Ukridge looked at me. I looked at Ukridge. There was a long silence.
“Shift-ho, old horse?” said Ukridge, sadly. “No use staying on here.”
“No,” I replied, with equal gloom. “May as well go.”
“Glad to have seen you,” said Teddy Weeks, “and thanks for the fruit.”
The next time I saw the man he was coming out of a manager’s office in the Haymarket. He had on a new Homburg hat of a delicate pearl grey, spats to match, and a new blue flannel suit, beautifully cut, with an invisible red twill. He was looking jubilant, and, as I passed him, he drew from his pocket a gold cigarette-case.
It was shortly after that, if you remember, that he made a big hit as the juvenile lead in that piece at the Apollo and started on his sensational career as a matinee idol.
Inside the church the organ had swelled into the familiar music of the Wedding March. A verger came out and opened the doors. The five cooks ceased their reminiscences of other and smarter weddings at which they had participated. The camera-men unshipped their cameras. The costermonger moved his barrow of vegetables a pace forward. A dishevelled and unshaven man at my side uttered a disapproving growl.
“Idle rich!” said the dishevelled man.
Out of the church came a beauteous being, leading attached to his arm another being, somewhat less beauteous.
There was no denying the spectacular effect of Teddy Weeks. He was handsomer than ever. His sleek hair, gorgeously waved, shone in the sun, his eyes were large and bright; his lissome frame, garbed in faultless morning-coat and trousers, was that of an Apollo. But his bride gave the impression that Teddy had married money. They paused in the doorway, and the camera-men became active and fussy.
“Have you got a shilling, laddie?” said Ukridge in a low, level voice.
“Why do you want a shilling?”
“Old horse,” said Ukridge, tensely, “it is of the utmost vital importance that I have a shilling here and now.”
I passed it over. Ukridge turned to the dishevelled man, and I perceived that he held in his hand a large rich tomato of juicy and over-ripe appearance.
“Would you like to earn a bob?” Ukridge said.
“Would I!” replied the dishevelled man.
Ukridge sank his voice to a hoarse whisper.
The camera-men had finished their preparations. Teddy Weeks, his head thrown back in that gallant way which has endeared him to so many female hearts, was exhibiting his celebrated teeth. The cooks, in undertones, were making adverse comments on the appearance of the bride.
“Now, please,” said one of the camera-men.
Over the heads of the crowd, well and truly aimed, whizzed a large juicy tomato. It burst like a shell full between Teddy Weeks’s expressive eyes, obliterating them in scarlet ruin. It spattered Teddy Weeks’s collar, it dripped on Teddy Weeks’s morning-coat. And the dishevelled man turned abruptly and raced off down the street.
Ukridge grasped my arm. There was a look of deep content in his eyes.
“Shift-ho?” said Ukridge.
Arm-in-arm, we strolled off in the pleasant June sunshine.
INDISCRETIONS OF ARCHIE
IT SEEMED TO ARCHIE, AS HE SURVEYED HIS Position at the end of the first month of his married life, that all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds. In their attitude towards America, visiting Englishmen almost invariably incline to extremes, either detesting all that therein is or else becoming enthusiasts on the subject of the country, its climate, and its institutions. Archie belonged to the second class. He liked America and got on splendidly with Americans from the start. He was a friendly soul, a mixer; and in New York, that city of mixers, he found himself at home. The atmosphere of good-fellowship and the open-hearted hospitality of everybody he met appealed to him. There were moments when it seemed to him as though New York had simply been waiting for him to arrive before giving the word to let the revels commence.
Nothing, of course, in this world is perfect; and, rosy as were the glasses through which Archie looked on his new surroundings, he had to admit that there was one flaw, one fly in the ointment, one individual caterpillar in the salad. Mr. Daniel Brewster, his father-in-law, remained consistently unfriendly. Indeed, his manner towards his new relative became daily more and more a manner which would have caused gossip on the plantation if Simon Legree had exhibited it in his relations with Uncle Tom. And this in spite of the fact that Archie, as early as the third morning of his stay, had gone to him and in the most frank and manly way had withdrawn his criticism of the Hotel Cosmopolis, giving it as his considered opinion that the Hotel Cosmopolis on closer inspection appeared to be a good egg, one of the best and brightest, and a bit of all right.
