SUMMER STORMS
Of course, in a way, the thing was simple. The wheeze was, in a sense,
straightforward and uncomplicated. What he wanted to do was to point
out to the injured girl all that hung on her. He wished to touch her
heart, to plead with her, to desire her to restate her war-aims, and to
persuade her—before three o’clock when that stricken gentleman would be
stepping into the pitcher’s box to loose off the first ball against the
Pittsburg Pirates—to let bygones be bygones and forgive Augustus
Biddle. But the blighted problem was, how the deuce to find the
opportunity to start. He couldn’t yell at the girl in a crowded
street-car; and, if he let go of his strap and bent over her, somebody
would step on his neck.
The Girl Friend, who for the first five minutes had remained entirely
concealed beneath her hat, now sought diversion by looking up and
examining the faces of the upper strata of passengers. Her eye caught
Archie’s in a glance of recognition, and he smiled feebly, endeavouring
to register bonhomie and good-will. He was surprised to see a startled
expression come into her brown eyes. Her face turned pink. At least, it
was pink already, but it turned pinker. The next moment, the car having
stopped to pick up more passengers, she jumped off and started to hurry
across the street.
Archie was momentarily taken aback. When embarking on this business he
had never intended it to become a blend of otter-hunting and a
moving-picture chase. He followed her off the car with a sense that his
grip on the affair was slipping. Preoccupied with these thoughts, he
did not perceive that the long young man who had shared his strap had
alighted too. His eyes were fixed on the vanishing figure of the Girl
Friend, who, having buzzed at a smart pace into Sixth Avenue, was now
legging it in the direction of the staircase leading to one of the
stations of the Elevated Railroad. Dashing up the stairs after her, he
shortly afterwards found himself suspended as before from a strap,
gazing upon the now familiar flowers on top of her hat. From another
strap farther down the carriage swayed the long young man in the grey
suit.
The train rattled on. Once or twice, when it stopped, the girl seemed
undecided whether to leave or remain. She half rose, then sank back
again. Finally she walked resolutely out of the car, and Archie,
following, found himself in a part of New York strange to him. The
inhabitants of this district appeared to eke out a precarious
existence, not by taking in one another’s washing, but by selling one
another second-hand clothes.
Archie glanced at his watch. He had lunched early, but so crowded with
emotions had been the period following lunch that he was surprised to
find that the hour was only just two. The discovery was a pleasant one.
With a full hour before the scheduled start of the game, much might be
achieved. He hurried after the girl, and came up with her just as she
turned the corner into one of those forlorn New York side-streets which
are populated chiefly by children, cats, desultory loafers, and empty
meat-tins.
The girl stopped and turned. Archie smiled a winning smile.
“I say, my dear sweet creature!” he said. “I say, my dear old thing,
one moment!”
“Is that so?” said the Girl Friend.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Is that so?”
Archie began to feel certain tremors. Her eyes were gleaming, and her
determined mouth had become a perfectly straight line of scarlet. It
was going to be difficult to be chatty to this girl. She was going to
be a hard audience. Would mere words be able to touch her heart? The
thought suggested itself that, properly speaking, one would need to use
a pick-axe.
“If you could spare me a couple of minutes of your valuable time—”
“Say!” The lady drew herself up menacingly. “You tie a can to yourself
and disappear! Fade away, or I’ll call a cop!”
Archie was horrified at this misinterpretation of his motives. One or
two children, playing close at hand, and a loafer who was trying to
keep the wall from falling down, seemed pleased. Theirs was a
colourless existence and to the rare purple moments which had enlivened
it in the past the calling of a cop had been the unfailing preliminary.
The loafer nudged a fellow-loafer, sunning himself against the same
wall. The children, abandoning the meat-tin round which their game had
centred, drew closer.
“My dear old soul!” said Archie. “You don’t understand!”
“Don’t I! I know your sort, you trailing arbutus!”
“No, no! My dear old thing, believe me! I wouldn’t dream!”
“Are you going or aren’t you?”
Eleven more children joined the ring of spectators. The loafers stared
silently, like awakened crocodiles.
