Books: Mr. Bingle
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George Barr McCutcheon >> Mr. Bingle
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Ten o'clock came. Mr. and Mrs. Bingle sat side by side in front of the
fireplace, her hand in his. The floor was littered with white tissue
paper, red ribbons, peanut hulls and other by-products of festivity;
the rugs were scuffled up and hopelessly awry; chairs were out of
their accustomed places--two or three of them no longer stood upon
their legs as upright chairs should do--and the hearth was strewn with
coals from an overturned scuttle. Candle grease solidified on the
mantelpiece and dripped unseen upon the mahogany bookcase--all
unnoticed by the dreamy, desolate Bingles. They were alone with the
annual wreck. Melissa and the five Sykeses were out in the bitter
night, on their frolicksome way to the distant home of the woman who
had so many children she didn't know what to do for them, not with
them. They had gone away with their hands and pockets full, and their
stomachs, too, and they had all been kissed and hugged and invited to
come again without fail a year from that very night.
Mr. Bingle sighed. Neither had spoken for many minutes after the
elevator door slammed behind the excited, shrill-voiced children. Mr.
Bingle always sighed exactly at this moment in his reflections, and
Mrs. Bingle always squeezed his hand fiercely and turned a pair of
darkly regretful eyes upon him.
"I am sorry, dear heart," she murmured, and then he kissed her hand
and said that it was God's will.
"It doesn't seem right, when we want them, need them so much," she
said, huskily.
And then he repeated the thing he always said on Christmas Eve: "One
of these days I am going to adopt a--er--a couple, Mary, sure as I'm
sitting here. We just can't grow old without having some of them about
us. Some day we'll find the right sort of--"
The bedroom door opened with a squeak, slowly and with considerable
caution. The gaunt, bearded face of a tall, stooping old man appeared
in the aperture; sharp, piercing eyes under thick grey eyebrows
searched the room in a swift, almost unfriendly glance.
"The infernal brats gone, Tom?" demanded Uncle Joe harshly.
Mr. and Mrs. Bingle stiffened in their chairs. The tall old man came
down to the fireplace, disgustedly kicking a stray, crumpled sheet of
tissue paper out of his path.
"Oh, they are perfect dears, Uncle Joe," protested Mrs. Bingle, trying
her best not to bristle.
"I wish you had come in for a look at 'em--" began Mr. Bingle, but the
old man cut him off with a snort of anger.
"Cussed little nuisances," he said, holding his thin hands to the
blaze.
"I don't see how you can say such things about children you don't know
and can't--" began Mrs. Bingle.
He glared at her. "You can't tell me anything about children, Mary.
I'm the father of three and I know what I'm talking about. Children
are the damnedest curse on earth. You ought to thank God you haven't
got any."
CHAPTER II
RELATING TO AN ODD RELATION
Now, Mr. Joseph Hooper had excellent cause for being a sour old man,
and in a measure was to be pitied because of his attitude toward the
young of his species. He had not been well-used by his own children,
although it is no more than right to explain that they were hardly
what any one save a parent would call children when they turned
against him. At that particular period in the history of the Hooper
family, the youngest of Joseph's three children was seventeen, the
oldest twenty-two--and it so happens that the crisis came just fifteen
years prior to the opening scene in this tale. It did not actually
come on Christmas Eve, but, as a matter of record, on the 2lst of
December at about half-past three in the afternoon. At that precise
instant a judge sitting on the bench in one of the courtrooms in New
York City signed the decree divorcing Mrs. Joseph Hooper from her
husband, and four minutes later the lady walked out of the building
with her son and two daughters, all of them having deliberately turned
their backs upon the miserable defendant in the case. As all of the
children were of an age to legally choose the parent with whom they
preferred to live, and as they elected to cast off the paternal for
the maternal, it readily may be seen that Mr. Hooper was not entirely
without proof that this is a cruel, heartless, ungrateful world and
filled with gall.
As a matter of fact, he had not been wholly to blame for the family
crash, notwithstanding a rather loose respect on his part for the
sanctity of the home. (It was not to be denied that he had strayed
into crooked paths and devious ways--and, to do him justice, he did
not attempt to deny it: he ventured only to EXPLAIN it.) According to
his version of the affair, the trouble began long before he took to
wine and women. It began with his wife's propensity for nagging. Being
a high-spirited, intelligent person with a mind of his own, Mr. Hooper
didn't like being nagged, and as he rather harshly attempted to put a
stop to it just as soon as it dawned upon him that he was being hen-
pecked, his wife, not to be outdone, went at it harder than ever. And
that is how it all began, and that is why I say that he was not wholly
to blame. She was very pretty and very peevish, and they lived a cat
and dog life for ten years after the birth of the last child.
