THE MELTING OF MR. CONNOLLY
The main dining-room of the Hotel Cosmopolis is a decorous place. The
lighting is artistically dim, and the genuine old tapestries on the
walls seem, with their mediaeval calm, to discourage any essay in the
riotous. Soft-footed waiters shimmer to and fro over thick, expensive
carpets to the music of an orchestra which abstains wholly from the
noisy modernity of jazz. To Archie, who during the past few days had
been privileged to hear Miss Huskisson rehearsing, the place had a sort
of brooding quiet, like the ocean just before the arrival of a cyclone.
As Lucille had said, Miss Huskisson’s voice was loud. It was a powerful
organ, and there was no doubt that it would take the cloistered
stillness of the Cosmopolis dining-room and stand it on one ear. Almost
unconsciously, Archie found himself bracing his muscles and holding his
breath as he had done in France at the approach of the zero hour, when
awaiting the first roar of a barrage. He listened mechanically to the
conversation of Mr. Blumenthal.
The music-publisher was talking with some vehemence on the subject of
Labour. A recent printers’ strike had bitten deeply into Mr.
Blumenthal’s soul. The working man, he considered, was rapidly landing
God’s Country in the soup, and he had twice upset his glass with the
vehemence of his gesticulation. He was an energetic right-and-left-hand
talker.
“The more you give ’em the more they want!” he complained. “There’s no
pleasing ’em! It isn’t only in my business. There’s your father, Mrs.
Moffam!”
“Good God! Where?” said Archie, starting.
“I say, take your father’s case. He’s doing all he knows to get this
new hotel of his finished, and what happens? A man gets fired for
loafing on his job, and Connolly calls a strike. And the building
operations are held up till the thing’s settled! It isn’t right!”
“It’s a great shame,” agreed Lucille. “I was reading about it in the
paper this morning.”
“That man Connolly’s a tough guy. You’d think, being a personal friend
of your father, he would—”
“I didn’t know they were friends.”
“Been friends for years. But a lot of difference that makes. Out come
the men just the same. It isn’t right! I was saying it wasn’t right!”
repeated Mr. Blumenthal to Archie, for he was a man who liked the
attention of every member of his audience.
Archie did not reply. He was staring glassily across the room at two
men who had just come in. One was a large, stout, square-faced man of
commanding personality. The other was Mr. Daniel Brewster.
Mr. Blumenthal followed his gaze.
“Why, there is Connolly coming in now!”
“Father!” gasped Lucille.
Her eyes met Archie’s. Archie took a hasty drink of ice-water.
“This,” he murmured, “has torn it!”
“Archie, you must do something!”
“I know! But what?”
“What’s the trouble?” enquired Mr. Blumenthal, mystified.
“Go over to their table and talk to them,” said Lucille.
“Me!” Archie quivered. “No, I say, old thing, really!”
“Get them away!”
“How do you mean?”
“I know!” cried Lucille, inspired, “Father promised that you should be
manager of the new hotel when it was built. Well, then, this strike
affects you just as much as anybody else. You have a perfect right to
talk it over with them. Go and ask them to have dinner up in our suite
where you can discuss it quietly. Say that up there they won’t be
disturbed by the—the music.”
At this moment, while Archie wavered, hesitating like a diver on the
edge of a spring-board who is trying to summon up the necessary nerve
to project himself into the deep, a bell-boy approached the table where
the Messrs. Brewster and Connolly had seated themselves. He murmured
something in Mr. Brewster’s ear, and the proprietor of the Cosmopolis
rose and followed him out of the room.
“Quick! Now’s your chance!” said Lucille, eagerly. “Father’s been
called to the telephone. Hurry!”
Archie took another drink of ice-water to steady his shaking
nerve-centers, pulled down his waistcoat, straightened his tie, and
then, with something of the air of a Roman gladiator entering the
arena, tottered across the room. Lucille turned to entertain the
perplexed music-publisher.
