A TALE OF A GRANDFATHER
Archie was not a man who readily allowed himself to become worried,
especially about people who were not in his own immediate circle of
friends, but in the course of the next week he was bound to admit that
he was not altogether easy in his mind about his father-in-law’s mental
condition. He had read all sorts of things in the Sunday papers and
elsewhere about the constant strain to which captains of industry are
subjected, a strain which sooner or later is only too apt to make the
victim go all blooey, and it seemed to him that Mr. Brewster was
beginning to find the going a trifle too tough for his stamina.
Undeniably he was behaving in an odd manner, and Archie, though no
physician, was aware that, when the American business-man, that
restless, ever-active human machine, starts behaving in an odd manner,
the next thing you know is that two strong men, one attached to each
arm, are hurrying him into the cab bound for Bloomingdale.
He did not confide his misgivings to Lucille, not wishing to cause her
anxiety. He hunted up Reggie van Tuyl at the club, and sought advice
from him.
“I say, Reggie, old thing—present company excepted—have there been any
loonies in your family?”
Reggie stirred in the slumber which always gripped him in the early
afternoon.
“Loonies?” he mumbled, sleepily. “Rather! My uncle Edgar thought he was
twins.”
“Twins, eh?”
“Yes. Silly idea! I mean, you’d have thought one of my uncle Edgar
would have been enough for any man.”
“How did the thing start?” asked Archie.
“Start? Well, the first thing we noticed was when he began wanting two
of everything. Had to set two places for him at dinner and so on.
Always wanted two seats at the theatre. Ran into money, I can tell
you.”
“He didn’t behave rummily up till then? I mean to say, wasn’t sort of
jumpy and all that?”
“Not that I remember. Why?”
Archie’s tone became grave.
“Well, I’ll tell you, old man, though I don’t want it to go any
farther, that I’m a bit worried about my jolly old father-in-law. I
believe he’s about to go in off the deep-end. I think he’s cracking
under the strain. Dashed weird his behaviour has been the last few
days.”
“Such as?” murmured Mr. van Tuyl.
“Well, the other morning I happened to be in his suite—incidentally he
wouldn’t go above ten dollars, and I wanted twenty-five-and he suddenly
picked up a whacking big paper-weight and bunged it for all he was
worth.”
“At you?”
“Not at me. That was the rummy part of it. At a mosquito on the wall,
he said. Well, I mean to say, do chappies bung paper-weights at
mosquitoes? I mean, is it done?”
“Smash anything?”
“Curiously enough, no. But he only just missed a rather decent picture
which Lucille had given him for his birthday. Another foot to the left
and it would have been a goner.”
“Sounds queer.”
“And, talking of that picture, I looked in on him about a couple of
afternoons later, and he’d taken it down from the wall and laid it on
the floor and was staring at it in a dashed marked sort of manner. That
was peculiar, what?”
“On the floor?”
“On the jolly old carpet. When I came in, he was goggling at it in a
sort of glassy way. Absolutely rapt, don’t you know. My coming in gave
him a start—seemed to rouse him from a kind of trance, you know—and he
jumped like an antelope; and, if I hadn’t happened to grab him, he
would have trampled bang on the thing. It was deuced unpleasant, you
know. His manner was rummy. He seemed to be brooding on something. What
ought I to do about it, do you think? It’s not my affair, of course,
but it seems to me that, if he goes on like this, one of these days
he’ll be stabbing someone with a pickle-fork.”
To Archie’s relief, his father-in-law’s symptoms showed no signs of
development. In fact, his manner reverted to the normal once more, and
a few days later, meeting Archie in the lobby of the hotel, he seemed
quite cheerful. It was not often that he wasted his time talking to his
son-in-law, but on this occasion he chatted with him for several
minutes about the big picture-robbery which had formed the chief item
of news on the front pages of the morning papers that day. It was Mr.
Brewster’s opinion that the outrage had been the work of a gang and
that nobody was safe.
Daniel Brewster had spoken of this matter with strange earnestness, but
his words had slipped from Archie’s mind when he made his way that
night to his father-in-law’s suite. Archie was in an exalted mood. In
the course of dinner he had had a bit of good news which was occupying
his thoughts to the exclusion of all other matters. It had left him in
a comfortable, if rather dizzy, condition of benevolence to all created
things. He had smiled at the room-clerk as he crossed the lobby, and if
he had had a dollar, he would have given it to the boy who took him up
in the elevator.
He found the door of the Brewster suite unlocked, which at any other
time would have struck him as unusual; but to-night he was in no frame
of mind to notice these trivialities. He went in, and, finding the room
dark and no one at home, sat down, too absorbed in his thoughts to
switch on the lights, and gave himself up to dreamy meditation.
