TUT, TUT! MR. TUTT
Agree with thine adversary quickly, whiles thou art in the way with him; lest at any time the adversary deliver thee to the judge, and the judge deliver thee to the officer, and thou be cast into prison. Verily I say unto thee, Thou shalt by no means come out thence, till thou hast paid the uttermost farthing.
I
There are some people who simply can’t learn anything by experience. I am thinking particularly of Mrs. Edna [Pierpont] Pumpelly, née Haskins, wife of Vice-President Pumpelly of the Cuban Crucible Steel Company, formerly of Athens, Ohio, and now of East Seventy-third Street, New York, New York. One would have thought that after her celebrated run-in with her next-door neighbor, Mrs. Rutherford Wells, in which the latter simply put it all over her, she would have acquired some sense. But she didn’t seem to. When Lackawanna and Bethlehem began to dally with “Cruce,” as they call it on the big board, and it jumped to 791, the money went to her head and stayed there, filling that receptacle so completely that there wasn’t room in it for anything else. In a word, she carried her nose in the air. Blood will tell: Edna had too many red corpuscles to live in New York.
You remember, perhaps, how Mrs. Rutherford Wells—the Mrs. Wells—having snubbed Mrs. Pumpelly in a social way, had unintentionally blocked the street with her motor; and how Edna had taken that opportunity to get even by having her summoned to the police court for violating Article II, Section 2, of the traffic regulations. How, further—the firm of Tutt & Tutt having been retained by Mrs. Wells to defend her person and protect her rights in said matter—Mr. Ephraim Tutt had demonstrated most effectively that Edna was in no position to complain about other folks, by proceeding to plaster her all over with summonses herself for a whole galaxy of criminal acts, from illegally keeping Pomeranians and cockatoos down to and including having her garbage pail filled in an improper manner. Thirteen separate and distinct crimes did he pin on her, thus establishing successfully and indisputably that most perfect of all defenses known to the female of the species—“You’re another.” Edna threw up the sponge, called it off, withdrew her summons and swore that should she ever get into any such mess again she would herself retain Mr. Tutt.[1] But Mrs. Rutherford Wells continued to ignore her. Somehow Edna’s money did not seem to take her so far, at that. But as it went to her head, the iron entered her soul. She became, in a word, meaner than ever.
That was the difference between her and Pierpont—if that was in fact his real name, as some were unkind enough to hint had not formerly been the case, at least not out in Athens. “Pellatiah,” they said, is what his mother had told the minister to dub him. Down in Wall Street “P. P.” had the reputation of being a good old scout. It was Edna who put on all the dog—threw the Pomeranian, so to speak. She’d nothing else to do, poor thing. But P. P. had to work just as hard in New York as he had in Athens. He kept just as long hours, slept a good deal less and didn’t begin to eat near so hearty as out to home, where the hired girl had used to plunk the vittles right down on the table and they had all helped themselves. No, sir! Somehow it didn’t seem the same, even if they did have a French chef—caneton au Chambertin, risotto de volaille à l’orientale, cœur d’artichaut aux pointes d’asperges, carré d’agneau, pommes Sarladaises. Nothin’ to it! Give him a couple of spareribs with plenty of brown juice and a stack of spuds, and just watch him!
A regular fellow, Pierpont, or Pellatiah, or P. P., or whatever you may choose to call him; and whenever he went back to Athens all the boys turned out in full regalia and gave him a big night, for he was Past Grand Patriarch of the local lodge of the Brotherhood of Abyssinian Mysteries and of that elevation known as a Sacred Camel of King Menelik. He claimed he liked a place where you could unbutton your vest and enjoy diaphragmatic comfort. Vests annoyed him anyway. Home, he got ’em only because they came with the suit. Here, the celebrated Mr. Jacob Erdman, Jr., son of the even more illustrious Mr. Jacob Erdman, of Erdman, Erdman & Erdman, Artists in Clothes for Men, made him order them. He now had twenty-nine, each considerably too tight and getting tighter day by day—the caneton au Chambertin maybe, or possibly the volaille à l’orientale. He looked so sloppy, Edna said, that he ought to be ashamed of himself, when he had a vallay an’ everything. P. P. inevitably retorted that he hadn’t asked for a vallay, didn’t want any vallay, and would be eternally condemned if he’d have any such jackanapes capering around him when he was bare-naked. All the same, she got one for him—to press the twenty-nine waistcoats and make sure he was properly shaved.
The vallay’s name was Beaton. He was young, English, respectful, came from Wapping-on-Valley in Devon, had volunteered with the First Hundred Thousand, been gassed at Ypres and had gone into valetry because he wasn’t fit for anything else. P. P., having given him the once-over, strove vainly to get used to Beaton’s “Yes, sir; thank you, sir,” and “Very good, sir,” and “Your bawth is ready, sir,” found that it was no use, decided the boy was all right—“quite all right,” he almost said—and proceeded to take him into his confidence.
“Look here, Beaton,” he had declared from the folds of the Turkish towel in which he was draped, much as Jove might have spoken from the clouds of Olympus, “you and I have got to understand each other. That mayn’t be easy, considering our lingo is so different. I never went to school, an’ you did. Still, I guess you can get the hang of what I have to say.”
“I’ll try to, sir,” replied the bewildered Beaton. “Thank you, sir.”
“Well, in the first place, for God’s sake stop saying ‘Thank you, sir,’ every time I look at you. My face ain’t any Christmas present. And cut out about ninety-seven out of every hundred ‘sirs.’ I ain’t used to it, an’ it gives me an inferiority complex. You can Mr. Pumpelly me as much as you like, only I ain’t stuck on that, either. Plain ‘yes’ and ‘no’ is good enough for me, see? Plain speech for plain people.
“Second, I don’t need any man to help me put my clothes on, and I don’t want one hangin’ round me. Looks like, however, I’ve got no choice in the matter. The missus has hired a housekeeper and you come with the rest of the outfit. I don’t mind payin’ you—not at all. But I don’t want you to bother me any more than necessary. I can shave, clean my teeth, pare my fingernails, gargle my throat and put on my socks without assistance. I can even, under favorable circumstances, draw my own bath and brush my own hair. The way you hold my pants for me to jump into makes me nervous. I’m not trained to it. I like old soft things that fit into me; ones I know the holes and creases in. I hate vests—waistcoats, I s’pose you call ’em. I like to be comfortable. I can’t work if I ain’t. Get me? Money in my pocket to be in the old duds!
