It was at this precise moment, when poor Mrs. Idiot was beginning to despair of getting any advice of value from her husband, that the telephone-bell rang, and the Idiot rose up to answer the call.
"h.e.l.lo!" he said.
"Oh! h.e.l.lo, old man!" he added. "That you? Glad to see you."
"Yes," he continued, after a pause. "Of course we expect you."
"Seven o"clock sharp," he remarked, a moment later. "You"ll surely be here?" Then after a second pause, he added:
"Good! You can stay all night if you wish; we"ve plenty of room.
Good-bye."
[Ill.u.s.tration: ""WHO WAS IT?" ASKED MRS. IDIOT"]
"Who was it?" asked Mrs. Idiot, as the Idiot hung up the receiver of the telephone.
"The Poet," replied the Idiot. "He wanted to know at what hour dinner was."
"Oh, dear!" cried Mrs. Idiot. "Why didn"t you tell him the dinner isn"t for to-night, but to-morrow night?"
"Didn"t need to, my dear," said the Idiot, lighting a cigarette. "We"ve made a slight mistake. You invited these people, it now appears, for the twenty-ninth."
"Certainly," said Mrs. Idiot.
"Well, my love," said the Idiot, with an affectionate glance, "to-day is the--ah--the twenty-eighth."
Mrs. Idiot drew a sigh of relief.
"My!" she cried, "what a blessing! I wonder how I got so mixed!"
"It"s economy, perhaps," suggested the Idiot. "If you will insist on buying out-of-date diaries and last year"s calendars at bargain-counters because they are cheap, I don"t really see how you can expect to keep up with the times."
Mrs. Idiot laughed heartily. Her relief of mind was unmistakable.
"What would you have done, John, if this had really been the night?" she asked later.
"Oh, I don"t know," said the Idiot. "I think I should have taken you to New York to dinner, and bluffed our guests into believing they had come up on the wrong night. It is very easy for a host to put his guests in the wrong if he wants to. I don"t, but if I must, I must."
As it was, the family dinner that night was a great success in spite of the absence of the cook, because Mrs. Idiot, who is an expert with the chafing-dish, found several odds and ends in the late cook"s domains, which, under her expert manipulation, became dishes which the Idiot said afterwards "remained long in the memory without proving too permanent a tax upon the digestion."
V
ON THE MAINTENANCE OF AN ATTIC
The Idiot had been laid up for a week. That is to say, he was too indisposed to attend to business at his office, and the family physician thought it would be a good idea if his patient would be content to remain quietly indoors for a little while. To this the Idiot cheerfully consented.
"If there is one thing that I can do to perfection," he said, "it is resting. Some men are born leisurely, some achieve leisure, and some are discharged by their employers. I belong to the first two cla.s.ses. I can never become one of the third cla.s.s, because, being my own employer, I am naturally pleased with myself, and am not likely to dispense with my own services."
And so he stayed at home, and for a week pottered about the house, as he put it, and he had a glorious time.
"What are you going to do with yourself this morning, dear?" asked Mrs.
Idiot on the morning of the first day. "I"ve got to go to market, and there are one or two other little things to be attended to which will keep me out for some hours. Do you think you can amuse yourself while I am out?"
"Well, I don"t know," said the Idiot. "I can try. Of course, you know, my dear, that I am a good deal of a baby yet. However, if you can trust me to stay all by my lonesome for two or three hours I"ll try to behave.
I promise not to take the piano apart, and I vow I won"t steal any jam, and I sha"n"t float hair-brushes in the bath-tub pretending that they are armored cruisers looking for Spaniards, and I"ll try to be good, but I can"t make any promises."
Mrs. Idiot smiled, as an indulgent guardian should, and went forth. The Idiot stayed at home and enjoyed himself. What he did is perhaps best indicated by his remarks some time later at a Sunday-night tea at which Mr. and Mrs. Pedagog, and Mr. Brief, the lawyer, were present.
"Mrs. Pedagog," said the Idiot, "did you ever have an attic?"
"A what?" demanded the Schoolmaster, naturally somewhat nonplussed.
"An attic," said the Idiot. "A favored spot wherein to potter, to root, to rummage."
"Why, yes," said Mrs. Pedagog, after a moment of deliberation. "I have had an attic, but it never seemed to me to be a particularly interesting spot. I"ve used it as a sort of store-room for things I didn"t know what to do with."
"Useless things," suggested Mr. Pedagog.
"Entirely so," acquiesced the good lady.
"Then if they are useless, why keep them?" queried the Idiot. "Useless things might better be thrown away than stored away even in an attic."
"Oh, as for that," rejoined Mrs. Pedagog, "they were useless in the sense that there was nothing I could do with them, and yet there was generally some quality of a.s.sociation or something about them that so appealed to me that I couldn"t quite throw them away, or even bring myself to give them away."
"That is the idea," said the Idiot. "One"s cherished possessions are often stored away up-stairs and forgotten, and then sometimes years after you"ll go rummaging about the house for lack of some other employment; an old trunk, a wooden box, will be unearthed in the attic, and then what a flood of memories will come rushing back over you as the long-forgotten objects come to light, one by one."
"I have had much the same experience," said Mr. Brief, "in what I might term my professional attic. We keep a room for the storage of old papers, and strange exhibits in litigation turn up there frequently that bring back old-time lawsuits in a most interesting fashion."
"I suppose, then," observed Mr. Pedagog, with a shrug of tolerant contempt, "that the attic is, in your estimation, a sort of repository for family archives."
[Ill.u.s.tration: ""I SET OFF A GIANT CRACKER UNDER HIS CHAIR""]
"That"s about it," said the Idiot. "You ought to see mine. There are archives from the Ark in mine. I"ve got all the portraits of my unpopular relatives up there, and such a gallery of smug-looking individuals you never saw. There"s Uncle Jedediah, who hated me because I set off a giant cracker under his chair one Fourth of July, and who from that day vowed I was born to be hanged; and who sent me a crayon portrait of himself the following Christmas--"
"That seems to me to show a kindly feeling, not one of hatred, towards you," suggested Mrs. Pedagog.
[Ill.u.s.tration: ""WOULD HANG THAT PORTRAIT UPON THE WALL OF MY BEDROOM""]
"Oh no," said the Idiot, with a laugh. "You never knew my dear old Uncle Jed. He sent it in a pure spirit of revenge. He had to send something, and he picked out the one thing he had reason to know I didn"t want; and he was likewise aware that my mother had a sense of the proprieties and would hang that portrait upon the wall of my bedroom, whence it could stare at me, disapprovingly, forevermore. Still, when I became the head of my own house, I did not take a mean-spirited revenge on Uncle Jedediah"s portrait by selling it to one of the comic papers with a joke under it; I gave it the nicest, warmest, most comfortable spot I could find for it under a pile of old magazines in the attic, and the other day when it came to light again I greeted it with an affectionate smile; and the picture of the old gentleman rising hurriedly from over the giant cracker on that long-forgotten Fourth, brought vividly to mind by the portrait, brought tears to my eyes, I laughed so heartily. It really was very affecting."
Mr. Pedagog gazed at the Idiot fondly.
"You are a great boy," he said. "You"d never suspect it, but I had a similar case of Uncle Jed, but the years I have lived since have softened my feelings so that I remember my old relative with a certain degree of affection."