Mr. Hooper took to drink and then took to staying away from home for
days at a time. It was at this stage of the affair that the children
began to see him through their mother's eyes. Certain disclosures were
inevitable. In a word, Mrs. Hooper hired detectives, and finding
herself in a splendid position to secure all she wanted in the way of
alimony, heralded Mr. Hooper's shortcomings to the world. The only
good that ever came out of the unfortunate transaction, so far as Mr.
Hooper was concerned, was to be found in the blessed realisation that
she had actually deprived herself of the right to nag him, and that
was something he knew would prove to be a constant source of
irritation to her.
But when his children turned against him, he faltered. He had not
counted on that. They not only went off to live with their mother, but
they virtually wiped him out of their lives, quite as if he had passed
away and no longer existed in the flesh. The three of them stood by
the mother--as they should have done, we submit, considering Mr.
Hooper's habits--and shuddered quite as profoundly as she when the
name of the erring parent was mentioned in their presence. Mr. Hooper
couldn't for the life of him understand this treachery on the part of
his pampered offspring, on whom he had lavished everything and to whom
he had denied nothing in the way of luxury. It was hard for him to
realise that he was as much of a scamp and scapegrace in their young
eyes as he was in the eyes of his wife--and the whole of his wife's
family, even to the remotest of cousins.
In the bright days of their early married life, before he knew the
difference between what he looked upon as affectionate teasing and
what he afterwards came to know as persistent nagging, he deeded over
to her the house and lot in Madison Avenue. He did that willingly,
cheerfully. Two days after the divorce was granted, he paid over to
her one hundred thousand dollars alimony. He did that unwillingly,
gloomily. And the very next week the stock market went the wrong way
for him, and he was cleaned out. He hadn't a dollar left of the
comfortable little fortune that had been his. He remained drunk for
nearly two months, and when he sobered up in a sanitarium--and took
the pledge for the first and last time--he came out of the haze and
found that he hadn't a friend left in New York. Every man's head was
turned away from him, every man's hand was against him.
He sent for his son to come to the cheap hotel in which he was living.
The son sent back word that he never wanted to see his face again.
Whereupon Joseph Hooper for the first time declared that the sons and
daughters of men are curses, and slunk out of New York to say it aloud
in the broad, free stretches of the world across which he drifted
without aim or purpose for years and years and always farther away
from the home he had lost.
He always said to himself--but never so much as a word of it to any
one else--that if his wife hadn't driven him to distraction with her
nagging he would have avoided the happy though disastrous pitfalls
into which he stumbled in his desperate efforts to find appreciation.
He would have remained an honourable, faithful spouse to her, and an
abstainer--as such things go. He would have shared with her the love
and respect of their three children, and he would have staved off
bankruptcy with the very hundred thousand dollars that she exacted as
spite money. But she was a nagger, and he was no Job. There was a
modicum of joy in the heart of him, however: having been cleaned out
to the last penny, he was in no position to come up monthly with the
thousand dollars charged against him by the court for the support and
maintenance of two of his children until they reached their majority.
He took a savage delight in contemplating the rage of his late wife
when she realised that the children would have to be provided for out
of the income from the one hundred thousand she had received in a lump
sum, and he even thanked God that she was without means beyond this
hateful amount. It tickled him to think of her anguish in not being
able to spend the income from her alimony on furs and feathers with
which to bedeck herself. Instead of spending the five thousand on
herself she would be obliged to put it on the backs and into the
stomachs of her three brats! He chuckled vastly over this bit of good
fortune! It was really a splendid joke on her, this smash of his. No
doubt the children also hated him the more because of his failure to
remain on his feet down in Wall Street, but he consoled himself with
the thought that they would sometimes long for the old days when
father did the providing, and wish that things hadn't turned out so
badly.