“But, I say, listen! I only wanted—”
At this point another voice spoke.
“Say!”
The word “Say!” more almost than any word in the American language, is
capable of a variety of shades of expression. It can be genial, it can
be jovial, it can be appealing. It can also be truculent. The “Say!”
which at this juncture smote upon Archie’s ear-drum with a suddenness
which made him leap in the air was truculent; and the two loafers and
twenty-seven children who now formed the audience were well satisfied
with the dramatic development of the performance. To their experienced
ears the word had the right ring.
Archie spun round. At his elbow stood a long, strongly-built young man
in a grey suit.
“Well!” said the young man, nastily. And he extended a large, freckled
face toward Archie’s. It seemed to the latter, as he backed against the
wall, that the young man’s neck must be composed of india-rubber. It
appeared to be growing longer every moment. His face, besides being
freckled, was a dull brick-red in colour; his lips curled back in an
unpleasant snarl, showing a gold tooth; and beside him, swaying in an
ominous sort of way, hung two clenched red hands about the size of two
young legs of mutton. Archie eyed him with a growing apprehension.
There are moments in life when, passing idly on our way, we see a
strange face, look into strange eyes, and with a sudden glow of human
warmth say to ourselves, “We have found a friend!” This was not one of
those moments. The only person Archie had ever seen in his life who
looked less friendly was the sergeant-major who had trained him in the
early days of the war, before he had got his commission.
“I’ve had my eye on you!” said the young man.
He still had his eye on him. It was a hot, gimlet-like eye, and it
pierced the recesses of Archie’s soul. He backed a little farther
against the wall.
Archie was frankly disturbed. He was no poltroon, and had proved the
fact on many occasions during the days when the entire German army
seemed to be picking on him personally, but he hated and shrank from
anything in the nature of a bally public scene.
“What,” enquired the young man, still bearing the burden of the
conversation, and shifting his left hand a little farther behind his
back, “do you mean by following this young lady?”
Archie was glad he had asked him. This was precisely what he wanted to
explain.
“My dear old lad—” he began.
In spite of the fact that he had asked a question and presumably
desired a reply, the sound of Archie’s voice seemed to be more than the
young man could endure. It deprived him of the last vestige of
restraint. With a rasping snarl he brought his left fist round in a
sweeping semicircle in the direction of Archie’s head.
Archie was no novice in the art of self-defence. Since his early days
at school he had learned much from leather-faced professors of the
science. He had been watching this unpleasant young man’s eyes with
close attention, and the latter could not have indicated his scheme of
action more clearly if he had sent him a formal note. Archie saw the
swing all the way. He stepped nimbly aside, and the fist crashed
against the wall. The young man fell back with a yelp of anguish.
“Gus!” screamed the Girl Friend, bounding forward.
She flung her arms round the injured man, who was ruefully examining a
hand which, always of an out-size, was now swelling to still further
dimensions.
“Gus, darling!”
A sudden chill gripped Archie. So engrossed had he been with his
mission that it had never occurred to him that the love-lorn pitcher
might have taken it into his head to follow the girl as well in the
hope of putting in a word for himself. Yet such apparently had been the
case. Well, this had definitely torn it. Two loving hearts were united
again in complete reconciliation, but a fat lot of good that was. It
would be days before the misguided Looney Biddle would be able to pitch
with a hand like that. It looked like a ham already, and was still
swelling. Probably the wrist was sprained. For at least a week the
greatest left-handed pitcher of his time would be about as much use to
the Giants in any professional capacity as a cold in the head. And on
that crippled hand depended the fate of all the money Archie had in the
world. He wished now that he had not thwarted the fellow’s simple
enthusiasm. To have had his head knocked forcibly through a brick wall
would not have been pleasant, but the ultimate outcome would not have
been as unpleasant as this. With a heavy heart Archie prepared to
withdraw, to be alone with his sorrow.
At this moment, however, the Girl Friend, releasing her wounded lover,
made a sudden dash for him, with the plainest intention of blotting him
from the earth.
