RELATING TO AN ODD RELATION
Now, Mr. Joseph Hooper had excellent cause for being a sour old man,
and in a measure was to be pitied because of his attitude toward the
young of his species. He had not been well-used by his own children,
although it is no more than right to explain that they were hardly what
any one save a parent would call children when they turned against him.
At that particular period in the history of the Hooper family, the
youngest of Joseph's three children was seventeen, the oldest
twenty-two--and it so happens that the crisis came just fifteen years
prior to the opening scene in this tale. It did not actually come on
Christmas Eve, but, as a matter of record, on the 2lst of December at
about half-past three in the afternoon. At that precise instant a judge
sitting on the bench in one of the courtrooms in New York City signed
the decree divorcing Mrs. Joseph Hooper from her husband, and four
minutes later the lady walked out of the building with her son and two
daughters, all of them having deliberately turned their backs upon the
miserable defendant in the case. As all of the children were of an age
to legally choose the parent with whom they preferred to live, and as
they elected to cast off the paternal for the maternal, it readily may
be seen that Mr. Hooper was not entirely without proof that this is a
cruel, heartless, ungrateful world and filled with gall.
As a matter of fact, he had not been wholly to blame for the family
crash, notwithstanding a rather loose respect on his part for the
sanctity of the home. (It was not to be denied that he had strayed into
crooked paths and devious ways--and, to do him justice, he did not
attempt to deny it: he ventured only to EXPLAIN it.) According to his
version of the affair, the trouble began long before he took to wine
and women. It began with his wife's propensity for nagging. Being a
high-spirited, intelligent person with a mind of his own, Mr. Hooper
didn't like being nagged, and as he rather harshly attempted to put a
stop to it just as soon as it dawned upon him that he was being
hen-pecked, his wife, not to be outdone, went at it harder than ever.
And that is how it all began, and that is why I say that he was not
wholly to blame. She was very pretty and very peevish, and they lived a
cat and dog life for ten years after the birth of the last child.
Mr. Hooper took to drink and then took to staying away from home for
days at a time. It was at this stage of the affair that the children
began to see him through their mother's eyes. Certain disclosures were
inevitable. In a word, Mrs. Hooper hired detectives, and finding
herself in a splendid position to secure all she wanted in the way of
alimony, heralded Mr. Hooper's shortcomings to the world. The only good
that ever came out of the unfortunate transaction, so far as Mr. Hooper
was concerned, was to be found in the blessed realisation that she had
actually deprived herself of the right to nag him, and that was
something he knew would prove to be a constant source of irritation to
her.
But when his children turned against him, he faltered. He had not
counted on that. They not only went off to live with their mother, but
they virtually wiped him out of their lives, quite as if he had passed
away and no longer existed in the flesh. The three of them stood by the
mother--as they should have done, we submit, considering Mr. Hooper's
habits--and shuddered quite as profoundly as she when the name of the
erring parent was mentioned in their presence. Mr. Hooper couldn't for
the life of him understand this treachery on the part of his pampered
offspring, on whom he had lavished everything and to whom he had denied
nothing in the way of luxury. It was hard for him to realise that he
was as much of a scamp and scapegrace in their young eyes as he was in
the eyes of his wife--and the whole of his wife's family, even to the
remotest of cousins.
In the bright days of their early married life, before he knew the
difference between what he looked upon as affectionate teasing and what
he afterwards came to know as persistent nagging, he deeded over to her
the house and lot in Madison Avenue. He did that willingly, cheerfully.
Two days after the divorce was granted, he paid over to her one hundred
thousand dollars alimony. He did that unwillingly, gloomily. And the
very next week the stock market went the wrong way for him, and he was
cleaned out. He hadn't a dollar left of the comfortable little fortune
that had been his. He remained drunk for nearly two months, and when he
sobered up in a sanitarium--and took the pledge for the first and last
time--he came out of the haze and found that he hadn't a friend left in
New York. Every man's head was turned away from him, every man's hand
was against him.
He sent for his son to come to the cheap hotel in which he was living.
The son sent back word that he never wanted to see his face again.
