II
Nothing spoils a tête-à-tête chat between two newly-made friends more than a disposition towards reticence on the part of the senior of the pair: and it was fortunate therefore, that, by the time he found himself seated opposite to George in his study, the heady influence of Zane Grey and the rather generous potations in which he had indulged during dinner had brought Sigsbee H. Waddington to quite a reasonably communicative mood. He had reached the stage when men talk disparagingly about their wives. He tapped George on the knee, informed him three times that he liked his face, and began.
“You married, Winch?”
“Finch,” said George.
“How do you mean, Finch?” asked Mr. Waddington, puzzled.
“My name is Finch.”
“What of it?”
“You called me Winch.”
“Why?”
“I think you thought it was my name.”
“What was?”
“Winch.”
“You said just now it was Finch.”
“Yes, it is. I was saying. …”
Mr. Waddington tapped him on the knee once more.
“Young man,” he said, “pull yourself together. If your name is Finch, why pretend that it is Winch? I don’t like this shiftiness. It does not come well from a Westerner. Leave this petty shilly-shallying to Easterners like that vile rabble of widow-and-orphan oppressors upstairs, all of whom have got incipient Bright’s Disease. If your name is Pinch, admit it like a man. Let your yea be yea and your nay be nay,” said Mr. Waddington a little severely, holding a match to the fountain-pen which, as will happen to the best of us in moments of emotion, he had mistaken for his cigar.
“As a matter of fact, I’m not,” said George.
“Not what?”
“Married.”
“I never said you were.”
“You asked me if I was.”
“Did I?”
“Yes.”
“You’re sure of that?” said Mr. Waddington keenly.
“Quite. Just after we sat down, you asked me if I was married.”
“And your reply was … ?”
“No.”
Mr. Waddington breathed a sigh of relief.
“Now we have got it straight at last,” he said, “and why you beat about the bush like that, I cannot imagine. Well, what I say to you, Pinch—and I say it very seriously as an older, wiser, and better-looking man—is this.” Mr. Waddington drew thoughtfully at the fountain-pen for a moment. “I say to you, Pinch, be very careful, when you marry, that you have money of your own. And, having money of your own, keep it. Never be dependent on your wife for the occasional little sums which even the most prudent man requires to see him through the day. Take my case. When I married, I was a wealthy man. I had money of my own. Lots of it. I was beloved by all, being generous to a fault. I bought my wife—I am speaking now of my first wife—a pearl necklace that cost fifty thousand dollars.”
He cocked a bright eye at George, and George, feeling that comment was required, said that it did him credit.
“Not credit,” said Mr. Waddington. “Cash. Cold cash. Fifty thousand dollars of it. And what happened? Shortly after I married again I lost all my money through unfortunate speculations on the Stock Exchange and became absolutely dependent on my second wife. And that is why you see me today, Winch, a broken man. I will tell you something, Pinch—something no one suspects and something which I have never told anybody else and wouldn’t be telling you now if I didn’t like your face. … I am not master in my own home!”
“No?”
“No. Not master in my own home. I want to live in the great, glorious West, and my second wife insists on remaining in the soul-destroying East. And I’ll tell you something else.” Mr. Waddington paused and scrutinised the fountain-pen with annoyance. “This darned cigar won’t draw,” he said petulantly.
“I think it’s a fountain-pen,” said George.
“A fountain-pen?” Mr. Waddington, shutting one eye, tested this statement and found it correct. “There!” he said, with a certain moody satisfaction. “Isn’t that typical of the East? You ask for cigars and they sell you fountain-pens. No honesty, no sense of fair trade.”
“Miss Waddington was looking very charming at dinner, I thought,” said George, timidly broaching the subject nearest his heart.
“Yes, Pinch,” said Mr. Waddington, resuming his theme, “my wife oppresses me.”
“How wonderfully that bobbed hair suits Miss Waddington.”
“I don’t know if you noticed a pie-faced fellow with an eyeglass and a toothbrush moustache at dinner? That was Lord Hunstanton. He keeps telling me things about etiquette.”
“Very kind of him,” hazarded George.
Mr. Waddington eyed him in a manner that convinced him that he had said the wrong thing.
“What do you mean, kind of him? It’s officious and impertinent. He is a pest,” said Mr. Waddington. “They wouldn’t stand for him in Arizona. They would put hydrophobia skunks in his bed. What does a man need with etiquette? As long as a man is fearless and upstanding and can shoot straight and look the world in the eye, what does it matter if he uses the wrong fork?”
“Exactly.”
“Or wears the wrong sort of hat?”
“I particularly admired the hat which Miss Waddington was wearing when I first saw her,” said George. “It was of some soft material and of a light brown colour and. …”
“My wife—I am still speaking of my second wife. My first, poor soul, is dead—sicks this Hunstanton guy on to me, and for financial reasons, darn it, I am unable to give him the good soak on the nose to which all my better instincts urge me. And guess what she’s got into her head now.”