“No, I say! Really!” said Archie, bounding backwards. “I mean to say!”
In a series of events, all of which had been a bit thick, this, in his
opinion, achieved the maximum of thickness. It was the extreme ragged,
outside edge of the limit. To brawl with a fellow-man in a public
street had been bad, but to be brawled with by a girl—the shot was not
on the board. Absolutely not on the board. There was only one thing to
be done. It was dashed undignified, no doubt, for a fellow to pick up
the old waukeesis and leg it in the face of the enemy, but there was no
other course. Archie started to run; and, as he did so, one of the
loafers made the mistake of gripping him by the collar of his coat.
“I got him!” observed the loafer.
There is a time for all things. This was essentially not the time for
anyone of the male sex to grip the collar of Archie’s coat. If a
syndicate of Dempsey, Carpentier, and one of the Zoo gorillas had
endeavoured to stay his progress at that moment, they would have had
reason to consider it a rash move. Archie wanted to be elsewhere, and
the blood of generations of Moffams, many of whom had swung a wicked
axe in the free-for-all mix-ups of the Middle Ages, boiled within him
at any attempt to revise his plans. There was a good deal of the
loafer, but it was all soft. Releasing his hold when Archie’s heel took
him shrewdly on the shin, he received a nasty punch in what would have
been the middle of his waistcoat if he had worn one, uttered a gurgling
bleat like a wounded sheep, and collapsed against the wall. Archie,
with a torn coat, rounded the corner, and sprinted down Ninth Avenue.
The suddenness of the move gave him an initial advantage. He was
halfway down the first block before the vanguard of the pursuit poured
out of the side street. Continuing to travel well, he skimmed past a
large dray which had pulled up across the road, and moved on. The noise
of those who pursued was loud and clamorous in the rear, but the dray
hid him momentarily from their sight, and it was this fact which led
Archie, the old campaigner, to take his next step.
It was perfectly obvious—he was aware of this even in the novel
excitement of the chase—that a chappie couldn’t hoof it at twenty-five
miles an hour indefinitely along a main thoroughfare of a great city
without exciting remark. He must take cover. Cover! That was the
wheeze. He looked about him for cover.
“You want a nice suit?”
It takes a great deal to startle your commercial New Yorker. The small
tailor, standing in his doorway, seemed in no way surprised at the
spectacle of Archie, whom he had seen pass at a conventional walk some
five minutes before, returning like this at top speed. He assumed that
Archie had suddenly remembered that he wanted to buy something.
This was exactly what Archie had done. More than anything else in the
world, what he wanted to do now was to get into that shop and have a
long talk about gents’ clothing. Pulling himself up abruptly, he shot
past the small tailor into the dim interior. A confused aroma of cheap
clothing greeted him. Except for a small oasis behind a grubby counter,
practically all the available space was occupied by suits. Stiff suits,
looking like the body when discovered by the police, hung from hooks.
Limp suits, with the appearance of having swooned from exhaustion, lay
about on chairs and boxes. The place was a cloth morgue, a Sargasso Sea
of serge.
Archie would not have had it otherwise. In these quiet groves of
clothing a regiment could have lain hid.
“Something nifty in tweeds?” enquired the business-like proprietor of
this haven, following him amiably into the shop, “Or, maybe, yes, a
nice serge? Say, mister, I got a sweet thing in blue serge that’ll fit
you like the paper on the wall!”
Archie wanted to talk about clothes, but not yet.
“I say, laddie,” he said, hurriedly. “Lend me your ear for half a
jiffy!” Outside the baying of the pack had become imminent. “Stow me
away for a moment in the undergrowth, and I’ll buy anything you want.”
He withdrew into the jungle. The noise outside grew in volume. The
pursuit had been delayed for a priceless few instants by the arrival of
another dray, moving northwards, which had drawn level with the first
dray and dexterously bottled up the fairway. This obstacle had now been
overcome, and the original searchers, their ranks swelled by a few
dozen more of the leisured classes, were hot on the trail again.