Whereupon Joseph Hooper for the first time declared that the sons and
daughters of men are curses, and slunk out of New York to say it aloud
in the broad, free stretches of the world across which he drifted
without aim or purpose for years and years and always farther away from
the home he had lost.
He always said to himself--but never so much as a word of it to any one
else--that if his wife hadn't driven him to distraction with her
nagging he would have avoided the happy though disastrous pitfalls into
which he stumbled in his desperate efforts to find appreciation. He
would have remained an honourable, faithful spouse to her, and an
abstainer--as such things go. He would have shared with her the love
and respect of their three children, and he would have staved off
bankruptcy with the very hundred thousand dollars that she exacted as
spite money. But she was a nagger, and he was no Job. There was a
modicum of joy in the heart of him, however: having been cleaned out to
the last penny, he was in no position to come up monthly with the
thousand dollars charged against him by the court for the support and
maintenance of two of his children until they reached their majority.
He took a savage delight in contemplating the rage of his late wife
when she realised that the children would have to be provided for out
of the income from the one hundred thousand she had received in a lump
sum, and he even thanked God that she was without means beyond this
hateful amount. It tickled him to think of her anguish in not being
able to spend the income from her alimony on furs and feathers with
which to bedeck herself. Instead of spending the five thousand on
herself she would be obliged to put it on the backs and into the
stomachs of her three brats! He chuckled vastly over this bit of good
fortune! It was really a splendid joke on her, this smash of his. No
doubt the children also hated him the more because of his failure to
remain on his feet down in Wall Street, but he consoled himself with
the thought that they would sometimes long for the old days when father
did the providing, and wish that things hadn't turned out so badly.
In his hour of disgrace--and we may add degeneration--he possessed but
one blood relation who stood by him and pitied him in spite of his
faults. That was his nephew, Tom Bingle, the son of his only sister,
many years dead. But even so, he did not deceive himself in respect to
the young man's attitude toward him. He realised that Tom was kind to
him simply because it was his nature to be kind to every one, no matter
how unworthy. It wasn't in Tom Bingle to be mean, not even to his worst
enemy. Notwithstanding the fact that the young man had just taken unto
himself a wife, and was as poor as a church-mouse, the door and the
cupboard in his modest little flat were opened cheerfully to the
delinquent Uncle Joe, and be it said to the latter's discredit and
shame--he proceeded to impose upon the generosity of his nephew in a
manner that should have earned him a booting into the street. But young
Tom was patient, he was mild, he even seemed to enjoy being put upon by
the wretched bankrupt. The thing that touched his heart most of all and
caused him to overlook a great many shortcomings, was the cruel,
unfilial slap in the face that had been administered by the three
children of the man, and the crushing, bewildering effect it had upon
him.
It was Tom who virtually picked the once fastidious Joseph Hooper out
of the gutter, weeks after the smash, and took him under his puny wing,
so to speak, during a somewhat protracted period of regeneration. The
broken, shattered man became, for the time being, the Bingle burden,
and he was not by any means a light or pleasant one. For months old
Joseph ate of his nephew's food, drained his purse, abused his
generosity, ignored his comforts and almost succeeded in driving the
young but devoted wife back to the home from which Tom had married her.
It was at this juncture that the mild-mannered bookkeeper arose to the
dignity of a fine rage, and co-incidentally Joseph Hooper for the first
time realised what an overbearing, disagreeable visitor he had been and
departed, but without the slightest ill-feeling toward his benefactors.
Indeed, he was deeply repentant, deeply apologetic. He ruefully
announced that it would never be in his power to repay them for all
they had done for him, but, resorting to a sudden whim, declared that
he would make them his heirs if they didn't mind being used as a means
to convey his final word of defiance to the children who had cast him
off. Not that he would ever have a dollar to leave to them, but for the
satisfaction it would give him to cut the traitors off with the
proverbial shilling. Beset with the notion that this was an ideal way
to show his contempt for his offspring, he went to the safety deposit
vault and took there from the worthless document known as his last will
and testament and in the presence of witnesses destroyed the thing,
thereby disinheriting the erstwhile wife and her children as
effectually as if he had really possessed the estate set forth in the
instrument.
