Indiscretions of Archie, P. G. Wodehouse [read a book txt] 📗

armhole of his waistcoat: with the other hand he tapped menacingly on the table.

As she gazed upon him, wondering what could be the matter with him, Lucille was suddenly aware of Bill’s presence. He had emerged sharply from the bedroom and was walking briskly across the floor. He came to a halt in front of the table.

“Father!” said Bill.

Archie looked up sharply, frowning heavily over his cigar.

“Well, my boy,” he said in a strange, rasping voice. “What is it? Speak up, my boy, speak up! Why the devil can’t you speak up? This is my busy day!”

“What on earth are you doing?” asked Lucille.

Archie waved her away with the large gesture of a man of blood and iron interrupted while concentrating.

“Leave us, woman! We would be alone! Retire into the jolly old background and amuse yourself for a bit. Read a book. Do acrostics. Charge ahead, laddie.”

“Father!” said Bill, again.

“Yes, my boy, yes? What is it?”

“Father!”

Archie picked up the red-covered volume that lay on the table.

“Half a mo’, old son. Sorry to stop you, but I knew there was something. I’ve just remembered. Your walk. All wrong!”

“All wrong?”

“All wrong! Where’s the chapter on the Art. of Walking? Here we are. Listen, dear old soul. Drink this in. ‘In walking, one should strive to acquire that swinging, easy movement from the hips. The correctly-poised walker seems to float along, as it were.’ Now, old bean, you didn’t float a dam’ bit. You just galloped in like a chappie charging into a railway restaurant for a bowl of soup when his train leaves in two minutes. Dashed important, this walking business, you know. Get started wrong, and where are you? Try it again.... Much better.” He turned to Lucille. “Notice him float along that time? Absolutely skimmed, what?”

Lucille had taken a seat,-and was waiting for enlightenment.

“Are you and Bill going into vaudeville?” she asked.

Archie, scrutinising-his-brother-in-law closely, had further criticism to make.

“‘The man of self-respect and self-confidence,’” he read, “‘stands erect in an easy, natural, graceful attitude. Heels not too far apart, head erect, eyes to the front with a level gaze’—get your gaze level, old thing!—‘shoulders thrown back, arms hanging naturally at the sides when not otherwise employed’—that means that, if he tries to hit you, it’s all right to guard—‘chest expanded naturally, and abdomen’—this is no place for you, Lucille. Leg it out of earshot—‘ab—what I said before—drawn in somewhat and above all not protruded.’ Now, have you got all that? Yes, you look all right. Carry on, laddie, carry on. Let’s have two-penn’orth of the Dynamic Voice and the Tone of Authority—some of the full, rich, round stuff we hear so much about!”

Bill fastened a gimlet eye upon his brother-in-law and drew a deep breath.

“Father!” he said. “Father!”

“You’ll have to brighten up Bill’s dialogue a lot,” said Lucille, critically, “or you will never get bookings.”

“Father!”

“I mean, it’s all right as far as it goes, but it’s sort of monotonous. Besides, one of you ought to be asking questions and the other answering. Bill ought to be saying, ‘Who was that lady I saw you coming down the street with?’ so that you would be able to say, ‘That wasn’t a lady. That was my wife.’ I know! I’ve been to lots of vaudeville shows.”

Bill relaxed his attitude. He deflated his chest, spread his heels, and ceased to draw in his abdomen.

“We’d better try this another time, when we’re alone,” he said, frigidly. “I can’t do myself justice.”

“Why do you want to do yourself justice?” asked Lucille.

“Right-o!” said Archie, affably, casting off his forbidding expression like a garment. “Rehearsal postponed. I was just putting old Bill through it,” he explained, “with a view to getting him into mid-season form for the jolly old pater.”

“Oh!” Lucille’s voice was the voice of one who sees light in darkness. “When Bill walked in like a cat on hot bricks and stood there looking stuffed, that was just the Personality That Wins!”

“That was it.”

“Well, you couldn’t blame me for not recognising it, could you?”

Archie patted her head paternally.

“A little less of the caustic critic stuff,” he said. “Bill will be all right on the night. If you hadn’t come in then and put him off his stroke, he’d have shot out some amazing stuff, full of authority and dynamic accents and what not. I tell you, light of my soul, old Bill is all right! He’s got the winning personality up a tree, ready whenever he wants to go and get it. Speaking as his backer and trainer, I think he’ll twist your father round his little finger. Absolutely! It wouldn’t surprise me if at the end of five minutes the good old dad started jumping through hoops and sitting up for lumps of sugar.”

“It would surprise me.”

“Ah, that’s because you haven’t seen old Bill in action. You crabbed his act before he had begun to spread himself.”

“It isn’t that at all. The reason why I think that Bill, however winning his personality may be, won’t persuade father to let him marry a girl in the chorus is something that happened last night.”

“Last night?”

“Well, at three o’clock this morning. It’s on the front page of the early editions of the evening papers. I brought one in for you to see, only you were so busy. Look! There it is!”

Archie seized the paper.

“Oh, Great Scot!”

“What is it?” asked Bill, irritably. “Don’t stand goggling there! What the devil is it?”

“Listen to this, old thing!”

REVELRY BY NIGHT.
SPIRITED BATTLE ROYAL AT HOTEL
COSMOPOLIS.
THE HOTEL DETECTIVE HAD A GOOD HEART
BUT PAULINE PACKED THE PUNCH.

The logical contender for Jack Dempsey’s championship honours has been discovered; and, in an age where women are stealing men’s jobs all the time, it will not come as a surprise to our readers to learn that she belongs to the sex that is more deadly than the male. Her name is Miss Pauline Preston, and her wallop is vouched for under oath—under many oaths—by Mr. Timothy O’Neill, known to his intimates as Pie-Face, who holds down the arduous job of detective at the Hotel Cosmopolis.