There are certain moods in which one loses count of time, and Archie
could not have said how long he had been sitting in the deep arm-chair
near the window when he first became aware that he was not alone in the
room. He had closed his eyes, the better to meditate, so had not seen
anyone enter. Nor had he heard the door open. The first intimation he
had that somebody had come in was when some hard substance knocked
against some other hard object, producing a sharp sound which brought
him back to earth with a jerk.
He sat up silently. The fact that the room was still in darkness made
it obvious that something nefarious was afoot. Plainly there was dirty
work in preparation at the cross-roads. He stared into the blackness,
and, as his eyes grew accustomed to it, was presently able to see an
indistinct form bending over something on the floor. The sound of
rather stertorous breathing came to him.
Archie had many defects which prevented him being the perfect man, but
lack of courage was not one of them. His somewhat rudimentary
intelligence had occasionally led his superior officers during the war
to thank God that Great Britain had a Navy, but even these stern
critics had found nothing to complain of in the manner in which he
bounded over the top. Some of us are thinkers, others men of action.
Archie was a man of action, and he was out of his chair and sailing in
the direction of the back of the intruder’s neck before a wiser man
would have completed his plan of campaign. The miscreant collapsed
under him with a squashy sound, like the wind going out of a pair of
bellows, and Archie, taking a firm seat on his spine, rubbed the
other’s face in the carpet and awaited the progress of events.
At the end of half a minute it became apparent that there was going to
be no counter-attack. The dashing swiftness of the assault had
apparently had the effect of depriving the marauder of his entire stock
of breath. He was gurgling to himself in a pained sort of way and
making no effort to rise. Archie, feeling that it would be safe to get
up and switch on the light, did so, and, turning after completing this
manoeuvre, was greeted by the spectacle of his father-in-law, seated on
the floor in a breathless and dishevelled condition, blinking at the
sudden illumination. On the carpet beside Mr. Brewster lay a long
knife, and beside the knife lay the handsomely framed masterpiece of J.
B. Wheeler’s fiancée, Miss Alice Wigmore. Archie stared at this
collection dumbly.
“Oh, what-ho!” he observed at length, feebly.
A distinct chill manifested itself in the region of Archie’s spine.
This could mean only one thing. His fears had been realised. The strain
of modern life, with all its hustle and excitement, had at last proved
too much for Mr. Brewster. Crushed by the thousand and one anxieties
and worries of a millionaire’s existence, Daniel Brewster had gone off
his onion.
Archie was nonplussed. This was his first experience of this kind of
thing. What, he asked himself, was the proper procedure in a situation
of this sort? What was the local rule? Where, in a word, did he go from
here? He was still musing in an embarrassed and baffled way, having
taken the precaution of kicking the knife under the sofa, when Mr.
Brewster spoke. And there was in, both the words and the method of
their delivery so much of his old familiar self that Archie felt quite
relieved.
“So it’s you, is it, you wretched blight, you miserable weed!” said Mr.
Brewster, having recovered enough breath to be going on with. He
glowered at his son-in-law despondently. “I might have expected it! If
I was at the North Pole, I could count on you butting in!”
“Shall I get you a drink of water?” said Archie.
“What the devil,” demanded Mr. Brewster, “do you imagine I want with a
drink of water?”
“Well—” Archie hesitated delicately. “I had a sort of idea that you had
been feeling the strain a bit. I mean to say, rush of modern life and
all that sort of thing—”
“What are you doing in my room?” said Mr. Brewster, changing the
subject.
“Well, I came to tell you something, and I came in here and was waiting
for you, and I saw some chappie biffing about in the dark, and I
thought it was a burglar or something after some of your things, so,
thinking it over, I got the idea that it would be a fairly juicy scheme
to land on him with both feet. No idea it was you, old thing!
Frightfully sorry and all that. Meant well!”
Mr. Brewster sighed deeply. He was a just man, and he could not but
realise that, in the circumstances, Archie had behaved not unnaturally.
“Oh, well!” he said. “I might have known something would go wrong.”
“Awfully sorry!”
“It can’t be helped. What was it you wanted to tell me?” He eyed his
son-in-law piercingly. “Not a cent over twenty dollars!” he said
coldly.
Archie hastened to dispel the pardonable error.
“Oh, it wasn’t anything like that,” he said. “As a matter of fact, I
think it’s a good egg. It has bucked me up to no inconsiderable degree.
