And he looked at “The Coming of Summer” as if it were a black beetle.
I must say, much as I disliked the blighter, I couldn’t help feeling that he had right on his side. It hadn’t occurred to me in quite that light before, but, considering it calmly now, I could see that a man who would disgorge two thousand of the best for Archie’s Futurist masterpiece might very well step straight into the nut factory, and no questions asked.
Mrs. Archie came right back at him, as game as you please.
“I am sorry for Mr. Brackett’s domestic troubles, but my husband can prove without difficulty that he did buy the picture. Can’t you, dear?”
Archie, extremely white about the gills, looked at the ceiling and at the floor and at me and Renshaw Liggett.
“No,” he said finally. “I can’t. Because he didn’t.”
“Exactly,” said Renshaw, “and I must ask you to publish that statement in tomorrow’s papers without fail.” He rose, and made for the door. “My client has no objection to young artists advertising themselves, realizing that this is an age of strenuous competition, but he firmly refuses to permit them to do it at his expense. Good afternoon.”
And he legged it, leaving behind him one of the most chunky silences I have ever been mixed up in. For the life of me, I couldn’t see who was to make the next remark. I was jolly certain that it wasn’t going to be me.
Eventually Mrs. Archie opened the proceedings.
“What does it mean?”
Archie turned to me with a sort of frozen calm.
“Reggie, would you mind stepping into the kitchen and asking Julia for this week’s Funny Slices? I know she has it.”
He was right. She unearthed it from a cupboard. I trotted back with it to the sitting room. Archie took the paper from me, and held it out to his wife, Doughnuts uppermost.
“Look!” he said.
She looked.
“I do them. I have done them every week for three years. No, don’t speak yet. Listen. This is where all my money came from, all the money I lost when B. and O. P. Rails went smash. And this is where the money came from to buy ‘The Coming of Summer.’ It wasn’t Brackett who bought it; it was myself.”
Mrs. Archie was devouring the Doughnuts with wide-open eyes. I caught a glimpse of them myself, and only just managed not to laugh, for it was the set of pictures where Pa Doughnut tries to fix the electric light, one of the very finest things dear old Archie had ever done.
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“I draw these things. I have sold my soul.”
“Archie!”
He winced, but stuck to it bravely.
“Yes, I knew how you would feel about it, and that was why I didn’t dare to tell you, and why we fixed up this story about old Brackett. I couldn’t bear to live on you any longer, and to see you roughing it here, when we might be having all the money we wanted.”
Suddenly, like a boiler exploding, she began to laugh.
“They’re the funniest things I ever saw in my life,” she gurgled. “Mr. Pepper, do look! He’s trying to cut the electric wire with the scissors, and everything blazes up. And you’ve been hiding this from me all that time!”
Archie goggled dumbly. She dived at a table, and picked up a magazine, pointing to one of the advertisement pages.
“Read!” she cried. “Read it aloud.”
And in a shaking voice Archie read:
You think you are perfectly well, don’t you? You wake up in the morning and spring out of bed and say to yourself that you have never been better in your life. You’re wrong! Unless you are avoiding coffee as you would avoid the man who always tells you the smart things his little boy said yesterday, and drinking SAFETY FIRST MOLASSINE for breakfast, you cannot be Perfectly Well.
It is a physical impossibility. Coffee contains an appreciable quantity of the deadly drug caffeine, and therefore–-
“I wrote that,” she said. “And I wrote the advertisement of the Spiller Baby Food on page ninety-four, and the one about the Preeminent Breakfast Sausage on page eighty-six. Oh, Archie, dear, the torments I have been through, fearing that you would some day find me out and despise me. I couldn’t help it. I had no private means, and I didn’t make enough out of my poetry to keep me in hats. I learned to write advertisements four years ago at a correspondence school, and I’ve been doing them ever since. And now I don’t mind your knowing, now that you have told me this perfectly splendid news. Archie!”
She rushed into his arms like someone charging in for a bowl of soup at a railway station buffet. And I drifted out. It seemed to me that this was a scene in which I was not on. I sidled to the door, and slid forth. They didn’t notice me. My experience is that nobody ever does—much.
THE TEST CASE
Well-meaning chappies at the club sometimes amble up to me and tap me on the wishbone, and say “Reggie, old top,”—my name’s Reggie Pepper—”you ought to get married, old man.” Well, what I mean to say is, it’s all very well, and I see their point and all that sort of thing; but it takes two to make a marriage, and to date I haven’t met a girl who didn’t seem to think the contract was too big to be taken on.
Looking back, it seems to me that I came nearer to getting over the home-plate with Ann Selby than with most of the others. In fact, but for circumstances over which I had no dashed control, I am inclined to think that we should have brought it off. I’m bound to say that, now that what the poet chappie calls the first fine frenzy has been on the ice for awhile and I am able to consider the thing calmly, I am deuced glad we didn’t. She was one of those strong-minded girls, and I hate to think of what she would have done to me.
At the time, though, I was frightfully in love, and, for quite a while after she definitely gave me the mitten, I lost my stroke at golf so completely that a child could have given me a stroke a hole and got away with it. I was all broken up, and I contend to this day that I was dashed badly treated.
Let me give you what they call the data.
One day I was lunching with Ann, and was just proposing to her as usual, when, instead of simply refusing me, as she generally did, she fixed me with a thoughtful eye and kind of opened her heart.
“Do you know, Reggie, I am in doubt.”
“Give me the benefit of it,” I said. Which I maintain was pretty good on the spur of the moment, but didn’t get a hand. She simply ignored it, and went on.
“Sometimes,” she said, “you seem to me entirely vapid and brainless; at other times you say or do things which suggest that there are possibilities in you; that, properly stimulated and encouraged, you might overcome the handicap of large private means and do something worthwhile. I wonder if that is simply my imagination?” She watched me very closely as she spoke.
“Rather not. You’ve absolutely summed me up. With you beside me, stimulating and all that sort of rot, don’t you know, I should show a flash of speed which would astonish you.”