“I can’t imagine.”
“She wants Molly to marry the fellow.”
“I should not advise that,” said George seriously. “No, no, I am strongly opposed to that. So many of these Anglo-American marriages turn out unhappily.”
“I am a man of broad sympathies and a very acute sensibility,” began Mr. Waddington, apropos, apparently, of nothing.
“Besides,” said George, “I did not like the man’s looks.”
“What man?”
“Lord Hunstanton.”
“Don’t talk of that guy! He gives me a pain in the neck.”
“Me, too,” said George. “And I was saying. …”
“Shall I tell you something?” said Mr. Waddington.
“What?”
“My second wife—not my first—wants Molly to marry him. Did you notice him at dinner?”
“I did,” said George patiently. “And I did not like his looks. He looked to me cold and sinister, the sort of man who might break the heart of an impulsive young girl. What Miss Waddington wants, I feel convinced, is a husband who would give up everything for her—a man who would sacrifice his heart’s desire to bring one smile to her face—a man who would worship her, set her in a shrine, make it his only aim in life to bring her sunshine and happiness.”
“My wife,” said Mr. Waddington, “is much too stout.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Much too stout.”
“Miss Waddington, if I may say so, has a singularly beautiful figure.”
“Too much starchy food, and no exercise—that’s the trouble. What my wife needs is a year on a ranch, riding over the prairies in God’s sunshine.”
“I happened to catch sight of Miss Waddington the other day in riding costume. I thought it suited her admirably. So many girls look awkward in riding-breeches, but Miss Waddington was charming. The costume seemed to accentuate what I might describe as that strange boyish jauntiness of carriage which, to my mind, is one of Miss Waddington’s chief. …”
“And I’ll have her doing it before long. As a married man, Winch—twice married, but my first wife, poor thing, passed away some years back—let me tell you something. To assert himself with his wife, to bend her to his will, if I may put it that way, a man needs complete financial independence. It is no use trying to bend your wife to your will when five minutes later you have got to try and wheedle twenty-five cents out of her for a cigar. Complete financial independence is essential, Pinch, and that is what I am on the eve of achieving. Some little time back, having raised a certain sum of money—we need not go into the methods which I employed to do so—I bought a large block of stock in a Hollywood Motion Picture Company. Have you ever heard of the Finer and Better Motion Picture Company of Hollywood, Cal.? Let me tell you that you will. It is going to be big, and I shall very shortly make an enormous fortune.”
“Talking of the motion-pictures,” said George, “I do not deny that many of the women engaged in that industry are superficially attractive, but what I do maintain is that they lack Miss Waddington’s intense purity of expression. To me Miss Waddington seems like some. …”
“I shall clean up big. It is only a question of time.”
“The first thing anyone would notice on seeing Miss Waddington. …”
“Thousands and thousands of dollars. And then. …”
“A poet has spoken of a young girl as ‘standing with reluctant feet where the brook and river meet. …’ ”
Mr. Waddington shook his head.
“It isn’t only meat. What causes the real trouble is the desserts. It stands to reason that if a woman insists on cramming herself with rich stuff like what we were having tonight she is bound to put on weight. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a hundred times. …”
What Mr. Waddington was about to say for the hundred and first time must remain one of the historic mysteries. For, even as he drew in breath the better to say it, the door opened and a radiant vision appeared. Mr. Waddington stopped in mid-sentence, and George’s heart did three back-somersaults and crashed against his front teeth.
“Mother sent me down to see what had become of you,” said Molly.
Mr. Waddington got about halfway towards a look of dignity.
“I am not aware, my dear child,” he said, “that anything has ‘become of me.’ I merely snatched the opportunity of having a quiet talk with this young friend of mine from the West.”
“Well, you can’t have quiet talks with your young friends when you’ve got a lot of important people to dinner.”
“Important people!” Mr. Waddington snorted sternly. “A bunch of super-fatted bits of bad news! In God’s country they would be lynched on sight.”
“Mr. Brewster Bodthorne has been asking for you particularly. He wants to play checkers.”
“Hell,” said Mr. Waddington, with the air of quoting something out of Dante, “is full of Brewster Bodthornes.”
Molly put her arms round her father’s neck and kissed him fondly—a proceeding which drew from George a low, sharp howl of suffering like the bubbling cry of some strong swimmer in his agony. There is a limit to what the flesh can bear.
“Darling, you must be good. Up you go at once and be very nice to everybody. I’ll stay here and entertain Mr.—”
“His name is Pinch,” said Mr. Waddington, rising reluctantly and making for the door. “I met him out on the sidewalk where men are men. Get him to tell you all about the West. I can’t remember when I’ve ever heard a man talk so arrestingly. Mr. Winch has held me spellbound. Positively spellbound. And my name,” he concluded, a little incoherently, groping for the door-handle, “is Sigsbee Horatio Waddington and I don’t care who knows it.”