The nearer Archie got to Mr. Aloysius Connolly the less did he like the
looks of him. Even at a distance the Labour leader had had a formidable
aspect. Seen close to, he looked even more uninviting. His face had the
appearance of having been carved out of granite, and the eye which
collided with Archie’s as the latter, with an attempt at an
ingratiating smile, pulled up a chair and sat down at the table was
hard and frosty. Mr. Connolly gave the impression that he would be a
good man to have on your side during a rough-and-tumble fight down on
the water-front or in some lumber-camp, but he did not look chummy.
“Hallo-allo-allo!” said Archie.
“Who the devil,” inquired Mr. Connolly, “are you?”
“My name’s Archibald Moffam.”
“That’s not my fault.”
“I’m jolly old Brewster’s son-in-law.”
“Glad to meet you.”
“Glad to meet _you_,” said Archie, handsomely.
“Well, good-bye!” said Mr. Connolly.
“Eh?”
“Run along and sell your papers. Your father-in-law and I have business
to discuss.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Private,” added Mr. Connolly.
“Oh, but I’m in on this binge, you know. I’m going to be the manager of
the new hotel.”
“You!”
“Absolutely!”
“Well, well!” said Mr. Connolly, noncommittally.
Archie, pleased with the smoothness with which matters had opened, bent
forward winsomely.
“I say, you know! It won’t do, you know! Absolutely no! Not a bit like
it! No, no, far from it! Well, how about it? How do we go? What? Yes?
No?”
“What on earth are you talking about?”
“Call it off, old thing!”
“Call what off?”
“This festive old strike.”
“Not on your—hallo, Dan! Back again?”
Mr. Brewster, looming over the table like a thundercloud, regarded
Archie with more than his customary hostility. Life was no pleasant
thing for the proprietor of the Cosmopolis just now. Once a man starts
building hotels, the thing becomes like dram-drinking. Any hitch, any
sudden cutting-off of the daily dose, has the worst effects; and the
strike which was holding up the construction of his latest effort had
plunged Mr. Brewster into a restless gloom. In addition to having this
strike on his hands, he had had to abandon his annual fishing-trip just
when he had begun to enjoy it; and, as if all this were not enough,
here was his son-in-law sitting at his table. Mr. Brewster had a
feeling that this was more than man was meant to bear.
“What do you want?” he demanded.
“Hallo, old thing!” said Archie. “Come and join the party!”
“Don’t call me old thing!”
“Right-o, old companion, just as you say. I say, I was just going to
suggest to Mr. Connolly that we should all go up to my suite and talk
this business over quietly.”
“He says he’s the manager of your new hotel,” said Mr. Connolly. “Is
that right?”
“I suppose so,” said Mr. Brewster, gloomily.
“Then I’m doing you a kindness,” said Mr. Connolly, “in not letting it
be built.”
Archie dabbed at his forehead with his handkerchief. The moments were
flying, and it began to seem impossible to shift these two men. Mr.
Connolly was as firmly settled in his chair as some primeval rock. As
for Mr. Brewster, he, too, had seated himself, and was gazing at Archie
with a weary repulsion. Mr. Brewster’s glance always made Archie feel
as though there were soup on his shirt-front.
And suddenly from the orchestra at the other end of the room there came
a familiar sound, the prelude of “Mother’s Knee.”
“So you’ve started a cabaret, Dan?” said Mr. Connolly, in a satisfied
voice. “I always told you you were behind the times here!”
Mr. Brewster jumped.
“Cabaret!”
He stared unbelievingly at the white-robed figure which had just
mounted the orchestra dais, and then concentrated his gaze on Archie.
Archie would not have looked at his father-in-law at this juncture if
he had had a free and untrammelled choice; but Mr. Brewster’s eye drew
his with something of the fascination which a snake’s has for a rabbit.
Mr. Brewster’s eye was fiery and intimidating. A basilisk might have
gone to him with advantage for a course of lessons. His gaze went right
through Archie till the latter seemed to feel his back-hair curling
crisply in the flames.