In his hour of disgrace--and we may add degeneration--he possessed but
one blood relation who stood by him and pitied him in spite of his
faults. That was his nephew, Tom Bingle, the son of his only sister,
many years dead. But even so, he did not deceive himself in respect to
the young man's attitude toward him. He realised that Tom was kind to
him simply because it was his nature to be kind to every one, no
matter how unworthy. It wasn't in Tom Bingle to be mean, not even to
his worst enemy. Notwithstanding the fact that the young man had just
taken unto himself a wife, and was as poor as a church-mouse, the door
and the cupboard in his modest little flat were opened cheerfully to
the delinquent Uncle Joe, and be it said to the latter's discredit and
shame--he proceeded to impose upon the generosity of his nephew in a
manner that should have earned him a booting into the street. But
young Tom was patient, he was mild, he even seemed to enjoy being put
upon by the wretched bankrupt. The thing that touched his heart most
of all and caused him to overlook a great many shortcomings, was the
cruel, unfilial slap in the face that had been administered by the
three children of the man, and the crushing, bewildering effect it had
upon him.
It was Tom who virtually picked the once fastidious Joseph Hooper out
of the gutter, weeks after the smash, and took him under his puny
wing, so to speak, during a somewhat protracted period of
regeneration. The broken, shattered man became, for the time being,
the Bingle burden, and he was not by any means a light or pleasant
one. For months old Joseph ate of his nephew's food, drained his
purse, abused his generosity, ignored his comforts and almost
succeeded in driving the young but devoted wife back to the home from
which Tom had married her.
It was at this juncture that the mild-mannered bookkeeper arose to the
dignity of a fine rage, and co-incidentally Joseph Hooper for the
first time realised what an overbearing, disagreeable visitor he had
been and departed, but without the slightest ill-feeling toward his
benefactors. Indeed, he was deeply repentant, deeply apologetic. He
ruefully announced that it would never be in his power to repay them
for all they had done for him, but, resorting to a sudden whim,
declared that he would make them his heirs if they didn't mind being
used as a means to convey his final word of defiance to the children
who had cast him off. Not that he would ever have a dollar to leave to
them, but for the satisfaction it would give him to cut the traitors
off with the proverbial shilling. Beset with the notion that this was
an ideal way to show his contempt for his offspring, he went to the
safety deposit vault and took there from the worthless document known
as his last will and testament and in the presence of witnesses
destroyed the thing, thereby disinheriting the erstwhile wife and her
children as effectually as if he had really possessed the estate set
forth in the instrument.
"I'll make a will in your favour, Tom," he said at the time, with a
mocking grin, "and in it I will include this miserable carcass of
mine, so that you may at least have something to sell to the doctors.
And who knows? I may scrape together a few hundred dollars before I
die, provided I don't die too soon."
"We will give you a decent burial, Uncle Joe," said Thomas Bingle,
revolting against the specific. "Do you suppose I would sell my uncle
to a--"
"Haven't you a ray of humour in that head of yours?" demanded his
uncle. "Can't you SEE a joke?"
"Well, if you were joking," said Bingle, relieved, "all well and good,
but it didn't sound that way."
"You are a simple soul," was all that Joseph said, and then borrowed
fifty dollars from his nephew for a fresh start in the world, as he
expressed it. With this slender fortune in his purse he set out into a
world that knew him not, nor was it known to him.
He came back fifteen years afterward, poorer than when he went away,
broken in health, old to the point of decrepitude, bedraggled, unkempt
and prideless. And once more Thomas Bingle took him in and provided
the prospective death-bed for him. They made the old derelict as
comfortable as it was in their power to do, and sacrificed not a
little in order that he might have some of the comforts of life.
He was a very humble, meek old man, and they pitied him. Screwing up
his courage, Mr. Bingle went one day to the home of the son of Joseph
Hooper and boldly suggested that, inasmuch as the mother was no longer
living, it would not be amiss for him and his sisters to take the
father who created them back into the family circle once more, and to
ease his declining years. Mr. Bingle was ordered out of the rich man's
office. Then he approached the two daughters, both of whom had married
well, and met with an even more painful reception. They not only
refused to recognise their father but declined to recognise their
father's nephew.
A few days afterward, a lawyer came to the bank to see Mr. Bingle. He
informed the bookkeeper that the Hooper family had been thinking
matters over and were prepared to pay him the sum of seventy-five
dollars a month for the care of Joseph Hooper, or, in other words,
they would contribute twenty-five dollars apiece toward sustaining the
life of one who was already dead to them. Moreover, they stood ready
to pay the expenses of his funeral when actual dissolution occurred,
but farther than that they could not be expected to go.
Mr. Bingle flared up--a most unusual thing for him to do. "You tell
them that I will take care of Uncle Joe as long as he lives without a
nickel from them and that I'll bury him when he dies."
"Out of your own pocket?" exclaimed the lawyer, who knew something of
bookkeepers' salaries.