“You done a murder?” enquired the voice of the proprietor, mildly
interested, filtering through a wall of cloth. “Well, boys will be
boys!” he said, philosophically. “See anything there that you like?
There some sweet things there!”
“I’m inspecting them narrowly,” replied Archie. “If you don’t let those
chappies find me, I shouldn’t be surprised if I bought one.”
“One?” said the proprietor, with a touch of austerity.
“Two,” said Archie, quickly. “Or possibly three or six.”
The proprietor’s cordiality returned.
“You can’t have too many nice suits,” he said, approvingly, “not a
young feller like you that wants to look nice. All the nice girls like
a young feller that dresses nice. When you go out of here in a suit I
got hanging up there at the back, the girls’ll be all over you like
flies round a honey-pot.”
“Would you mind,” said Archie, “would you mind, as a personal favour to
me, old companion, not mentioning that word ‘girls’?”
He broke off. A heavy foot had crossed the threshold of the shop.
“Say, uncle,” said a deep voice, one of those beastly voices that only
the most poisonous blighters have, “you seen a young feller run past
here?”
“Young feller?” The proprietor appeared to reflect. “Do you mean a
young feller in blue, with a Homburg hat?”
“That’s the duck! We lost him. Where did he go?”
“Him! Why, he come running past, quick as he could go. I wondered what
he was running for, a hot day like this. He went round the corner at
the bottom of the block.”
There was a silence.
“Well, I guess he’s got away,” said the voice, regretfully.
“The way he was travelling,” agreed the proprietor, “I wouldn’t be
surprised if he was in Europe by this. You want a nice suit?”
The other, curtly expressing a wish that the proprietor would go to
eternal perdition and take his entire stock with him, stumped out.
“This,” said the proprietor, tranquilly, burrowing his way to where
Archie stood and exhibiting a saffron-coloured outrage, which appeared
to be a poor relation of the flannel family, “would put you back fifty
dollars. And cheap!”
“Fifty dollars!”
“Sixty, I said. I don’t speak always distinct.”
Archie regarded the distressing garment with a shuddering horror. A
young man with an educated taste in clothes, it got right in among his
nerve centres.
“But, honestly, old soul, I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but that
isn’t a suit, it’s just a regrettable incident!”
The proprietor turned to the door in a listening attitude.
“I believe I hear that feller coming back,” he said.
Archie gulped.
“How about trying it on?” he said. “I’m not sure, after all, it isn’t
fairly ripe.”
“That’s the way to talk,” said the proprietor, cordially. “You try it
on. You can’t judge a suit, not a real nice suit like this, by looking
at it. You want to put it on. There!” He led the way to a dusty mirror
at the back of the shop. “Isn’t that a bargain at seventy
dollars?...Why, say, your mother would be proud if she could see her
boy now!”
A quarter of an hour later, the proprietor, lovingly kneading a little
sheaf of currency bills, eyed with a fond look the heap of clothes
which lay on the counter.
“As nice a little lot as I’ve ever had in my shop!” Archie did not deny
this. It was, he thought, probably only too true.
“I only wish I could see you walking up Fifth Avenue in them!”
rhapsodised the proprietor. “You’ll give ’em a treat! What you going to
do with ’em? Carry ’em under your arm?” Archie shuddered strongly.
“Well, then, I can send ’em for you anywhere you like. It’s all the
same to me. Where’ll I send ’em?”
Archie meditated. The future was black enough as it was. He shrank from
the prospect of being confronted next day, at the height of his misery,
with these appalling reach-me-downs.
An idea struck him.
“Yes, send ’em,” he said.
“What’s the name and address?”
“Daniel Brewster,” said Archie, “Hotel Cosmopolis.”
It was a long time since he had given his father-in-law a present.
Archie went out into the street, and began to walk pensively down a now
peaceful Ninth Avenue. Out of the depths that covered him, black as the
pit from pole to pole, no single ray of hope came to cheer him. He
could not, like the poet, thank whatever gods there be for his
unconquerable soul, for his soul was licked to a splinter. He felt
alone and friendless in a rotten world. With the best intentions, he
had succeeded only in landing himself squarely amongst the ribstons.