"I'll make a will in your favour, Tom," he said at the time, with a
mocking grin, "and in it I will include this miserable carcass of mine,
so that you may at least have something to sell to the doctors. And who
knows? I may scrape together a few hundred dollars before I die,
provided I don't die too soon."
"We will give you a decent burial, Uncle Joe," said Thomas Bingle,
revolting against the specific. "Do you suppose I would sell my uncle
to a--"
"Haven't you a ray of humour in that head of yours?" demanded his
uncle. "Can't you SEE a joke?"
"Well, if you were joking," said Bingle, relieved, "all well and good,
but it didn't sound that way."
"You are a simple soul," was all that Joseph said, and then borrowed
fifty dollars from his nephew for a fresh start in the world, as he
expressed it. With this slender fortune in his purse he set out into a
world that knew him not, nor was it known to him.
He came back fifteen years afterward, poorer than when he went away,
broken in health, old to the point of decrepitude, bedraggled, unkempt
and prideless. And once more Thomas Bingle took him in and provided the
prospective death-bed for him. They made the old derelict as
comfortable as it was in their power to do, and sacrificed not a little
in order that he might have some of the comforts of life.
He was a very humble, meek old man, and they pitied him. Screwing up
his courage, Mr. Bingle went one day to the home of the son of Joseph
Hooper and boldly suggested that, inasmuch as the mother was no longer
living, it would not be amiss for him and his sisters to take the
father who created them back into the family circle once more, and to
ease his declining years. Mr. Bingle was ordered out of the rich man's
office. Then he approached the two daughters, both of whom had married
well, and met with an even more painful reception. They not only
refused to recognise their father but declined to recognise their
father's nephew.
A few days afterward, a lawyer came to the bank to see Mr. Bingle. He
informed the bookkeeper that the Hooper family had been thinking
matters over and were prepared to pay him the sum of seventy-five
dollars a month for the care of Joseph Hooper, or, in other words, they
would contribute twenty-five dollars apiece toward sustaining the life
of one who was already dead to them. Moreover, they stood ready to pay
the expenses of his funeral when actual dissolution occurred, but
farther than that they could not be expected to go.
Mr. Bingle flared up--a most unusual thing for him to do. "You tell
them that I will take care of Uncle Joe as long as he lives without a
nickel from them and that I'll bury him when he dies."
"Out of your own pocket?" exclaimed the lawyer, who knew something of
bookkeepers' salaries.
"Most certainly not out of anybody else's," said Mr. Bingle, with
dignity. "And you can also tell them that they are a pack of blamed
good-for-nothings," he added, with absolutely no dignity.
"My dear sir."
"Be sure to tell 'em, will you? If I was a swearing man I'd do better
than that but I guess it will do for a starter."
"My clients will insist upon re-imbursing you for--" began the lawyer
stiffly, but Mr. Bingle snapped his fingers disdainfully, much nearer
the gentleman's nose than he intended, no doubt, and with a perfectly
astonishing result. The legal representative's hat fell off backwards
and he actually trod upon it in his haste to give way before the irate
little bookkeeper.
"You tell 'em just what I said, that's all you've got to do," said Mr.
Bingle, and then picked up his visitor's hat and pushed the crown into
shape with a vicious dig. "Here's your hat. Good day."
He was so boiling mad all the rest of the afternoon that he could not
see the figures clearly, and made countless mistakes, necessitating an
extra two hours' work on the books before he could even think of going
home.
Arriving at the apartment, he found his wife in a state of
perturbation, not over his tardiness, but over the extraordinary
behaviour of Uncle Joe. The old man had been out most of the day and
had come in at five, growling and cursing with more than ordinary
vehemence.
"He is in his bedroom, Tom, and I don't know what to make of him. He
has had bad news, I think."
"Bad news?" cried Mr. Single. "The very worst news on earth wouldn't
seem bad to Uncle Joe after all he has gone through. I'll go in and see
him."