“Now then, the missus insists on my havin’ you, and I like you personally all right. You’re a well-meaning young feller in spite of your frozen face. But you’ll get thawed out over here soon enough. Let’s come to an agreement. You can go through all the motions, dancing around outside my door and all that, but you leave me alone, see? Let me paddle my own canoe. You can lay out all the underclothes you want, by gosh, so long’s I don’t have to wear ’em! You can press pants ten hours a day, so be I don’t have to put ’em on. The missus wants me to be dolled up like a swell, with a fresh suit every morning, a chrysanthemum in my buttonhole, a stovepipe, yellow gloves, and a gold-headed cane. Can you see me? I s’pose I’ve gotta have the clothes—yes. But so long as she can come up here and look in my closet and see fifty suits hanging there and a hundred pairs of boots in a line on the floor, look in my bureau and see a big pile of merino drawers and undershirts, a thousand pairs of silk socks, five thousand ties and a million handkerchiefs, she’ll be satisfied. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. I may have to own the clothes, but I don’t have to wear ’em. Now I’ll buy the clothes, you make a noise like a vallay—the louder the better—but it stops right there. I’ll own the clothes, but you’ll wear ’em. Understand me?”
“Yes, sir; thank you, sir!” answered the valet, standing at attention.
“What did I tell you?” roared P. P.
“Yes, Mr. Pum—pum—pelly.” replied Beaton quickly.
“That’s better!” nodded his employer. “Now no more of that bawth-is-ready stuff. Hand me down that baggy old gray coat and pants and give me a pair of old shoes.”
“Shall you have the waistcoat?” inquired Beaton politely from the recesses of the closet.
“No!” shouted P. P. “I don’t wear ’em. I’m too fat. They interfere with my circulation. Bad for my health.”
And he winked at the imperturbable Britisher as he emerged.
“What’s your name, son?”
“James William Beaton, sir.”
“I’ll call you Jimmy.”
“Very good, sir.”
“For God’s sake, learn to say ‘all right.’”
“Right-o!” chirped Beaton, falling into the spirit of the game. “May I ask if you will ’ave your ’andkerchiefs perfumed, sir?”
The vice-president of Cuban Cruce paused in the act of drawing on his breeches.
“Yes,” he replied, “scent me good and strong. Fill me up with the breeziest stuff you can buy and then step on it. It may help us get by the old lady.”
Beaton soon became letter-perfect in his new duties. P. P.’s wardrobe bulged with beautifully hanging suits, his shoes shone in lustrous rows, ties of many colors filled his bureau drawers. The young valet seemed to be always engaged in pressing his master’s clothes. Whenever Edna poked her head into P. P.’s room there was always a nice new suit on the back of a chair, with a pair of suspenders carefully attached to the trousers, and a display of fresh underclothes and neckwear like that in the window of a Bond Street haberdasher. And over all there breathed a scent like the odors of Edom, which was as incense divine to Edna’s snobbish soul. P. P. was so pleased with the success of the scheme that he conceived a very friendly feeling for Beaton and used to ring for him while dressing in order to talk to him. On these occasions P. P. usually ended by presenting the valet with something from his overload of belongings—an article of apparel or disused piece of jewelry.
However, we perceive that entirely too much attention is being accorded here to P. P. This story relates not to him but to his wife, a very different sort of fish.
She was in fact just the opposite from Pumpelly, for she was ashamed of everything about herself that was really decent and worth-while, which, we may add, wasn’t much. Her aim and ambition were to make everybody think that she was something that she wasn’t, and, as she was so obviously what she was, she made a miserable failure of it. In a word, though she lived on Seventy-third Street, she never got socially beyond Canal. The real swells had no use for her. They would have stood for P. P., maybe, because whatever he may have been he was real; but not for Edna, because she was a fake. So she played the great lady to trades-people, elevator men, and waiters, paying them to pretend they thought her a leader of fashion and taking out her chagrin on her servants, seamstresses, and other helpless people about her who could not stand up to her without losing their means of livelihood. She took a special dislike to Beaton, laying it up against him that he didn’t make Pierpont more presentable. She did not know exactly what was wrong, but she was conscious that something was rotten in her husband’s sartorial estate. She blamed Beaton for it. That was what they paid him ninety dollars a month for, wasn’t it? With all those suits of clothes hanging up in the closet, she should have thought he could have managed to find something more o-fay than that wretched old moth-eaten gray suit P. P. had brought along with him from Athens five years ago. A waste of good money! The man didn’t know his business.
Pumpelly insisted that he had particularly asked Beaton for the gray suit because he liked it himself. The boy was all right—“H’m! Quite all right.” Surely she had noticed how industrious and attentive he was. Edna had the decency to acknowledge that the vallay seemed busy enough. That wasn’t the point. Did the fellow know what was what? For instance, she’d never seen any other gentleman wearing a white tie with a dinner jacket. P. P. gazed blandly at her. She hadn’t! Well, that just showed! She could put her mind at rest and let it go to sleep. Beaton had all the books on etiquette beat a mile. He was, P. P. opined, the anonymous author of What the Man Will Wear. This quieted her for a time.
Came then that awful evening—Edna swore she’d never get over it as long as she lived, never!—when they went to Mrs. Morganthaler’s evening reception, and she discovered that he had on congress boots. That finished her. He must get rid of that man. He must get rid of that man! That was all there was to it! She’d never have the courage to look Mrs. Morganthaler in the face again. P. P. strove to pacify her with marked unsuccess. Her pride—it was her pride that had been hurt.
Pierpont found himself in an awkward position. If he admitted that Beaton was in no way responsible and that the congress boots were his own idea, he would pay the penalty of his uxoriousness and the vials of her wrath would be emptied down his neck. But if he put it on the valet the innocent would suffer for the guilty. So, like the honest chap he was, he told her the truth. Beaton had laid out his full-dress clothes, including pumps; and he, her faithless Pierpont, had deliberately kicked ’em under the bed and not bothered to change his feet at all. What was the use? Just goin’ over for a few minutes to Morganthaler’s! It wasn’t a dancing party. Beaton wasn’t to blame at all. He besought her to promise that she would take his word for it and leave the poor feller be. She promised, because she wanted P. P. to give her a new thirteen-hundred-dollar mink coat, but in her secret soul she vowed to herself that she would “get” Beaton the first chance she had. There was something about him that wasn’t right. She only half believed Pierpont about the pumps. He was trying to shield the man for some reason. Why?