"Most certainly not out of anybody else's," said Mr. Bingle, with
dignity. "And you can also tell them that they are a pack of blamed
good-for-nothings," he added, with absolutely no dignity.
"My dear sir."
"Be sure to tell 'em, will you? If I was a swearing man I'd do better
than that but I guess it will do for a starter."
"My clients will insist upon re-imbursing you for--" began the lawyer
stiffly, but Mr. Bingle snapped his fingers disdainfully, much nearer
the gentleman's nose than he intended, no doubt, and with a perfectly
astonishing result. The legal representative's hat fell off backwards
and he actually trod upon it in his haste to give way before the irate
little bookkeeper.
"You tell 'em just what I said, that's all you've got to do," said Mr.
Bingle, and then picked up his visitor's hat and pushed the crown into
shape with a vicious dig. "Here's your hat. Good day."
He was so boiling mad all the rest of the afternoon that he could not
see the figures clearly, and made countless mistakes, necessitating an
extra two hours' work on the books before he could even think of going
home.
Arriving at the apartment, he found his wife in a state of
perturbation, not over his tardiness, but over the extraordinary
behaviour of Uncle Joe. The old man had been out most of the day and
had come in at five, growling and cursing with more than ordinary
vehemence.
"He is in his bedroom, Tom, and I don't know what to make of him. He
has had bad news, I think."
"Bad news?" cried Mr. Single. "The very worst news on earth wouldn't
seem bad to Uncle Joe after all he has gone through. I'll go in and
see him."
"Be careful, dear! I--I--he may be insane. You never can tell what--"
It turned out that the old man had visited his three children during
the day, going to each of them as a suppliant and in deep humility.
After fifteen years, he broke his resolve and went to them with his
only appeal. He wanted to die with his children about him. That was
all. He did not ask them to love him, or forgive him. He only asked
them to call him father and to let him spend the last weeks of his
life within the sound of their voices.
Sitting at the supper table, he grimly related his experiences to the
distressed Bingles.
"I went first to Angela's, Tom," he said, scowling at the centre-
piece. "Angela married that Mortimer fellow in Sixty-first Street, you
know--Clarence Mortimer's son. Ever seen their home? Well, the butler
told me to go around to the rear entrance. I gave him my card and told
him to take it up to MY DAUGHTER. I had a fellow in a drug-store write
my name neatly on some blank cards, Mary. The butler threatened to
call the police. He thought I was crazy. But just then old Clarence
Mortimer came up the steps. It seems that he is living with his son,
having lost all of his money a few years ago. He recognised me at
once, and I knew by the way he shook hands with me that he has been
leading a dog's life ever since he went broke. He said he'd speak to
Angela--and he did. I waited in the hall downstairs. Old Clarence
didn't have the courage to come back himself. A footman brought down
word that Mrs. Mortimer could not see Mr. Hooper. She was not at home
to Mr. Hooper, and--never would be. That was what her servant was
obliged to tell me. So I went away. Then I tried Elizabeth. She lives
in one of those fifteen thousand dollar a year apartments on Park
Avenue. She has three lovely children. They are my grand-children, you
know, Tom. I saw them in the automobile as I came out of the building
and went my way after Elizabeth Bransone had told me to my face--I
managed to get in to see her--had told me that I was a sight, a
disgrace, that she couldn't bear to look at me, and that I had better
clear out before her husband came in. My own daughter, Tom, my own
flesh and blood. She informed me that provision would be made for me,
but she made it very plain--damnably plain--that I was never to bother
her again. So I went away from Elizabeth's. There was only one of 'em
left, and I hated to tackle him worse than either of the girls. But I
did. I went down to his office. He refused to see me at first, but
evidently thought it best to get the thing out of his system forever,
so he changed his mind and told the office boy to let me in. Well, my
son Geoffrey is a very important person now. He married a Maybrick,
you know, and he is a partner in old Maybrick's firm--steamship
agents. Geoffrey looked me over. He did it very thoroughly. I told him
I'd come to see if he couldn't do something toward helping me to die a
respectable, you might say comfortable death. He cut me off short.
Said he would give me a thousand dollars to leave New York and stay
away forever. I---"
"I trust you did not accept the money," cried Mr. Bingle in a shocked
voice.
"I'm pretty well down and out, Tom, but I'd sooner starve than to take
money from him in that way. So I told my son to go to the devil."
"Good for you!" cried Mr. Bingle. "And then what?"