"Be careful, dear! I--I--he may be insane. You never can tell what--"
It turned out that the old man had visited his three children during
the day, going to each of them as a suppliant and in deep humility.
After fifteen years, he broke his resolve and went to them with his
only appeal. He wanted to die with his children about him. That was
all. He did not ask them to love him, or forgive him. He only asked
them to call him father and to let him spend the last weeks of his life
within the sound of their voices.
Sitting at the supper table, he grimly related his experiences to the
distressed Bingles.
"I went first to Angela's, Tom," he said, scowling at the centre-piece.
"Angela married that Mortimer fellow in Sixty-first Street, you
know--Clarence Mortimer's son. Ever seen their home? Well, the butler
told me to go around to the rear entrance. I gave him my card and told
him to take it up to MY DAUGHTER. I had a fellow in a drug-store write
my name neatly on some blank cards, Mary. The butler threatened to call
the police. He thought I was crazy. But just then old Clarence Mortimer
came up the steps. It seems that he is living with his son, having lost
all of his money a few years ago. He recognised me at once, and I knew
by the way he shook hands with me that he has been leading a dog's life
ever since he went broke. He said he'd speak to Angela--and he did. I
waited in the hall downstairs. Old Clarence didn't have the courage to
come back himself. A footman brought down word that Mrs. Mortimer could
not see Mr. Hooper. She was not at home to Mr. Hooper, and--never would
be. That was what her servant was obliged to tell me. So I went away.
Then I tried Elizabeth. She lives in one of those fifteen thousand
dollar a year apartments on Park Avenue. She has three lovely children.
They are my grand-children, you know, Tom. I saw them in the automobile
as I came out of the building and went my way after Elizabeth Bransone
had told me to my face--I managed to get in to see her--had told me
that I was a sight, a disgrace, that she couldn't bear to look at me,
and that I had better clear out before her husband came in. My own
daughter, Tom, my own flesh and blood. She informed me that provision
would be made for me, but she made it very plain--damnably plain--that
I was never to bother her again. So I went away from Elizabeth's. There
was only one of 'em left, and I hated to tackle him worse than either
of the girls. But I did. I went down to his office. He refused to see
me at first, but evidently thought it best to get the thing out of his
system forever, so he changed his mind and told the office boy to let
me in. Well, my son Geoffrey is a very important person now. He married
a Maybrick, you know, and he is a partner in old Maybrick's
firm--steamship agents. Geoffrey looked me over. He did it very
thoroughly. I told him I'd come to see if he couldn't do something
toward helping me to die a respectable, you might say comfortable
death. He cut me off short. Said he would give me a thousand dollars to
leave New York and stay away forever. I---"
"I trust you did not accept the money," cried Mr. Bingle in a shocked
voice.
"I'm pretty well down and out, Tom, but I'd sooner starve than to take
money from him in that way. So I told my son to go to the devil."
"Good for you!" cried Mr. Bingle. "And then what?"
"He is a humorous individual, that pompous son of mine," said old
Joseph, with a chuckle. "He said I ought to be ashamed of myself for
advising my own son to go to the devil in view of what a similar
excursion had done for me. I managed to subdue my temper--it's a bad
one, as you know--and put the matter up to him in plain terms. 'I am
your father, Geoffrey, when all is said and done. Are you going to kick
me out into the world when I've got no more than a month or two to
live? Are you going to allow my body to lie in the Potter's field? Are
you willing to allow this poor nephew of mine to take care of me, to
assume the responsibility of seeing that I get a decent burial in a
decent---'"
"Oh, Uncle Joe, you oughtn't even to think of such things," broke in
his niece by marriage. "You MUST think of cheerful---"
"You are good for years and years---" began Mr. Bingle.