“A credit to you, old thing,” said Archie cordially.
“Don’t call me old thing!” growled Mr. Brewster. “Right-0, old companion!” said Archie amiably.
Archie, a true philosopher, bore this hostility with fortitude, but it worried Lucille.
“I do wish father understood you better,” was her wistful comment when Archie had related the conversation.
“Well, you know,” said Archie, “I’m open for being understood any time he cares to take a stab at it.”
“You must try and make him fond of you.”
“But how? I smile winsomely at him and what not, but he doesn’t respond.”
“Well, we shall have to think of something. I want him to realise what an angel you are. You are an angel, you know.”
“No, really?”
“Of course you are.”
“It’s a rummy thing,” said Archie, pursuing a train of thought which was constantly with him, “the more I see of you, the more I wonder how you can have a father like— mean to say, what I mean to say is, I wish I had known your mother; she must have been frightfully attractive.”
“What would really please him, I know,” said Lucille, “would be if you got some work to do. He loves people who work.”
“Yes?” said Archie doubtfully. “Well, you know, I heard him interviewing that chappie behind the desk this morning, who works like the dickens from early morn to dewy eve, on the subject ol a mistake in his figures; and, if he loved him, he dissembled it all right. Of course, I admit that so far I haven’t been one of the toilers, but the dashed difficult thing is to know how to start. I’m nosing round, but the openings for a bright young man seem so scarce.”
“Well, keep on trying. I feel sure that, if you could only find something to do, it doesn’t matter what, father would be quite different.”
It was possibly the dazzling prospect of making Mr. Brewster quite different that stimulated Archie. He was strongly of the opinion that any change in his father-in-law must inevitably be for the better. A chance meeting with James B. Wheeler, the artist, at the Pen-and-ink Club seemed to open the way.
To a visitor to New York who has the ability to make himself liked it almost appears as though the leading industry in that city was the issuing of two-weeks’ invitation-cards to clubs. Archie since his arrival had been showered with these pleasant evidences of his popularity; and he was now an honorary member of so many clubs of various kinds that he had not time to go to them all. There were the fashionable clubs along Fifth Avenue to which his friend Reggie van Tuyl, son of his Florida hostess, had introduced him. I’here were the businessmen’s clubs of which he was made free by more solid citizens. And, best of all, there were the Lambs’, the Players’, the Friars’, the Coffee-House, the Pen-and-ink, and the other resorts of the artist, the author, the actor, and the Bohemian. It was in these that Archie spent most of his time, and it was here that he made the acquaintance of J. B. Wheeler, the popular illustrator.
To Mr. Wheeler, over a friendly lunch, Archie had been confiding some of his ambitions to qualify as the hero of one of the Get-on-or-get-out-young-man-step-lively-books.
“You want a job?” said Mr. Wheeler.
“I want a job,” said Archie.
Mr. Wheeler con
sumed eight fried potatoes in quick succession. He was an able trencherman.
“I always looked on you as one of our leading lilies of the field,” he said. “Why this anxiety to toil and spin?”
“Well, my wife, you know, seems to think it might put me one up with the jolly old dad if I did something.”
“And you’re not particular what you do, so long as it has the outer aspect of work?”
“Anything in the world, laddie, anything in the world.”
“Then come and pose for a picture I’m doing,” said J. B. Wheeler. “It’s for a magazine cover. You’re just the model I want, and I’ll pay you at the usual rates. Is it a go?”
“Pose?”
“You’ve only got to stand still and look like a chunk of wood. You can do that, surely?”
“I can do that,” said Archie.
“Then come along down to my studio to-morrow.”
“Right-o!” said Archie.
“I say, old thing!”