Suddenly she saw it all! They were working together against her. A conspiracy! P. P. paid Beaton to let him wear what he chose! Beaton was a traitor to the cause of her social progress. The nerve of that man! What was a vallay for but to see that one’s husband put on the right sort of clothes before he went out? The trouble was he was too young; didn’t have enough authority. She must get a man—a big, heavy man—who, if Pierpont rebelled, could shove him into a corner and willy-nilly put the right pants on him. But first she must get rid of this one. She began to hate Beaton. He had been unfaithful to her; he had got her in wrong at Mrs. Morganthaler’s; he was conspiring against her, no doubt stirring up trouble with the other servants—and she was conscious that he scorned her. That was the real secret of her venom. He was always respectful, but he never treated her as if she were what she paid him to pretend he thought she was.
But when she asked Pierpont to dismiss him he protested that Beaton was an excellent valet and perfectly satisfactory. He couldn’t dismiss a man without cause. She begged him to do so, as a favor to her; but he was stubborn about it, and at length angrily refused. She could mind her own business. Edna had occasionally seen P. P. like that out in Athens, and the recollection of what had happened was not pleasant. She could not afford to have anything so undignified happen here in New York. So she subsided, nursing her hatchet. Then Cruce got a big contract for steel plates for a new fleet of Clyde-built steamships, and P. P. had to run over to Glasgow for a few weeks. Her opportunity! She did not dare fire Beaton right off the bat, but she made up her mind to get the goods on him and give him the sack before Pierpont came back.
Together, she and the housekeeper went on a still hunt to Beaton’s room on his afternoon out. It was a dreary enough place, seven by ten, with hardly enough room for a cot bed, a bureau, and a wash-stand. No chair. The housekeeper had said chairs gave servants the habit of sitting in their rooms, which was bad and used up electricity. Let them go to bed and get their rest so they could properly do their work. There were two photographs on the bureau: one of a middle-aged woman with tired eyes; the other one of a young girl with high cheek-bones and a “bang.” A hairbrush, a broken comb, and an alarm clock were the only other visible evidences of crime.
“I thought maybe we’d find he’d been smokin’ his old pipe up here,” sniffed the housekeeper. “Most of ’em do. I don’t allow it. They can go outside if they want to smoke.”
Mrs. Pumpelly shrugged her shoulders.
“We ain’t through yet,” she replied, pulling open the top drawer. “Gracious me! I should say not!” she added triumphantly. “Look at here! If that ain’t Pierpont Pumpelly’s cigarette-case I’ll eat my hat! And there’s the watch fob that belonged to my Great-uncle Moses! Well, I never! The man’s a thief, that’s what he is! It was worth while coming up here! I wonder how many other things he’s taken!”
A pasteboard box in the back of the drawer yielded an old-fashioned gold-plated watch, a heavy chain with an agate charm, two wiggly scarfpins, a pair of coral cuff-buttons, a single one of onyx, and a pair of paste studs—all easily identified as belonging to the Athens period of their existence.
“Got him!” hissed Edna through her teeth. “Miserable thief! I knew he was crooked!”
Then she pulled out the other drawers. The first contained several new suits of clothes; the second, socks, silk shirts, and pajamas, together with haberdashery of the most expensive sort.
“Ain’t it awful?” she gasped. “Those shirts must have cost at least twenty dollars apiece. I’m not going to look a step farther. Anybody can swear to those bein’ Mr. Pumpelly’s things. You go right down and call up the police station—the one where I gave the captain that humidor with all those cigars last Christmas—and have him send an officer to arrest Beaton the minute he comes back. I wonder what Mr. Pumpelly will think now! A fine return for all our kindness!”
The housekeeper vacillated for a moment between sympathy and discretion, for Beaton had always impressed her as an unusually honest young fellow, and it was possible that Mr. Pumpelly had given him the things—anyone could see that the jewelry was practically valueless. She was on the point of suggesting that possibly it was a bit rough to have him locked up without hearing what he had to say, but at the sight of Mrs. Pumpelly’s face she changed her mind.
“Very good, madam,” she said obediently.
That was how the great case of the People of the State of New York against James Beaton for grand larceny in the second degree had its inception—in the hatred, malice, and uncharitableness of Edna’s Pumpelly’s heart.
She had had one experience already, from which she had learned the undesirability of invoking the processes of the law against the rich and socially elect unless quite sure of one’s ground; but she had not yet discovered that the law is no respecter of persons, and it did not occur to her that in its eyes she and the man she now accused were equally entitled to its aid and protection. From her point of view, this man was only her servant, a dependent. She could no longer, it was true, order him to be lashed or bastinadoed by her other menials—although theoretically, perhaps, it might be inferred from Section 1054 of the New York Criminal Code that such a proceeding might still be countenanced, since it proclaimed manslaughter excusable “when committed in the lawful chastisement of a child or servant.” But all the same, she could have him locked up. That much at least was her inalienable right. Not even Pierpont could possibly criticise her for apprehending a thief, and it did away with the necessity of formally dismissing him and giving him a reference and all that bother.
Two plain-clothes men arrived in response to the housekeeper’s summons, and after having searched Beaton’s room thoroughly they arrested him as he was about to enter the house by the area entrance at half-past ten.
At first, although naturally indignant, he was inclined to take the matter as a joke. Mr. Pumpelly had given him all the things and would gladly say so. The officers, however, talked as if he were already convicted of being a thief, and this so got on his nerves that he gave them some back talk, as a result of which one of them punched him violently in the stomach. Agonized and bewildered, he was then taken in a police wagon to the night court and arraigned before a magistrate, who held him in three thousand dollars’ bail. The pain, the rough way in which he was shoved about, his ignorance of his rights confused and filled him with apprehension.
He was locked in a cell, where gradually his bodily misery gave place to torture of the mind. For he now for the first time realized to his horror that the only witness who could corroborate his explanation of the possession of the alleged stolen property had sailed for Europe, to be gone for an indefinite period. Even if in the end he should secure his liberty, what misery might he not be compelled to suffer in the meantime! Coffee and bread were given him in the morning, but after his sleepless night he was too wretched to eat. Sick with humiliation, stiff and unshaven, he shook his head when asked by the sergeant if there was anybody with whom he wished to communicate. But later on he recalled the gossip of the servants’ hall and the story of the affair in which Mrs. Wells had got the better of his mistress through the ingenuity of Tutt & Tutt.
II
“Mr. Tutt,” remarked Tutt as the senior partner of the firm paused at the door of his office and skilfully decorated the hat-tree with his stovepipe from a distance of seven feet, “I have news for thee.”