“Is this one of your fool-tricks?”
Even in this tense moment Archie found time almost unconsciously to
admire his father-in-law’s penetration and intuition. He seemed to have
a sort of sixth sense. No doubt this was how great fortunes were made.
“Well, as a matter of fact—to be absolutely accurate—it was like this—”
“Say, cut it out!” said Mr. Connolly. “Can the chatter! I want to
listen.”
Archie was only too ready to oblige him. Conversation at the moment was
the last thing he himself desired. He managed with a strong effort to
disengage himself from Mr. Brewster’s eye, and turned to the orchestra
dais, where Miss Spectatia Huskisson was now beginning the first verse
of Wilson Hymack’s masterpiece.
Miss Huskisson, like so many of the female denizens of the Middle West,
was tall and blonde and constructed on substantial lines. She was a
girl whose appearance suggested the old homestead and fried pancakes
and pop coming home to dinner after the morning’s ploughing. Even her
bobbed hair did not altogether destroy this impression. She looked big
and strong and healthy, and her lungs were obviously good. She attacked
the verse of the song with something of the vigour and breadth of
treatment with which in other days she had reasoned with refractory
mules. Her diction was the diction of one trained to call the cattle
home in the teeth of Western hurricanes. Whether you wanted to or not,
you heard every word.
The subdued clatter of knives and forks had ceased. The diners, unused
to this sort of thing at the Cosmopolis, were trying to adjust their
faculties to cope with the outburst. Waiters stood transfixed, frozen,
in attitudes of service. In the momentary lull between verse and
refrain Archie could hear the deep breathing of Mr. Brewster.
Involuntarily he turned to gaze at him once more, as refugees from
Pompeii may have turned to gaze upon Vesuvius; and, as he did so, he
caught sight of Mr. Connolly, and paused in astonishment.
Mr. Connolly was an altered man. His whole personality had undergone a
subtle change. His face still looked as though hewn from the living
rock, but into his eyes had crept an expression which in another man
might almost have been called sentimental. Incredible as it seemed to
Archie, Mr. Connolly’s eyes were dreamy. There was even in them a
suggestion of unshed tears. And when with a vast culmination of sound
Miss Huskisson reached the high note at the end of the refrain and,
after holding it as some storming-party, spent but victorious, holds
the summit of a hard-won redoubt, broke off suddenly, in the stillness
which followed there proceeded from Mr. Connolly a deep sigh.
Miss Huskisson began the second verse. And Mr. Brewster, seeming to
recover from some kind of a trance, leaped to his feet.
“Great Godfrey!”
“Sit down!” said Mr. Connolly, in a broken voice. “Sit down, Dan!”
“He went back to his mother on the train that very day:
He knew there was no other who could make him bright and gay:
He kissed her on the forehead and he whispered, ‘I’ve come home!’
He told her he was never going any more to roam.
And onward through the happy years, till he grew old and grey,
He never once regretted those brave words he once did say:
It’s a long way back to mother’s knee—”
The last high note screeched across the room like a shell, and the
applause that followed was like a shell’s bursting. One could hardly
have recognised the refined interior of the Cosmopolis dining-room.
Fair women were waving napkins; brave men were hammering on the tables
with the butt-end of knives, for all the world as if they imagined
themselves to be in one of those distressing midnight-revue places.
Miss Huskisson bowed, retired, returned, bowed, and retired again, the
tears streaming down her ample face. Over in a corner Archie could see
his brother-in-law clapping strenuously. A waiter, with a display of
manly emotion that did him credit, dropped an order of new peas.
“Thirty years ago last October,” said Mr. Connolly, in a shaking voice,
“I—”
Mr. Brewster interrupted him violently.
“I’ll fire that orchestra-leader! He goes to-morrow! I’ll fire—” He
turned on Archie. “What the devil do you mean by it, you—you—”
“Thirty years ago,” said Mr. Connolly, wiping away a tear with his
napkin, “I left me dear old home in the old country—”
“_My_ hotel a bear-garden!”