Archie spoke plaintively. Already he was looking back ruefully to the time when he had supposed that an artist’s model had a soft job. In the first five minutes muscles which he had not been aware that he possessed had started to ache like neglected teeth. His respect for the toughness and durability of artists’ models was now solid. How they acquired the stamina to go through this sort of thing all day and then bound off to Bohemian revels at night was more than he could understand.
“Don’t wobble, confound you!” snorted Mr. Wheeler.
“Yes, but, my dear old artist,” said Archie, “what you don’t seem to grasp—what you appear not to realise—is that I’m getting a crick in the back.”
“You weakling! You miserable, invertebrate worm. Move an inch and I’ll murder you, and come and dance on your grave every Wednesday and Saturday. I’m just getting it.”
“It’s in the spine that it seems to catch me principally.”
“Be a man, you faint-hearted string-bean!” urged J. B. Wheeler. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself. Why, a girl who was posing for me last week stood for a solid hour on one leg, holding a tennis racket over her head and smiling brightly withal.”
“The female of the species is more india-rubbery than the male,” argued Archie.
“Well, I’ll be through in a few minutes. Don’t weaken. Think how proud you’ll be when you see yourself on all the bookstalls.”
Archie sighed, and braced himself to the task once more. He wished he had never taken on this binge. In addition to his physical discomfort, he was feeling a most awful chump. The cover on which Mr. Wheeler was engaged was for the August number of the magazine, and it had been necessary for Archie to drape his reluctant form in a two-piece bathing suit of a vivid lemon colour; for he was supposed to be representing one of those jolly dogs belonging to the best families who dive off floats at exclusive seashore resorts.]. B. Wheeler, a stickler for accuracy, had wanted him to remove his socks and shoes; but there Archie had stood firm. He was willing to make an ass of himself, but not a silly ass.
“All right,” said]. B. Wheeler, laying down his brush. “That will do for to-day. Though, speaking without prejudice and with no wish to be offensive, if I had had a model who wasn’t a weak-kneed, jelly-backboned son of Belial, I could have got the darned thing finished without having to have another sitting.”
“I wonder why you chappies call this sort of thing ‘sitting,’ ” said Archie, pensively, as he conducted tentative experiments in osteopathy on his aching back. “I say, old thing, I could do with a restorative, if you have one handy. But, of course, you haven’t, I suppose,” he added, resignedly. Abstemious as a rule, there were moments when Archie found the Eighteenth Amendment somewhat trying.
J. B. Wheeler shook his head.
“You’re a little previous,” he said. “But come round in another day or so, and I may be able to do something for you.” He moved with a certain conspirator-like caution to a corner of the room, and, lifting to one side a pile of canvases, revealed a stout barrel, which he regarded with a fatherly and benignant eye. “I don’t mind telling you that, in the fullness of time, I believe this is going to spread a good deal of sweetness and light.”
“Oh, ah,” said Archie, interested. “Home-brew, what?”
“Made with these hands. I added a few more raisins yesterday, to speed things up a bit. There is much virtue in your raisin. And, talking of speeding things up, for goodness’ sake try to be a bit more punctual to-morrow. We lost an hour of good daylight to-day.”
“I like that! I was here on the absolute minute. I had to hang about on the landing waiting for you.”
“Well, well, that doesn’t matter,” said J. B. Wheeler, impatiently, for the artist soul is always annoyed by petty details. “The point is that we were an hour late in getting to work. Mind you’re here to-morrow at eleven sharp.”
It was, therefore, with a feeling of guilt and trepidation that Archie mounted the stairs on the following morning; for in spite of his good resolutions he was half an hour behind time. He was relieved to find that his friend had also lagged by the wayside. The door of the studio was ajar, and he went in, to discover the place occupied by a lady of mature years, who was scrubbing the floor with a mop. He went into the bedroom and donned his bathing suit. When he emerged, ten minutes later, the charwoman had gone, but J. B. Wheeler was still absent. Rather glad of the respite, he sat down to kill time by reading the morning paper, whose sporting page alone he had managed to master at the breakfast table.
