coat and derby for
mornings; top hat and frock for afternoons; bobtail and black tie for
stags, and full regalia of white choker, white waistcoat and
swallowtail for smart dinners and the opera.
He knew, too, all the little niceties of social life--which arm to give
to his hostess in escorting her out to dinner; on which side of a
hansom to place a lady; the proper hours for calling; the correct thing
in canes, umbrellas, stick-pins and cigar-cases; the way to balance a
cup of afternoon tea on one knee while he toyed with a lettuce sandwich
teetering on the other--all the delicate observances so vital to the
initiated and so unimportant to the untutored and ignorant. Then
Muggles was a kind and considerate young man--extremely kind and
intrusively considerate; always interesting himself in everybody's
affairs and taking no end of trouble to straighten them out whether
importuned or not--and he seldom was.
This idiosyncrasy had gained for him during his college days the title
of "Mixey." This in succeeding years had been merged into "Muddles" and
finally to "Muggles," as being more euphonious and less insulting. Of
late among his intimates he had been known as "The Goat," due to his
constant habit of butting in at any and all times, a sobriquet which
clings to him to this day.
His real name--the one he inherited from his progenitors and now borne
by his family--was one that stood high in the fashionable world: a
family that answered to the more dignified and aristocratic patronymic
of Maxwell--a name dating back to the time of Cromwell, with direct
lineage from the Earl of Clanworthy--john, Duke of Essex, Lord
Beverston--that sort of lineage. No one of the later Maxwells, it is
true, had ever been able to fill the gap of a hundred years or more
between the Clanworthys and the Maxwells, but a little thing like that
never made any difference to Muggles or his immediate connections. Was
not the family note-paper emblazoned with the counterfeit presentment
of a Stork Rampant caught by the legs and flopping its wings over a
flattened fish-basket; and did not Muggles's cigarette-case,
cuff-buttons and seal ring bear a similar design? And the wooden mantel
in the great locked library, and which was opened and dusted twice a
year--the books, not the mantel--did it not support a life-sized
portrait of the family bird done in wood, with three diminutive
storklets clamoring to be fed, their open mouths out-thrust between
their mother's breast and the top edge of the fish-basket, enwreathed
by a more than graceful ribbon bearing the inscription, "We feed the
hungry"--or words to that effect?
None of these evidences of wealth and ancestry, it must be said, ever
impressed the group of scoffers gathered about the wood fire of the
"Ivy" in his college days, or about the smart tables at the "Magnolia
Club" in his post-graduate life. To them he was still "Mixey," or
"Muddles," or "Muggles," or "The Goat," depending entirely upon the
peculiar circumstances connected with the mixing up or the butting in.
To his credit be it said the descendant of earls and high-daddies never
lost his temper at these onslaughts. If Bender, or Podvine, or little
Billy Salters pitched into him for some act of stupidity--due entirely
to his misguided efforts to serve some mutual friend--Muggles would
argue, defend and protest, but the discussion would always end with a
laugh and his signing the waiter's check and ordering another one for
everybody.
"Why the devil, Muggles, did you insist last night on that Boston
girl's riding home from the theatre in the omnibus, you goat?"
thundered Podvine one morning at the club, "instead of letting her--"
"My dear fellow," protested Muggles, "it was much more comfortable in
the omnibus, and--"
"--And broke up her walk home with Bobby, you idiot! He had to take the
owl train home, and she won't see him for a month. Didn't you know they
were engaged?"
"No--"
"Of course you didn't, Muggles, but you could have seen it in her face
if you'd looked. You always put your foot in it clean up to your pants'
pocket!"