"Don't interrupt me," said Uncle Joe irascibly. "I guess I know what
I'm talking about. I'm good for a couple of months at the outside. I'm
seventy years old and I feel two hundred. Why, dammit, old Clarence
Mortimer said I LOOK a hundred. To make the story short, Geoffrey said
he had arranged to pay you for my keep, no matter how long I lasted,
but he thought I was foolish not to take the thousand and go to some
quiet little place in the country--and wait. If--if it should happen
that I lived longer than the thousand would carry me, he'd see to it
that I had more. Only he didn't want me hanging around New York. That
was the point, d'you see? He very frankly said that he had always sided
with his mother against me, and that was all there was to it, so far as
he was concerned. And, see here, Tom, he said you had been down to see
him about me. Is that true?"
"Well, I--I thought perhaps--er--I might be able to bring about a
reconciliation," floundered Mr. Bingle.
"And you found that in the upper circles it is not considered good form
to be reconciled unless it pays, eh? What would be the sense in
becoming reconciled to a wreck of a father, who hasn't a dollar in the
world, after getting along so nicely for fifteen years without him? No,
it isn't done, Tom--it's not the thing. Geoffrey made no bones about
admitting that as far as he is concerned, I have been dead for fifteen
years. He---"
"Well then," said Mr. Bingle, slamming his fist upon the dining-table
so violently that the cutlery bounced, "why the dickens does he object
to burying you? If I discovered a relative that had been dead for
fifteen years, I'd see to it that he was buried, if only for the good
of the community."
"He doesn't object to burying me," explained Uncle Joe. "He implies
that he'll do that much for me with pleasure. As a matter of fact, he
said that if I'd arrange to have some one notify him when I was
literally dead, he would see to it that I was buried. But I told him he
needn't bother his head about it, because I was quite sure you would do
it even more cheerfully than he and undoubtedly with less secrecy."
"Cheerfully?" gasped the Bingles.
"Cheerfully," repeated Uncle Joe firmly. "And now, can't we talk about
something else? I've done my best to make peace with my son and
daughters, and now I wash my hands of 'em. I never intended to weaken
in my resolve, but I--I just couldn't help it, Tom. I swore I'd never
look into their faces again, but, after all, I AM their father, you
see, and I suppose I'm getting weak and childish in my old age. I gave
in, that's all. I thought they might have some little feeling for me,
and--" He did not finish the sentence, and as the Bingles took that
instant to blow their noses and to look so intently at the electric
chandelier that their eyes smarted, it was perhaps just as well that he
ended his ruminations when he did.
All this happened six weeks prior to Christmas Eve, and they were six
long, trying weeks for the two Bingles. The old man was sick two-thirds
of the time and had to have a physician. He insisted on having the now
famous Dr. Fiddler, one of the most expensive practitioners in New
York, obstinately refusing to listen to reason. Fiddler had been the
Hooper family physician years ago and that was all there was to be
said. He WOULD have him. So poor Tom Bingle sent for the great man, who
came and prescribed for his old friend and client. After a week the
Bingles began to count the number of visits, and grew lean and
gaunt-faced over the prospect ahead of them. Fiddler's fee was ten
dollars a visit--to a friend, he explained, in accounting for the
ridiculously low figure--and he came twice a day for nearly two weeks.
The Bingles did not complain. As Mr. Bingle said, they took their
medicine, even as Uncle Joe took his--only he thrived on it and they
withered. Dr. Fiddler was very nice about it, however. He assured Mr.
Bingle that he was in no hurry for his money. Any time before the first
of February would be perfectly satisfactory. He was only too glad to
have been instrumental in dragging his old friend, Joseph Hooper from
the very edge of the grave.
"And if he has a recurrence of the--" he began suavely.
"There's no danger of THAT, is there, Doctor? cried Mr. Bingle,
gripping his fingers tightly in his coat pockets.
"Don't hesitate a moment, Mr. Bingle. Send for me. You may depend upon
it, I will come on the instant. I think your poor uncle has been very
badly--er--treated, Mr. Bingle."
"Do you attend the families of his son and daughters--I mean to say, as
their regular--"
"No," said Dr. Fiddler shortly, "I have not that felicity, Mr. Bingle."
And Mr. Bingle thought he understood why Dr. Fiddler felt that Uncle
Joe had been badly treated.