The office force of Tutt & Tutt could always tell the altitude of Mr. Ephraim Tutt’s psychological barometer by his ability to stand on the threshold of his room, send his tall hat spinning through the air and hang it on the top of the mahogany tree. When he could do that it showed, as Bonnie Doon asserted, that he was full of beans and that the devil had jolly well better keep his head down. The old lawyer stood now in the middle of the office, rubbing his hands together and smiling a good morning at them as benevolently as a Sunday-school superintendent about to announce a chicken-pie supper in the church vestry on Friday evening. Yet because he had hit the bull’s-eye with his hat, they all knew that underneath the benign exterior there was coursing through his arteries that extoplasmic ichor which at times made him act more like Pan or Puck than St. Thomas Aquinas or Cardinal Manning.
“Ha!” cried he, sweeping the assembled Tutt family from beneath his shaggy eyebrows, and scenting, like Job’s war horse, the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains, and the shouting. “What news, watchman, of the night?”
Then without more ado both partners simultaneously produced their joint and several implements of intellectual labor—Tutt his cigarette, Mr. Tutt his stogy—and therefrom arose the smoke of council. It was characteristic of them that in every aspect of their professional life their relations to one another, whether physical or psychologic, were inevitably the same. Thus Tutt prepared the cases and dished them up carefully for Mr. Tutt to try; and thus—when Mr. Tutt smoked, Tutt held the match. Accordingly, having on tiptoe assisted in lighting the sacred fire upon the altar of his partner’s mind, he applied the match to the end of his own cigarette and turned to the legal group about them, consisting of Miss Minerva Wiggin; Miss Sondheim, the stenographer; Ezra Scraggs, the alcoholic scrivener; the ubiquitous Mr. Bonright Doon, and Willie Toothaker, erstwhile office-boy, but now a near-lawyer on the point of taking his examination for admission to the bar.
“Yea, verily, and of a truth!” quoth Tutt, conscious that his words would arouse delight if not enthusiasm. “Lady Edna Pumpelly has been getting gay again.”
“You mean the one who got a summons for Mrs. Rutherford Wells for blocking the street with her motor?” asked Miss Wiggins reminiscently.
“The same!” replied Tutt with a grin. “You remember, of course, how we sent Bonnie up to her house and found she’d been consistently violating every ordinance passed by the city fathers since the town was bought from the Indians. Bonnie summoned her for over a dozen trifling offenses, and she lay down, dropped, reneged, or whatever the expression is, in a hurry! Tit for tat! Eh, Bonnie?”
The redoubtable Mr. Doon nodded carelessly.
“Tutt for Tutt, you mean,” he corrected. “She’s just an ostentatious idiot! But the old man’s all right—a good sort. I found out afterward he was a Sacred Camel. Gave me a shot of the best hooch I’ve had since Michaelmas.”
The dry lips of Scraggs clicked involuntarily.
“What’s Her Grace done now?” asked Mr. Tutt, twirling his swivel chair and then adjusting himself in the characteristic pose which he found most conducive to mental effort. “How has her individuality expressed itself this time?”
“By getting one of her menservants arrested for stealing a few old hand-me-downs, a tin watch, and some snide breastpins her husband gave him. She had it in for the man for some reason, and as soon as she found that this old junk was up in his room she sent for the cops, had him yanked to the police station and locked up—just like that! He was a pitiful sight to see, poor chap, this morning. They had treated him pretty rough; he was scared blue and was nearly all in. So I bailed him out and sent him over to the Commodore to get some breakfast; and, if I do say it, he was ready to kneel down and say his prayers to me. Beaton’s his name.”
“But where’s Pumpelly?” asked Mr. Tutt. “How could she get the man arrested unless her husband disclaimed giving him the clothes?”
“In Europe!” answered Tutt with a flourish.
Mr. Tutt gazed at Tutt incredulously.
“In Europe?” repeated Mr. Tutt.
“In EUROPE,” asseverated Tutt.
The elder partner swept his long legs from the desk and sprang to his feet with the agility of a two-year-old.
“Then, by Coke, Littleton, and Max D. Steuer,” he exclaimed, shaking his fist in the air above his head, “she hath digged a pit for herself into which she shall surely fall! What sort of person is this manservant?”
“I thought he was a corking good fellow!” answered Tutt. “Served in the ranks during the war, was gassed, and entered domestic service over here after his discharge because there was nothing else he was fit for. Had no object whatever to take any of those old duds. He was making ninety a month, sent seventy-five of it home to his old mater in Devon, is engaged to marry a girl from his home town as soon as they can save enough money to start ‘a public’ as he calls it, and is altogether the stuff you’d expect. In fact, he’s worth about ten thousand of Edna Pumpelly and some few of her husband.”
“But why did she do this?” demanded Mr. Tutt, his jaw stiffening in a way that boded no good to the Duchess of Athens, Ohio. “How could she do such a thing?”
“Just out of sheer cussedness,” replied Tutt. “She’s a cheap skate and a snob. This poor guy was, as she thought, her social inferior and she had it in for him probably because he didn’t kowtow to her enough.”
For a full half minute the senior partner of Tutt & Tutt stood in silent indignation; then the lines about his mouth softened, his face twisted itself into a whimsical smile, and he brought down his fist upon the desk so that every stogy in the box leaped for very joy.
“Won’t I everlastingly swangdangle that woman!” he cried.
“Do wha-a-t to her?” exclaimed his partner.
“Swangdangle her!” repeated the greater Tutt.
“Who ever heard of such a word!” grunted Tutt the lesser.
“Just because you never have” countered Mr. Tutt. “It’s from the—er—Aramaic.”
“More likely from the Eskimonian!”
“Look here, Tutt!” cried Mr. Tutt with sudden irascibility. “If you had a little more culture! Why don’t you educate yourself? Some day I’m going to write a book to be called Half Hours With the Best Dictionaries.”
“Humph!” grumbled Tutt suspiciously. “What does this swangdangle word mean?”
Mr. Tutt solemnly placed his right hand on the top of his partner’s head and turned the latter’s face upward toward his own.
“Don’t you know all-fired well what I’m going to do to her?” he demanded.
“Ye-e-es,” acknowledged Tutt. “I—guess—I do.”
“Well,” exclaimed Mr. Tutt enthusiastically, “that’s exactly what it means!”
III
Mrs. Pumpelly, having, as she supposed, in thus ordering the valet-varlet to prison, vindicated her importance in the eyes of her other domestics and vented her spleen upon her husband’s co-conspirator, began on second thought secretly to wish she had been a trifle less hasty. She had acted on the impulse to make a lordly gesture, but now she wondered whether it might not have been better to have consulted a lawyer before doing anything. She had no intention of going into any nasty police court herself—no, indeed!