"You've been at it again, have you, Muggles?" burst out Bender that
same night "Listen to the Goat's last, boys. Jerry wanted to buy that
swamp meadow next his place on Long Island and had been dickering with
the old fellow who owns it all winter, telling him it would be a good
place to raise cranberries if it was dug out and drained, and they had
almost agreed on the price--about twice what it was worth--when down
goes Muggles to spend the night and Jerry blabs it all out, and just
why he wanted it, and the next morning Muggles, to clinch the deal and
help Jerry, slips over to the hayseed and tells him how the Sunnybrook
Club are going to buy Jerry's place, and how they wanted the swamp for
a hatchery--all true--and that the hayseed oughtn't to wait a moment,
but send word by HIM that the deal was closed, because the club-house
being near by would make all the rest of his land twice as valuable;
and the old Skeezicks winked his eye and shifted his tobacco and said
he'd think about it, and now you can't buy that sink-hole for twenty
times what it's worth, and the Sunnybrook is looking for another site
nearer Woodvale. Regular clown you are, Muggles. Exactly like that
fellow at the circus who holds up one end of the tent and then, before
the supes can reach it, drops it for the other end."
When the results of this last well-intentioned effort with its
disastrous consequences became clear to the Goat, that spotless
gentleman leaned back in his chair, threw hick his shoulders, shot out
his cuffs, readjusted his scarfpin and replied in an offended tone:
"All owing, my dear fellow, to the stupidity of the agricultural class.
I told the farmer he would regret it, and he will. As for myself, I was
awfully disappointed. I had planned to run all the way back to Jerry's
and tell him the good news before he went to sleep that night, and--"
"Disappointed, were you? How do you think Jerry felt? Made a lot of
difference to him, I tell you, not selling his place to the club. Been
a whole year working it up. It's smothered now under a blanket--about
ninety per cent of its value--and the Sunnybrook scheme would have
pulled him out with a margin! Now it's deader than last year's shad.
What the club wanted was a hatchery built over a spring, and that's why
that swamp was necessary to the deal. Oh, you're the limit, Muggles!"
It was while smarting under these criticisms that the steward one
morning in June brought him his letters. One was from Monteith--Class
of '9l--a senior when Muggles was a freshman--and was postmarked
"Wabacog, Canada," where Monteith owned a lumber mill--and where he ran
it himself and everything connected with it from stumpage to scantling.
"There is a broad stream that runs into the lake, ... and above the
mill there are bass weighing ten pounds, ... and back in the primeval
forest bears, ... and now and then a moose--" So ran the letter.
Muggles had spread it wide open by this time and was reading it
aloud--everybody knowing Monteith--and the group never having any
secrets of this kind from each other.
"Come up, old chap," the letter continued, "and stay a week--two, if
you can work it--and bring Bender, and little Billy and Poddy, and
three or four more. The bungalow holds ten. Wire when--I'm now putting
things on ice."
Muggles looked around the circle and sent interrogatory Marconigrams
with his eyebrows. In response Podvine said he'd go, and so did Billy
Salters. Bender thought he could come a day or two later--the earning
of their daily bread was not an absorbing task with these young
gentlemen--their fathers had done that years before.
Muggles ran over in his mind the list of his engagements: he was due at
Gravesend on the tenth for a week, to play golf; at his aunt's
country-seat in Westchester on the eleventh for the same length of
time, and on the twelfth he was expected to meet a yacht at Cold Spring
Harbor for a cruise up the coast. He had accepted these invitations and
had fully intended to keep each and every one. Monteith's letter,
however, seemed to come at a time when he really needed a more virile
and bracing life than was offered by the others. Here was a chance to
redeem his reputation. Lumber camps meant big men doing big
things--things reeking with danger, such as falling trees, forest fires
and log jams. There might also be hair-breadth escapes in the hunting
of big game and the tramping of the vast wilderness. This dressing
three times a day and spending the intermediate hours hitting wooden
balls, or lounging in a straw chair under a deck awning, had become
tiresome. What he needed was to get down to Nature and hug the sod, and
if there wasn't any sod then he would grapple with whatever took its
place.
Muggles dropped his legs to the floor, straightened his back, beckoned
to a servant, motioned for a telegraph blank--exertion is tabooed at
the Magnolia--untelescoped a gold pencil hooked to his watch-chain and
wrote as follows:
"Thanks. Coming Tuesday."