"He is a humorous individual, that pompous son of mine," said old
Joseph, with a chuckle. "He said I ought to be ashamed of myself for
advising my own son to go to the devil in view of what a similar
excursion had done for me. I managed to subdue my temper--it's a bad
one, as you know--and put the matter up to him in plain terms. 'I am
your father, Geoffrey, when all is said and done. Are you going to
kick me out into the world when I've got no more than a month or two
to live? Are you going to allow my body to lie in the Potter's field?
Are you willing to allow this poor nephew of mine to take care of me,
to assume the responsibility of seeing that I get a decent burial in a
decent---'"
"Oh, Uncle Joe, you oughtn't even to think of such things," broke in
his niece by marriage. "You MUST think of cheerful---"
"You are good for years and years---" began Mr. Bingle.
"Don't interrupt me," said Uncle Joe irascibly. "I guess I know what
I'm talking about. I'm good for a couple of months at the outside. I'm
seventy years old and I feel two hundred. Why, dammit, old Clarence
Mortimer said I LOOK a hundred. To make the story short, Geoffrey said
he had arranged to pay you for my keep, no matter how long I lasted,
but he thought I was foolish not to take the thousand and go to some
quiet little place in the country--and wait. If--if it should happen
that I lived longer than the thousand would carry me, he'd see to it
that I had more. Only he didn't want me hanging around New York. That
was the point, d'you see? He very frankly said that he had always
sided with his mother against me, and that was all there was to it, so
far as he was concerned. And, see here, Tom, he said you had been down
to see him about me. Is that true?"
"Well, I--I thought perhaps--er--I might be able to bring about a
reconciliation," floundered Mr. Bingle.
"And you found that in the upper circles it is not considered good
form to be reconciled unless it pays, eh? What would be the sense in
becoming reconciled to a wreck of a father, who hasn't a dollar in the
world, after getting along so nicely for fifteen years without him?
No, it isn't done, Tom--it's not the thing. Geoffrey made no bones
about admitting that as far as he is concerned, I have been dead for
fifteen years. He---"
"Well then," said Mr. Bingle, slamming his fist upon the dining-table
so violently that the cutlery bounced, "why the dickens does he object
to burying you? If I discovered a relative that had been dead for
fifteen years, I'd see to it that he was buried, if only for the good
of the community."
"He doesn't object to burying me," explained Uncle Joe. "He implies
that he'll do that much for me with pleasure. As a matter of fact, he
said that if I'd arrange to have some one notify him when I was
literally dead, he would see to it that I was buried. But I told him
he needn't bother his head about it, because I was quite sure you
would do it even more cheerfully than he and undoubtedly with less
secrecy."
"Cheerfully?" gasped the Bingles.
"Cheerfully," repeated Uncle Joe firmly. "And now, can't we talk about
something else? I've done my best to make peace with my son and
daughters, and now I wash my hands of 'em. I never intended to weaken
in my resolve, but I--I just couldn't help it, Tom. I swore I'd never
look into their faces again, but, after all, I AM their father, you
see, and I suppose I'm getting weak and childish in my old age. I gave
in, that's all. I thought they might have some little feeling for me,
and--" He did not finish the sentence, and as the Bingles took that
instant to blow their noses and to look so intently at the electric
chandelier that their eyes smarted, it was perhaps just as well that
he ended his ruminations when he did.
All this happened six weeks prior to Christmas Eve, and they were six
long, trying weeks for the two Bingles. The old man was sick two-
thirds of the time and had to have a physician. He insisted on having
the now famous Dr. Fiddler, one of the most expensive practitioners in
New York, obstinately refusing to listen to reason. Fiddler had been
the Hooper family physician years ago and that was all there was to be
said. He WOULD have him. So poor Tom Bingle sent for the great man,
who came and prescribed for his old friend and client. After a week
the Bingles began to count the number of visits, and grew lean and
gaunt-faced over the prospect ahead of them. Fiddler's fee was ten
dollars a visit--to a friend, he explained, in accounting for the
ridiculously low figure--and he came twice a day for nearly two weeks.
The Bingles did not complain. As Mr. Bingle said, they took their
medicine, even as Uncle Joe took his--only he thrived on it and they
withered. Dr. Fiddler was very nice about it, however. He assured Mr.
Bingle that he was in no hurry for his money. Any time before the
first of February would be perfectly satisfactory. He was only too
glad to have been instrumental in dragging his old friend, Joseph
Hooper from the very edge of the grave.
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