However, she reassured herself, Simmons the butler could identify the objects found in Beaton’s room as belonging to her husband, and qualify as complainant on the theory that they were in his care and custody, and had been feloniously removed therefrom. That would let her out. All the same
A vague disquiet filled her ample bosom. What would happen next? Suppose by some mischance the valet were acquitted? Mightn’t he sue her for damages? She remembered the trouble she had got into in summoning Mrs. Wells; but, of course, that was different. This man was a nobody, and a thief at that. Nevertheless, as the hours passed on the day following Beaton’s arrest, and Simmons still absented himself, she began really to worry. It was annoying not to know just what Simmons was doing, how long he’d have to be away, how many times he’d have to go to court and all that. It might upset the house dreadfully to have him hanging about a police station all day long when she could not charge it as part of his time out; particularly on account of her bridge party next week to raise money for building the inns for Indigent Indians. Anyhow, there was no reason why Simmons shouldn’t have sent some word to relieve her anxiety.
To her exasperation he did not return until nearly six o’clock. They had kept him there, he ruefully explained, against his violent protest in order that he might make a statement to the deputy assistant district attorney in charge of those cases where the complainants were not represented by their own lawyers. Mrs. Pumpelly had not engaged any lawyer, so it had been necessary for him to wait to explain the matter to the district attorney, who had been very busy all morning and had gone out to lunch at a quarter to one and had not come back until long after three. The latter had then amused himself in trying a bigamy case in utter disregard of the butler’s convenience. Mr. Simmons consequently had not had any lunch at all! Worse still, after the conclusion of the bigamy case the district attorney had utterly disappeared, oblivious of the presence of Simmons.
“You mean that after keeping you there all day the man didn’t even take the trouble to speak to you?” demanded Edna.
“Exactly so, ma’am,” said Simmons in a faint voice. “’E hevidently forgot me hentire.”
“Well,” snapped Lady Pumpelly, “that’s a pretty how d’y’do! What happens now?”
“I don’t know,” confessed Simmons, whose dignity had suffered severely. “They all seem a very hordinary sort of people, madam. Very hordinary! They pay no hattention to one at all. Brush one aside, as one might say. I call it plain himpudent.”
“Where’s Beaton now?” inquired his mistress, drawing in her lips.
“I don’t know, madam. I didn’t lay heyes on ’im!”
“Simmons,” cried Edna wrathfully, “you’re a fool! Haven’t you any idea what’s got to be done next?”
“No, madam,” he replied. “But I ventured to hask one of the minor hofficials and ’e hinformed me that I had better return again to-morrow morning.”
It was at that point that Mrs. Pumpelly concluded to retain Tutt & Tutt right off and have them attend to the whole matter for her; but to her surprise and dismay when she telephoned to their office she was politely informed that they had already been retained upon the opposite side.
Beaton retain lawyers! And Tutt & Tutt at that! She cursed herself for her delay. The thing might prove serious. She could just as well have retained them herself before taking any steps whatever. Now she wished that she had. In genuine trepidation she called up her husband’s law firm, Edgerton & Edgerton, got Mr. Wilfred, the elder of the two brothers, neither of whom she liked, and explained the situation to him to the best of her ability. What should she do next? She couldn’t just let the thing go at loose ends! Mr. Edgerton was somewhat vague, the truth being that he had never been in a police court in his entire life. Neither, for that matter, had Mr. Winfred, his younger brother. They were—Edgerton & Edgerton—very high class and always went to lunch together at the Downtown Association on Cedar Street, where they could see other lawyers equally high class and be seen by them in return. They were the variety of Wall Street attorneys who wear dickies and tall hats and are supposed to sleep in them.
Mr. Wilfred “smeared” the unfortunate truth as well as he could and told Edna he’d take the matter up immediately. Then Brother Wilfred asked Brother Winfred what to do, and Brother Winfred asked him how the hell he should know, to which Brother Wilfred replied that there was no sense in being snorty about it, for P. Pumpelly was their chief client and Cuban Cruce their one best bet. In the end Brother Wilfred put on his tall hat and, swallowing his pride, went over to see Mr. Tutt, who received him kindly and informed him that Mrs. Pierpont Pumpelly’s impulsiveness would cost her exactly ten thousand dollars. This seemed very curious to Mr. Edgerton.
“But, sir,” protested the elegant but baffled lawyer, “you do not seem to understand the situation. It is my client who has had your client arrested for a criminal offense—grand larceny in fact. I am—h’m—not very familiar with such matters, but I suppose the easiest way to dispose of this unpleasant case is for your client to enter a plea of guilty and throw himself upon the mercy of my client and of the court.”
Mr. Tutt smiled amiably, tendering Wilfred a stogy, at which the latter shuddered.
“Undoubtedly,” he agreed, “that would be the easiest way to dispose of it—for you. But, unfortunately, from our point of view it would not accomplish the ends of justice. You say quite truthfully, Mr. Edgerton, that you are not very familiar with these matters. I do not wish to take any unfair advantage of you. Let me suggest that you retain some one who is familiar with criminal procedure to take charge of this case for you.”
“Thank you,” said Wilfred rather stiffly. “My office is quite capable of handling a simple case of theft. May I ask what date has been set for the hearing?”
“Next Tuesday, in the Fifty-seventh Street Magistrate’s Court,” affably replied Mr. Tutt. “Shall I meet you at Philippi?”
“Er—possibly,” stammered Wilfred, not entirely sure of the allusion. “At any rate we shall be represented by counsel.”
They shook hands formally.
“I wonder what he meant by saying it would cost Mrs. Pumpelly ten thousand dollars!” pondered the lawyer as he went down in the elevator.
It is certain that Edna Pumpelly had never heard of the verb “swangdangle.” It is even possible that nobody else ever did and that Mr. Tutt may have made it up. It may never become part of our national vocabulary until the publication of Ephraim Tutt’s Half Hours With the Best Dictionaries. But even if Edna had never heard of it, she certainly was everlastingly swangdangled to the end that she decreased markedly both in weight and cubic contents.
In the first place, she had always supposed that if one had a person arrested for a criminal offense, the police, somehow or other, saw to it that he was immediately sent away to prison. It was like calling in a plumber or a paper-hanger. You pressed the button, they did the rest. You had nothing more to think about except to pay the bill. So, here, you sent for a policeman and that was the end of it!