“Frightfully sorry and all that, old companion—”
“Thirty years ago last October! ’Twas a fine autumn evening the finest
ye’d ever wish to see. Me old mother, she came to the station to see me
off.”
Mr. Brewster, who was not deeply interested in Mr. Connolly’s old
mother, continued to splutter inarticulately, like a firework trying to
go off.
“‘Ye’ll always be a good boy, Aloysius?’ she said to me,” said Mr.
Connolly, proceeding with, his autobiography. “And I said: ‘Yes,
Mother, I will!’” Mr. Connolly sighed and applied the napkin again.
“’Twas a liar I was!” he observed, remorsefully. “Many’s the dirty I’ve
played since then. ‘It’s a long way back to Mother’s knee.’ ’Tis a true
word!” He turned impulsively to Mr. Brewster. “Dan, there’s a deal of
trouble in this world without me going out of me way to make more. The
strike is over! I’ll send the men back tomorrow! There’s me hand on
it!”
Mr. Brewster, who had just managed to co-ordinate his views on the
situation and was about to express them with the generous strength
which was ever his custom when dealing with his son-in-law, checked
himself abruptly. He stared at his old friend and business enemy,
wondering if he could have heard aright. Hope began to creep back into
Mr. Brewster’s heart, like a shamefaced dog that has been away from
home hunting for a day or two.
“You’ll what!”
“I’ll send the men back to-morrow! That song was sent to guide me, Dan!
It was meant! Thirty years ago last October me dear old mother—”
Mr. Brewster bent forward attentively. His views on Mr. Connolly’s dear
old mother had changed. He wanted to hear all about her.
“’Twas that last note that girl sang brought it all back to me as if
’twas yesterday. As we waited on the platform, me old mother and I, out
comes the train from the tunnel, and the engine lets off a screech the
way ye’d hear it ten miles away. ’Twas thirty years ago—”
Archie stole softly from the table. He felt that his presence, if it
had ever been required, was required no longer. Looking back, he could
see his father-in-law patting Mr. Connolly affectionately on the
shoulder.
Archie and Lucille lingered over their coffee. Mr. Blumenthal was out
in the telephone-box settling the business end with Wilson Hymack. The
music-publisher had been unstinted in his praise of “Mother’s Knee.” It
was sure-fire, he said. The words, stated Mr. Blumenthal, were gooey
enough to hurt, and the tune reminded him of every other song-hit he
had ever heard. There was, in Mr. Blumenthal’s opinion, nothing to stop
this thing selling a million copies.
Archie smoked contentedly.
“Not a bad evening’s work, old thing,” he said. “Talk about birds with
one stone!” He looked at Lucille reproachfully. “You don’t seem
bubbling over with joy.”
“Oh, I am, precious!” Lucille sighed. “I was only thinking about Bill.”
“What about Bill?”
“Well, it’s rather awful to think of him tied for life to that-that
steam-siren.”
“Oh, we mustn’t look on the jolly old dark side. Perhaps—Hallo, Bill,
old top! We were just talking about you.”
“Were you?” said Bill Brewster, in a dispirited voice.
“I take it that you want congratulations, what?”
“I want sympathy!”
“Sympathy?”
“Sympathy! And lots of it! She’s gone!”
“Gone! Who?”
“Spectatia!”
“How do you mean, gone?”
Bill glowered at the tablecloth.
“Gone home. I’ve just seen her off in a cab. She’s gone back to
Washington Square to pack. She’s catching the ten o’clock train back to
Snake Bite. It was that damned song!” muttered Bill, in a stricken
voice. “She says she never realised before she sang it to-night how
hollow New York was. She said it suddenly came over her. She says she’s
going to give up her career and go back to her mother. What the deuce
are you twiddling your fingers for?” he broke off, irritably.
“Sorry, old man. I was just counting.”
“Counting? Counting what?”
“Birds, old thing. Only birds!” said Archie.