At three o’clock this morning, Mr. O’Neill was advised by the night-clerk that the occupants of every room within earshot of number 618 had ’phoned the desk to complain of a disturbance, a noise, a vocal uproar proceeding from the room mentioned. Thither, therefore, marched Mr. O’Neill, his face full of cheese-sandwich, (for he had been indulging in an early breakfast or a late supper) and his heart of devotion to duty. He found there the Misses Pauline Preston and “Bobbie” St. Clair, of the personnel of the chorus of the Frivolities, entertaining a few friends of either sex. A pleasant time was being had by all, and at the moment of Mr. O’Neill’s entry the entire strength of the company was rendering with considerable emphasis that touching ballad, “There’s a Place For Me In Heaven, For My Baby-Boy Is There.”

The able and efficient officer at once suggested that there was a place for them in the street and the patrol-wagon was there; and, being a man of action as well as words, proceeded to gather up an armful of assorted guests as a preliminary to a personally-conducted tour onto the cold night. It was at this point that Miss Preston stepped into the limelight. Mr. O’Neill contends that she hit him with a brick, an iron casing, and the Singer Building. Be that as it may, her efforts were sufficiently able to induce him to retire for reinforcements, which, arriving, arrested the supper-party regardless of age or sex.

At the police-court this morning Miss Preston maintained that she and her friends were merely having a quiet home-evening and that Mr. O’Neill was no gentleman. The male guests gave their names respectively as Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd-George, and William J. Bryan. These, however, are believed to be incorrect. But the moral is, if you want excitement rather than sleep, stay at the Hotel Cosmopolis.

Bill may have quaked inwardly as he listened to this epic but outwardly he was unmoved.

“Well,” he said, “what about it?”

“What about it!” said Lucille.

“What about it!” said Archie. “Why, my dear old friend, it simply means that all the time we’ve been putting in making your personality winning has been chucked away. Absolutely a dead loss! We might just as well have read a manual on how to knit sweaters.”

“I don’t see it,” maintained Bill, stoutly.

Lucille turned apologetically to her husband.

“You mustn’t judge me by him, Archie, darling. This sort of thing doesn’t run in the family.-We are supposed to be rather bright on the whole. But poor Bill was dropped by his nurse when he was a baby, and fell on his head.”

“I suppose what you’re driving at,” said the goaded Bill, “is that what has happened will make father pretty sore against girls who happen to be in the chorus?”

“That’s absolutely it, old thing, I’m sorry to say. The next person who mentions the word chorus-girl in the jolly old governor’s presence is going to take his life in his hands. I tell you, as one man to another, that I’d much rather be back in France hopping over the top than do it myself.”

“What darned nonsense! Mabel may be in the chorus, but she isn’t like those girls.”

“Poor old Bill!” said Lucille. “I’m awfully sorry, but it’s no use not facing facts. You know perfectly well that the reputation of the hotel is the thing father cares more about than anything else in the world, and that this is going to make him furious with all the chorus-girls in creation. It’s no good trying to explain to him that your Mabel is in the chorus but not of the chorus, so to speak.”

“Deuced well put!” said Archie, approvingly. “You’re absolutely right. A chorus-girl by the river’s brim, so to speak, a simple chorus-girl is to him, as it were, and she is nothing more, if you know what I mean.”

“So now,” said Lucille, “having shown you that the imbecile scheme which you concocted with my poor well-meaning husband is no good at all, I will bring you words of cheer. Your own original plan—of getting your Mabel a part in a comedy—was always the best one. And you can do it. I wouldn’t have broken the bad news so abruptly if I hadn’t had some consolation to give you afterwards. I met Reggie van Tuyl just now, wandering about as if the cares of the world were on his shoulders, and he told me that he was putting up most of the money for a new play that’s going into rehearsal right away. Reggie’s an old friend of yours. All you have to do is to go to him and ask him to use his influence to get your Mabel a small part. There’s sure to be a maid or something with only a line or two that won’t matter.”

“A ripe scheme!” said Archie. “Very sound and fruity!”

The cloud did not lift from Bill’s corrugated brow.

“That’s all very well,” he said. “But you know what a talker Reggie is. He’s an obliging sort of chump, but his tongue’s fastened on at the middle and waggles at both ends. I don’t want the whole of New York to know about my engagement, and have somebody spilling the news to father, before I’m ready.”

“That’s all right,” said Lucille. “Archie can speak to him. There’s no need for him to mention your name at all. He can just say there’s a girl he wants to get a part for. You would do it, wouldn’t you, angel-face?”

“Like a bird, queen of my soul.”

“Then that’s splendid. You’d better give Archie that photograph of Mabel to give to Reggie, Bill.”

“Photograph?” said Bill. “Which photograph? I have twenty-four!”

Archie found Reggie van Tuyl brooding in a window of his club that looked over Fifth Avenue. Reggie was a rather melancholy young man who suffered from elephantiasis of the bank-roll and the other evils that arise from that complaint. Gentle and sentimental by nature, his sensibilities had been much wounded by contact with a sordid world; and the thing that had first endeared Archie to him was the fact that the latter, though chronically hard-up, had never made any attempt to borrow money from him. Reggie would have parted with it on demand, but it had delighted him to find that Archie seemed to take a pleasure in his society without having any ulterior motives. He was fond of Archie, and also of Lucille; and their happy marriage was a constant source of gratification to him.

For Reggie was a sentimentalist. He would have liked to live in a world of ideally united couples, himself ideally united to some charming and affectionate girl. But, as a matter of cold fact, he was a bachelor, and most of the couples he knew were veterans of several divorces. In Reggie’s circle,