End of it! Many a night during the succeeding months Edna Pumpelly lay awake in her blue-silk bed wondering if the case of the People of the State of New York versus Beaton would ever end. For she had long since discovered to her disgust that when a person was arrested that was only the beginning of it. Mr. Wilfred Edgerton had explained fully, and with much decorously suppressed irritation, how—after he and his brother and their entire office staff had spent the greater part of a week briefing the law on the subject of grand and petty larceny, burden of proof, presumption of innocence, presumptions arising from possession and exclusive opportunity, reasonable cause, and the proper procedure in magistrates’ courts, and had personally appeared in support of Simmons and had waited, from nine in the morning until half-past twelve, to lay the whole case properly before the judge—that Mr. Tutt hadn’t even turned up at all! He had merely sent a casual and dilatory message that he was busy somewhere else. The judge had accordingly and with what seemed to Mr. Wilfred suspiciously like alacrity, put it over for two weeks, as Tutt & Tutt had requested. This had occurred four times! The Beaton case had, it appeared, simply played heck with the law offices of Edgerton & Edgerton. Mr. Tutt kept them marching like Humpty Dumpty up to Fifty-seventh Street and then marching back again—books, briefs, bags, papers, and all.
As for Simmons, it had destroyed his usefulness as a butler in toto. He had become an aged man, worn to a frazzle. Meantime Beaton had got another job—a very good one, it was said. He had gone to work for one Mr. Ephraim Tutt.
Thirteen weeks had now elapsed, with Edna Pumpelly on tenterhooks, and nothing whatever had happened. But then something happened with a vengeance! She was served with a summons and complaint in an action for malicious prosecution and false arrest—Beaton versus Pumpelly, in the Supreme Court of New York County—in which her husband’s former valet demanded judgment against her for ten thousand dollars’ damages. It was nothing but a bluff on Mr. Tutt’s part, since an action for false arrest or malicious prosecution cannot be maintained until the criminal prosecution upon which it is founded is disposed of. But neither of the Edgertons knew this, and it shocked and alarmed her, although she pretended that it merely made her tired. Mr. Edgerton, who knew no more law than most lawyers, now perceived the significance of Mr. Tutt’s allusion. Edna was furious. The man might just as well have asked fifty thousand, she said. What was to be done about it?
Mr. Edgerton answered that so far as he could see there was nothing to do about it, but to wait until twenty days were up and then put in a “general denial.” It couldn’t be tried for a couple of years, anyway, on account of the congestion of the calendars, and delay was always a good thing. Edna said she didn’t want any delay; that she wanted the matter attended to at once. Why should the man be allowed to hold a baseless claim over her head for two years? Wilfred patiently explained that it wasn’t his fault. Usually, he said, people who had actions brought against them wanted all the delay they could get, to tire the plaintiffs out.
At that Edna saw a great light. That was just what Beaton was trying to do to her in the criminal case—tire her out! Well, he’d see! He’d see! Tire her out! Ha! Ha-ha! Ha-ha-ha!
The worst feature of it to her mind was that P. P. might come back at any moment from Glasgow right in the middle of everything. Her idea, of course, had been to have it all over and done with, ages before he came home. The row had started just after Christmas, and already it was March! And as yet not even a police-court hearing! For every time the case came up, that old Tutt, using Pierpont’s absence as an excuse, asked for and secured another adjournment on the ground that her husband, as owner of the goods, was a necessary witness for the defense. She blamed the Edgertons for it, declaring on her biweekly visits, in a tone audible to their entire office equipment, that they were a pair of “bum lawyers,” flossy little silk-stocking attorneys, who let Tutt & Tutt put it all over them. Couldn’t they even bring the case to a preliminary hearing? What worried her was the possibility of P. P.’s coming back before it should be held and testifying that he’d given the things to Beaton. But she was saved that humiliation.
To her relief and, indeed, somewhat to her astonishment, the Edgertons called her along in April, and announced that Mr. Tutt had at length stated that he was ready to go ahead with the case. Would she please be at the police court the next morning and bring Simmons, the housekeeper, the clothes, and the jewelry along with her? She stormed over the wire that she’d do no such thing. Her in a police court? And she was no express-wagon either! However, in the end she went, terrified to her deep heart’s core lest old-fox Tutt should cross-examine her about P. P.’s friendly attitude toward his valet.
She sat with her French maid in a fetid crowd of Italian women whose husbands had vanished into the void, of Slavonian bigamists, fatherless babies, drunkards’ wives and sweethearts, evicted tenants, police officers, and miscellaneous ladies without visible means of support. “Move along there, you!” Thrice she was on the verge of committing assault on a policeman—once of murder in the first degree. For three hours she breathed air like that of the Black Hole of Calcutta. But she stuck it out bravely, because she intended to let the judge see just what sort of a miserable crook this Beaton was!
“James William Beaton to the bar!”
Edna’s internal mechanism suddenly went into reverse gear. She arose shakily. So did Beaton. It seemed that he had been sitting right behind her—no difference between them! The valet looked well-dressed, carefree; even smiled slightly. The impudence! Simmons also moved forward.
“Well, now, step up here—all of you!” said the judge sharply. “What do you want to do with this case, Mr. Tutt?”
To her great disgust she saw old Tutt leaning over the bench. Why should the judge address him and not her? It looked suspicious. The whole thing was crooked! The judge appeared to be sneering at her.
Mr. Tutt peeked quizzically over his lank shoulder in her direction as if he were looking over the top of a flight of steps.
“Your honor,” said he dryly, “we have decided to waive examination.”
“Well, what’s the meaning of that?” panted Edna indignantly when they were all outside again.
“It means,” said Mr. Wilfred Edgerton, “that the defendant is willing to have the case sent to the grand jury without any preliminary hearing in the magistrate’s court. You have won your case—in a sense.”
“How d’ya mean—‘in a sense’? Isn’t the judge going to send him to Sing Sing?” she persisted angrily.
“This judge can’t. The man’s got to be indicted first by a grand jury and then tried by a petit jury. If the petit jury find him guilty the judge presiding will send him to prison.”
“Oh!” Edna showed her disappointment. In her excitement she had forgotten about the grand jury—and the petit jury!
“But this judge here might have found the evidence insufficient and discharged the defendant right off now if he’d wanted to,” explained Wilfred proudly. “By waiving examination and consenting that his client be held for the action of the grand jury Mr. Tutt has, in effect, conceded that we have a case.”
“I don’t want any concessions from that old scalawag!” she snorted. “I can get along without any help from him. What’s back of it all?”
Mr. Wilfred rubbed his hands together after the manner of a curate seeking to register humility.
“I cannot say,” he breathed. “I cannot say. But”
“But—what?” she exploded.
“It is just conceivable that Mr. Tutt wants his client indicted, so that he can—er—get more delay. If the man is once indicted and let out on bail it may be several years before he can be tried.”