I was dining with Lucille just now, and, as we dallied with the
food-stuffs, she told me something which—well, I’m bound to say, it
made me feel considerably braced. She told me to trot along and ask you
if you would mind—”
“I gave Lucille a hundred dollars only last Tuesday.”
Archie was pained.
“Adjust this sordid outlook, old thing!” he urged. “You simply aren’t
anywhere near it. Right off the target, absolutely! What Lucille told
me to ask you was if you would mind—at some tolerably near date—being a
grandfather! Rotten thing to be, of course,” proceeded Archie
commiseratingly, “for a chappie of your age, but there it is!”
Mr. Brewster gulped.
“Do you mean to say—?”
“I mean, apt to make a fellow feel a bit of a patriarch. Snowy hair and
what not. And, of course, for a chappie in the prime of life like you—”
“Do you mean to tell me—? Is this true?”
“Absolutely! Of course, speaking for myself, I’m all for it. I don’t
know when I’ve felt more bucked. I sang as I came up here—absolutely
warbled in the elevator. But you—”
A curious change had come over Mr. Brewster. He was one of those men
who have the appearance of having been hewn out of the solid rock, but
now in some indescribable way he seemed to have melted. For a moment he
gazed at Archie, then, moving quickly forward, he grasped his hand in
an iron grip.
“This is the best news I’ve ever had!” he mumbled.
“Awfully good of you to take it like this,” said Archie cordially. “I
mean, being a grandfather—”
Mr. Brewster smiled. Of a man of his appearance one could hardly say
that he smiled playfully; but there was something in his expression
that remotely suggested playfulness.
“My dear old bean,” he said.
Archie started.
“My dear old bean,” repeated Mr. Brewster firmly, “I’m the happiest man
in America!” His eye fell on the picture which lay on the floor. He
gave a slight shudder, but recovered himself immediately. “After this,”
he said, “I can reconcile myself to living with that thing for the rest
of my life. I feel it doesn’t matter.”
“I say,” said Archie, “how about that? Wouldn’t have brought the thing
up if you hadn’t introduced the topic, but, speaking as man to man,
what the dickens WERE you up to when I landed on your spine just now?”
“I suppose you thought I had gone off my head?”
“Well, I’m bound to say—”
Mr. Brewster cast an unfriendly glance at the picture.
“Well, I had every excuse, after living with that infernal thing for a
week!”
Archie looked at him, astonished.
“I say, old thing, I don’t know if I have got your meaning exactly, but
you somehow give me the impression that you don’t like that jolly old
work of Art.”
“Like it!” cried Mr. Brewster. “It’s nearly driven me mad! Every time
it caught my eye, it gave me a pain in the neck. To-night I felt as if
I couldn’t stand it any longer. I didn’t want to hurt Lucille’s
feelings, by telling her, so I made up my mind I would cut the damned
thing out of its frame and tell her it had been stolen.”
“What an extraordinary thing! Why, that’s exactly what old Wheeler
did.”
“Who is old Wheeler?”
“Artist chappie. Pal of mine. His fiancée painted the thing, and, when
I lifted it off him, he told her it had been stolen. _He_ didn’t seem
frightfully keen on it, either.”
“Your friend Wheeler has evidently good taste.”
Archie was thinking.
“Well, all this rather gets past me,” he said. “Personally, I’ve always
admired the thing. Dashed ripe bit of work, I’ve always considered.
Still, of course, if you feel that way—”
“You may take it from me that I do!”
“Well, then, in that case—You know what a clumsy devil I am—You can
tell Lucille it was all my fault—”
The Wigmore Venus smiled up at Archie—it seemed to Archie with a
pathetic, pleading smile. For a moment he was conscious of a feeling of
guilt; then, closing his eyes and hardening his heart, he sprang
lightly in the air and descended with both feet on the picture. There
was a sound of rending canvas, and the Venus ceased to smile.
“Golly!” said Archie, regarding the wreckage remorsefully.
Mr. Brewster did not share his remorse. For the second time that night
he gripped him by the hand.
“My boy!” he quavered. He stared at Archie as if he were seeing him
with new eyes. “My dear boy, you were through the war, were you not?”
“Eh? Oh yes! Right through the jolly old war.”
“What was your rank?”
“Oh, second lieutenant.”
“You ought to have been a general!” Mr. Brewster clasped his hand once
more in a vigorous embrace. “I only hope,” he added “that your son will
be like you!”
There are certain compliments, or compliments coming from certain
sources, before which modesty reels, stunned. Archie’s did.
He swallowed convulsively. He had never thought to hear these words
from Daniel Brewster.
“How would it be, old thing,” he said almost brokenly, “if you and I
trickled down to the bar and had a spot of sherbet?”
THE END