There was not a great deal in the paper to interest him. The usual bond-robbery had taken place on the previous day, and the police were reported hot on the trail of the MasterMind who was alleged to be at the back of these financial operations. A messenger named Henry Babcock had been arrested and was expected to become confidential. To one who, like Archie, had never owned a bond, the story made little appeal. He turned with more interest to a cheery half-column on the activities of a gentleman in Minnesota who, with what seemed to Archie, as he thought of Mr. Daniel Brewster, a good deal of resource and public spirit, had recently beaned his father-in-law with the family meat-axe. It was only after he had read this through twice in a spirit of gentle approval that it occurred to him that J. B. Wheeler was uncommonly late at the tryst. He looked at his watch, and found that he had been in the studio three-quarters of an hour.
Archie became restless. Long-suffering old bean though he was, he considered this a bit thick. He got up and went out on to the landing, to see if there were any signs of the blighter. There were none. He began to understand now what had happened. For some reason or other the bally artist was not coming to the studio at all that day. Probably he had called up the hotel and left a message to this effect, and Archie had just missed it. Another man might have waited to make certain that his message had reached its destination, but not woollen-headed Wheeler, the most casual individual in New York. Thoroughly aggrieved, Archie turned back to the studio to dress and go away.
His progress was stayed by a solid, forbidding slab of oak. Somehow or other, since he had left the room, the door had managed to get itself shut.
“Oh, dash it!” said Archie.
The mildness of the expletive was proof that the full horror of the situation had not immediately come home to him. His mind in the first few moments was occupied with the problem of how the door had got that way. He could not remember shutting it. Probably he had done it unconsciously. As a child, he had been taught by sedulous elders that the little gentleman always closed doors behind him, and presumably his subconscious self was still under the influence. And then, suddenly, he realised that this infernal, officious ass of a subconscious self had deposited him right in the gumbo. Behind that closed door, unattainable as youthful ambition, lay his gent’s heather-mixture with the green twill, and here he was, out in the world, alone, in a lemon-coloured bathing suit.
In all crises of human affairs there are two broad courses open to a man. He can stay where he is or he ca
n go elsewhere. Archie, leaning on the banisters, examined these alternatives narrowly. If he stayed where he was he would have to spend the night on this dashed landing. If he legged it, in this kit, he would be gathered up by the constabulary before he had gone a hundred yards. He was no pessimist, but he was reluctantly forced to the conclusion that he was up against it.
It was while he was musing with a certain tenseness on these things that the sound of footsteps came to him from below. But almost in the first instant the hope that this might be J. B. Wheeler, the curse of the human race, died away. Whoever was coming up the stairs was running, and J. B. Wheeler never ran upstairs. He was not one of your lean, haggard, spiritual-looking geniuses. He made a large income with his brush and pencil, and spent most of it in creature comforts. This couldn’t be J. B. Wheeler.
It was not. It was a tall, thin man whom he had never seen before. He appeared to be in a considerable hurry. He let himself into the studio on the floor below, and vanished without even waiting to shut the door.
He had come and disappeared in almost record time, but, brief though his passing had been, it had been long enough to bring consolation to Archie. A sudden bright light had been vouchsafed to Archie, and he now saw an admirably ripe and fruity scheme for ending his troubles. What could be simpler than to toddle down one flight of stairs and in an easy and debonair manner ask the chappie’s permission to use his telephone? And what could be simpler, once he was at the ‘phone, than to get in touch with somebody at the Cosmopolis who would send down a few trousers and what not in a kit bag. It was a priceless solution, thought Archie, as he made his way downstairs. Not even embarrassing, he meant to say. This chappie, living in a place like this, wouldn’t bat an eyelid at the spectacle of a fellow trickling about the place in a bathing suit. They would have a good laugh about the whole thing.
“I say, I hate to bother you—dare say you’re busy and all that sort of thing—but would you mind if I popped in for half a second and used your ’phone?”
That was the speech, the extremely gentlemanly and well-phrased speech, which Archie had prepared to deliver the moment the man appeared. The reason he did not deliver it was that the man did not appear. He knocked, but nothing stirred.
Wodehouse On Crime Page 27