“Is that so?” queried Mrs. Pumpelly in a high sarcastic voice. “Listen here! I’ve had about all of this shilly-shallying and diddle-daddling I’m goin’ to stand! If you don’t get busy and do something I’m going to get another lawyer, little man!”
That “little man” finished Edgerton & Edgerton. Edna got another lawyer, a Mr. Delancy, and was quite delighted with him—until he sent her a bill for a thousand dollars. But when in a rage she took a taxi to his office and demanded the reason for any such charge, he told her quite calmly that unless the matter were handled with the utmost care and skill the case might be thrown out by the grand jury, or dismissed by the district attorney, or the defendant acquitted by the trial jury; and that on the disposition of it hung the possibility of her having to face a ten-thousand-dollar judgment in Beaton versus Pumpelly, for Mr. Delancy took it for granted that Edgerton & Edgerton knew what they were up to. She turned rather faint at this. What were the chances, she asked, of any of those things happening? Mr. Delancy looked at her significantly. The first two—a dismissal by the district attorney or grand jury—were unlikely, he said, because of Mr. Tutt’s attitude, which seemed to be rather as if he wanted his client both indicted and tried. As to the result of a trial, it would all turn on what Mr. Pumpelly might testify to. Edna stared at him. But Mr. Pumpelly was in Glasgow! Well, he was coming home sometime, wasn’t he? suggested Mr. Delancy. In the end Edna paid over the thousand. That, with her bill from Edgerton & Edgerton, made twenty-five hundred that her malice had cost her.
It was about this period that she got a letter from P. P., saying it looked as if he’d be tied up over across there for some time yet. Afterward he might have to go to Cracow, he said. Edna had lost thirteen pounds and a lot of her self-confidence. Beaton had been indicted, had pleaded not guilty, and had given bail in five thousand dollars. Then The People versus Beaton disappeared off the map. Toward Easter she inquired of Mr. Delancy when it was probably going to be tried. He said gruffly that it wasn’t probably going to be tried any time; it would be tried when the “D. A.” got good and ready and not before; that it was a bail case and in the usual course of events would come up in a couple of years; there was nothing either he or she could do but possess their souls in patience—two hundred and fifty dollars, please.
It was then that Edna Pumpelly, née Haskins, wife of Vice-President Pumpelly of Cuban Cruce, awoke to the miserable consciousness that she had really started something. She had honestly supposed that Beaton would be cast into prison merely on her say-so; or, if she so preferred, on Simmons’ say-so. But she now perceived that it wasn’t so easy. Beaton had rights that the law was bound to respect, even if she wasn’t. It was clear that no judge was going to force the case to trial in P. P.’s absence. Meanwhile it slumbered in the pigeonhole of Deputy Assistant District Attorney William Montague Pepperill, who privately intended in due time “to shoot it in some day with a lot of other junk and try it off the papers.”
“Came the merry month of May, when all nature,” etc., etc. But nature seemed naught now to Edna but a pestilent congregation of vapors. She was down to one hundred and seventy-nine; absolutely off her peck; wished she was dead, she did. If she could have dropped the case against Beaton she would have done it like a shot, but Delancy had told her that such an act would be absolutely fatal in the civil action of Beaton versus Pumpelly. After she had had the man arrested, thrown into jail, indicted and put on bail, to lie down now would make it impossible to defend the false-imprisonment action—cost her ten thousand. Doctor Crass, her gastro-intestinal specialist, insisted that she ought to travel, and not knowing what else to do she took a flying trip out to Athens to visit Mother Pumpelly, who always disagreed with her violently. It was here that she got a cable from P. P. saying that he would be obliged to spend the summer in Italy and suggesting that she join him in London. It really came to her as a great relief.
Up to this time she had not written a word to him about her troubles, but now she looked forward with eagerness to the time when she could lay her head on his shoulder and pour forth her sorrows. The mere thought of going abroad and getting away from everything filled her with delight. After all, the case wasn’t coming up for a couple of years and she might as well eat, drink, and be as merry as possible in the meantime. She made up her mind that she just wouldn’t do a thing to Paris!
Simmons got her the Presidential Suite on the A deck of a crack boat for thirty-five hundred—French salon, brass bed, hot and cold, fresh and salt—and then called up the society editors and asked each of them to run a stick to the effect that Mrs. Pierpont Pumpelly, wife of Vice-President Pumpelly of the Cuban Crucible Steel Company, was closing her house in East Seventy-third Street, and was sailing on the seventeenth inst. to join her husband in London for the season.
“Later on Mrs. Pumpelly expects to spend some time motoring in the Tyrolean Alps.”
Mrs. Pumpelly passed the period intervening before the sailing of the steamer in delightful anticipation. She hadn’t been so happy and carefree since that miserable day she had had Beaton arrested nearly six months before. There were a lot of people she knew going over for their annual spring spending, including Mrs. Morganthaler, and Edna made up her mind that this would be a grand chance to make up to her again and square the bad impression which P. P.’s congress shoes might have made. Indeed, she felt so bobbish that she moved down to the Waldorf for a couple of days before the seventeenth so as to give the servants a better chance to close up the house and be a little nearer the dock herself. The night before the ship was to sail she gave a good-by party ostensibly for Mrs. Morganthaler—dinner in private dining-room, with small orchestra, theatre afterward, dancing at the Crystal Room and all that—and didn’t go to bed at all. A real party! So she was a little peevish when she started for the slip at half-past ten, for although the steamer was not to sail till noon she thought it wiser, considering the Pomeranians and everything, to get to the pier promptly by eleven o’clock.
The crowds of motors and taxis moving slowly to the entrance of the pier, the lines of longshoremen trundling bales and barrels, the stewards swarming about everywhere, the throngs of passengers—such nice-looking people!—the bustle, the activity, the gaiety of it all, thrilled and excited her. Assisted by Thérèse, she got her passport stamped, deposited Pompom and Poopoo in the stateroom, and then strolled back upon the pier to watch the last arrivals. She did love ocean travel, particularly on English boats! Everybody treated you so nicely! The English were the only servants who know how to be properly deferential!
“Excuse me!” said a voice suddenly at her elbow. “This is Mrs. Pierpont Pumpelly, is it not?”
Hardly looking round to see who it was—since she supposed it must be a reporter—she simpered with importance, “Yes, I’m Mrs. Pumpelly. I’m going over to join Mr. Pumpelly in Rome, you see.”
Then she choked—sawdust in the epiglottis or something. She’d seen that young man before somewhere.
“Yes, so I read in the paper,” smiled Mr. Bonnie Doon. “But all the same”
For an instant the pier seemed to be rolling in a high sea. Automatically she received the paper which he shoved at her.