Later on, Uncle Joe blandly asseverated that it pays to have the best,
no matter what it costs. "Why, one of these cheap, rattle-brained
doctors would have let me die, sure as fate. Old Fiddler comes high,
but he cures. If I should happen to get sick again, Tom, send for him
without delay, will you?"
Mr. Bingle said he would, and he meant it. He had jotted down in the
back of a little notebook each successive visit of Dr. Fiddler, and,
consulting it from time to time, had no difficulty in realising that he
came high. Twenty-one visits, at ten dollars a visit, that's what it
amounted to, say nothing of the drug bill, the extra-food bill, the
night-nurse's wages, and the wear and tear on the nerves of his wife,
himself--and Melissa. For, it would appear, Melissa had nerves as well
as the rest of them, and Uncle Joe was the very worst thing in the
world for Melissa's nerves. She very frequently said so, and sometimes
to his face, although she never neglected him for an instant. In truth,
she shared with Mrs. Bingle the day nursing, and seldom slept well of
nights, knowing that the night-nurse was upsetting everything in the
kitchen and pantry in her most professional way.
Of course Uncle Joe did not actually get well. He merely recovered. In
other words, he survived the attack of influenza and heart trouble,
only to go on ailing as he had ailed before. He was quite cheerful
about it, too. They used to catch him chuckling to himself as he sat
shivering over the fireplace, and he seemed to take especial delight in
demanding three eggs for breakfast when every one knew that eggs were
seventy-two cents a dozen. The only compensation they had out of the
experience--aside from the realisation that they were living up to a
principle--was the untiring effort he made to entertain them with
stories of his adventures as a tramp! He gracelessly confessed that he
had travelled under many names, and that he was known by various
soubriquets that would not sound well on Fifth Avenue but still
possessed the splendid virtue of being decorative. There was not the
slightest doubt that he had roamed the land over, and there was not
even the faintest suspicion that he had profited by travel.
And this brings us up to Christmas Eve. With February not far away, and
Uncle Joe lamentably liable to have another attack, the Bingles
curtailed quite considerably in their preparations for the festivities
in honour of the five little Sykeses. They spent but a third of the
customary amount in providing presents, and they were not quite sure
that they were wise in spending as much as that. Uncle Joe went to
considerable pains to convince them that they were making fools of
themselves in throwing away money that might be needed for his funeral,
and absolutely refused to become a party to the affair. He moped in his
bedroom, over an oil-stove, and made himself generally unpleasant. As
for "The Christmas Carol," he had but one opinion about it, and this is
no place to express it.
When he came into the sitting-room after the departure of the Sykeses,
breaking in upon the tender reflections of Mr. and Mrs. Single, he
represented the ghost who might have been at the feast but was, for
some reason, obligingly late.
As he stood over the blaze, rubbing his bony old knuckles, he was a
depressing figure indeed. His gloomy eyes had no reflected glow in
them; his long, stooped frame suggested nothing so much as a
weather-worn scare-crow about which a thousand storms had thrashed.
There was no joy in his soul.
"Yes," he said, as if they had disputed him without reason, "you ought
to be thankful you have no children. What you can see in this
tomfoolery about Christmas Eve is beyond me. Better save your money for
something worth while, that's what I say. Something worth while."
"Well, WHAT, for instance?" demanded Mr. Bingle, suddenly irritated
beyond control.
"Confound you, Tom, do you forget that you owe Dr. Fiddler more than
two hundred dollars?" snapped Uncle Joe, turning on him.
"Oh, I will pay him--I will pay him all right, never fear," replied Mr.
Bingle, shrinking.
Old Joseph Hooper regarded him keenly for a long time before speaking
again. His voice softened and his manner underwent a swift change.
"Tom Bingle, you are the best man living to-day," he said, a strange
huskiness in his voice. "If you were not as good as gold you would kick
me out and--and--"
"Kick you out, Uncle Joe!" cried Mr. Bingle, coming to his feet and
laying his hand on the bent shoulder. "God bless you, sir, I--I--I
ought to kick you out for SAYING such a thing!"
And old Joseph suddenly laid his arm on the mantelpiece and buried his
face upon it, his gaunt figure shaking with sobs.