Why had he not been content with his wealth, instead of risking it on
that blighted bet with Reggie? Why had he trailed the Girl Friend, dash
her! He might have known that he would only make an ass of himself.
And, because he had done so, Looney Biddle’s left hand, that priceless
left hand before which opposing batters quailed and wilted, was out of
action, resting in a sling, careened like a damaged battleship; and any
chance the Giants might have had of beating the Pirates was
gone—gone—as surely as that thousand dollars which should have bought a
birthday present for Lucille.
A birthday present for Lucille! He groaned in bitterness of spirit. She
would be coming back to-night, dear girl, all smiles and happiness,
wondering what he was going to give her tomorrow. And when to-morrow
dawned, all he would be able to give her would be a kind smile. A nice
state of things! A jolly situation! A thoroughly good egg, he did _not_
think!
It seemed to Archie that Nature, contrary to her usual custom of
indifference to human suffering, was mourning with him. The sky was
overcast, and the sun had ceased to shine. There was a sort of
sombreness in the afternoon, which fitted in with his mood. And then
something splashed on his face.
It says much for Archie’s pre-occupation that his first thought, as,
after a few scattered drops, as though the clouds were submitting
samples for approval, the whole sky suddenly began to stream like a
shower-bath, was that this was simply an additional infliction which he
was called upon to bear, On top of all his other troubles he would get
soaked to the skin or have to hang about in some doorway. He cursed
richly, and sped for shelter.
The rain was setting about its work in earnest. The world was full of
that rending, swishing sound which accompanies the more violent summer
storms. Thunder crashed, and lightning flicked out of the grey heavens.
Out in the street the raindrops bounded up off the stones like fairy
fountains. Archie surveyed them morosely from his refuge in the
entrance of a shop.
And then, suddenly, like one of those flashes which were lighting up
the gloomy sky, a thought lit up his mind.
“By Jove! If this keeps up, there won’t be a ball-game to-day!”
With trembling fingers he pulled out his watch. The hands pointed to
five minutes to three. A blessed vision came to him of a moist and
disappointed crowd receiving rain-checks up at the Polo Grounds.
“Switch it on, you blighters!” he cried, addressing the leaden clouds.
“Switch it on more and more!”
It was shortly before five o’clock that a young man bounded into a
jeweller’s shop near the Hotel Cosmopolis—a young man who, in spite of
the fact that his coat was torn near the collar and that he oozed water
from every inch of his drenched clothes, appeared in the highest
spirits. It was only when he spoke that the jeweller recognised in the
human sponge the immaculate youth who had looked in that morning to
order a bracelet.
“I say, old lad,” said this young man, “you remember that jolly little
what-not you showed me before lunch?”
“The bracelet, sir?”
“As you observe with a manly candour which does you credit, my dear old
jeweller, the bracelet. Well, produce, exhibit, and bring it forth,
would you mind? Trot it out! Slip it across on a lordly dish!”
“You wished me, surely, to put it aside and send it to the Cosmopolis
to-morrow?”
The young man tapped the jeweller earnestly on his substantial chest.
“What I wished and what I wish now are two bally separate and dashed
distinct things, friend of my college days! Never put off till
to-morrow what you can do to-day, and all that! I’m not taking any more
chances. Not for me! For others, yes, but not for Archibald! Here are
the doubloons, produce the jolly bracelet. Thanks!”
The jeweller counted the notes with the same unction which Archie had
observed earlier in the day in the proprietor of the second-hand
clothes-shop. The process made him genial.
“A nasty, wet day, sir, it’s been,” he observed, chattily.
Archie shook his head.
“Old friend,” he said, “you’re all wrong. Far otherwise, and not a bit
like it, my dear old trafficker in gems! You’ve put your finger on the
one aspect of this blighted p.m. that really deserves credit and
respect. Rarely in the experience of a lifetime have I encountered a
day so absolutely bally in nearly every shape and form, but there was
one thing that saved it, and that was its merry old wetness! Toodle-oo,
laddie!”
“Good evening, sir,” said the jeweller.