In the Name of the People of the State of New York:
To Edna Pumpelly: You are commanded to appear forthwith before the Court of General Sessions of the County of New York, Part V thereof, at the Criminal Court Building in the City of New York, New York, on the seventeenth day of May, 1922, at ten o’clock in the forenoon of that day, as a witness in a criminal action, prosecuted by the People of the State of New York, against James W. Beaton.
Dated the City of New York, N. Y., the 17th day of May, 1922.
John J. Carroll,
The pier was sinking beneath her feet. Already the Hudson was roaring in her ears. It was some horrible mistake!
“I—I thought this case wasn’t coming up for a year or so,” she stammered.
“Oh, dear, yes!” answered Bonnie blithely. “Mr. Tutt told me to put it on as soon as he heard you were going to Europe.”
“He did, did he?” snapped Edna. “Well, I’m not a witness in it, anyway. My butler, Simmons, is the complainant. The district attorney can prove his case without me.”
“But this,” replied Mr. Doon, indicating the paper in her hand. “It is a subpoena on behalf of the defense.”
“For the defense!”
“Precisely! We want you as a witness to the friendly relations between the defendant and your husband.”
“But I thought Mr. Tutt didn’t intend to try the case until my husband got back!”
Bonnie coughed slightly.
“I guess Mr. Tutt must have changed his mind.”
Then she saw it all!
That horrible old man! He’d waited until the very minute she was starting for Europe, and then somehow got the case on for trial just to spite her, to prevent her going. But he’d been a little too smart! He couldn’t stop her now! Nobody could stop her now!
At that moment the ship’s whistle began to roar.
“I s’pose you all think you’re pretty clever!” she said venomously, edging toward the gangplank. “But you’re too late. You’ll have to try the case without me or adjourn it until I come back.”
The swell officer at the head of the gangplank touched his hat.
“All aboard, madam!”
It went to her head.
“Do you refuse to obey the subpœna?” demanded Bonnie, moving along with her.
Edna turned and faced him.
“You’ve said it!” She laughed harshly. “Tell the old judge that if he wants me he’ll have to take me off the steamer!”
“Very well,” replied Bonnie quietly, “I will.”
Something in his manner terrified her.
The smoke was pouring in a black cloud from the funnel and the air was pulsating with the hoarse diapason of the whistle. Two sailors were loosening the gangplank. It wasn’t possible that there was anything he could do, was there?
“Move along, madam, please!”
“If you board the steamer I shall go up to the court-house, get a warrant of attachment for your arrest and have the sheriff take you off the ship before you get past the Statue of Liberty!” he shouted.
She was glad that nobody else could hear on account of the noise.
“Nonsense!” she yelled at him.
“In a breeches buoy!” he flung back at her.
Mrs. Pumpelly felt her way cautiously up the gangplank. A moment later a crane lifted it into mid-air and it floated off like a feather. Another ship of the same line was also leaving, and the noise from the two whistles as they answered each other was deafening. Everybody was pressing to the shore side of the steamer. A crack of swirling water appeared between it and the pier. They were off! With immense relief Edna realized that she was no longer connected with dry land.
She craned her head at the crowd on the pier. Bonnie Doon had disappeared. Could they do anything to her? she wondered. Fine her a hundred dollars, maybe. But that wouldn’t be until she got back. She would be safe for many a long month, touring in the Tyrolean Alps, before that could happen.
The bugle sounded lunch, that early hearty lunch so generously supplied by the transatlantic navigation companies while their vessels are still in the North River and on an even keel, and Edna thought she might as well find her table number, absorb a cup of bouillon and a caviar sandwich, and give her companions the once-over. She was feeling so much encouraged that she did not come up on deck again for nearly three-quarters of an hour.
The great liner was in midstream by this time, and slowly gathering headway, slipping along at about fifteen knots opposite Ellis Island. The city really looked too lovely, she thought, as, having made sure the dear little dogs were getting along all right, she lit a cigarette and strolled to the rail of the A deck just outside her stateroom door.
Somebody was already there, pacing slowly along, with his hands behind him. There was something vaguely familiar about the shape of his back, like the top of a stepladder. Then he turned, and in her excitement she dropped her cigarette.
“Good afternoon, Mrs. Pumpelly,” said Mr. Tutt, removing his stovepipe with the grace of a Sir Walter.
The erstwhile Duchess of Athens leaned heavily against the bulwarks. To use her own picturesque diction, it was “a knockout.”
“The city looks rather well from here, doesn’t it?” went on the old man affably. “There’s the Woolworth Building there, and the Butterick Building there, and the Criminal Courts there; and let’s see—the Tombs ought to be somewhere about there—a wonderful panorama!”
But Edna made no reply. There was a frog in her larynx. In spite of her terror she noticed that several other people had stopped and were gazing toward the Battery at something. A paralysis seized her limbs, but she raised her eyes in the same direction. A fast launch was tearing across the harbor from the direction of the Aquarium.
In the bow stood a young man—that same horrid young man!—with a paper in his hand. He waved it at Mr. Tutt as the launch raced alongside. There was another horrid-looking man with him too. And the unknown horrid-looking man was grinning.
The launch was now hanging expectantly in the current alongside. To Edna it looked as if it were at least a thousand feet below. The crowd had greatly increased.
Of course she had no means of knowing that the horrid-looking man down there was just a plain friend of Bonnie’s, or that the paper was just a blank sheet of foolscap. Quite naturally, she took it for granted that the launch was a police launch carrying a deputy-sheriff with a warrant for her arrest. No breeches buoy for her!
The old lawyer sauntered slowly toward her, stovepipe in hand. He seemed to be saying something to himself. What was he muttering about?
“‘Agree with thine adversary quickly, whiles thou art in the way with him; lest at any time the adversary deliver thee to the judge, and the judge deliver thee to the officer, and thou be cast into prison. Verily I say unto thee, Thou shalt by no means come out thence, till thou hast paid the uttermost farthing.’”
The world went bad on her. She was called and she knew it. Aces!
“How much is it going to cost me to square this thing so’s I can go to Europe?” she faltered.
“Exactly ten thousand beans,” whispered Mr. Tutt. “And then you can forget it for the rest of your life.”
Thérèse, who had been trying to get Pompom and Poopoo to go to sleep, was surprised to see her mistress with a very red face hurriedly enter the salon and sit down at the Louis Seize writing desk.
“And cheap at the price!” she heard Edna Pumpelly mutter as she signed her name to whatever it was.
- ↑ See "By Advice of Counsel," p. 197