Part 3

"I wish you would be serious for a moment," Mrs. Idiot retorted, with as near an approach to irritation as was possible to one of her amiable disposition. "And it's just the same way with sympathy," she continued; "Mrs. Pedagog will lay this whole trouble to my inexperience. Probably she never had a servant take French leave in her life on the eve of a dinner-party."

"I'll bet she didn't," said the Idiot. "And for why? Because she never gave a dinner-party in all her life. The habits of early life cling unto old age, and even as in her early days as a boarding-house keeper she never gave anything, so now she doubtless considers giving a dinner as a reckless waste of opportunity. And she is quite right. Does a lawyer invite his friends to join him in an opinion? Never. Does Mr. Tiffany request Mr. and Mrs. Idiot to accept a diamond tiara given in their honor? Not. Does a true poet, with three names on his autograph, give a poem to anybody when he can sell it? Not if he knows it. Why, then, expect a landlady, by birth and previous training, to _give_ a dinner?"

"I notice," said Mrs. Idiot, severely, "that you are always willing to give your views!"

"Precisely, my dear, and that proves my point," replied the Idiot, amiably. "I am not a professional viewer, and I am not a photographer by trade. Therefore, why should I not _give_ my views? But really," he added, "I wouldn't bother; it'll all come out right. I don't know just how, but I am confident we shall have the most glorious dinner of our lives. When I was down cellar this morning looking at the gas-meter I saw two big boxes full of potatoes, a can of French pease, and a bottle of sarsaparilla, and if they don't like what they get it will be because they are exacting. And I'll wager you from what I know of their manners that if you gave them dried apples, cold tongue, and milk they'd say it was the most delightful repast they ever sat down to."

"But _I'd_ know they didn't mean it," said Mrs. Idiot, smiling in spite of her woe.

"And that brings up the question, why should your conscience be troubled by the insincerity of others?" said he. "Now, I'll tell you what we'll do. You fry the potatoes and I'll boil the can of pease; I think four minutes will boil them hard, like an egg, and together we'll put the sarsaparilla on ice, and bluff the whole thing through. Bluffing was always my strong point, and I have noticed, my dear, that in whatever I have tried to do since we were married you have contributed at least ninety per cent. to success. My bluff plus your efforts to make the thing a go will send our dinner to a premium."

Mrs. Idiot remained properly silent. As a matter of fact, she was not even listening. She was considering. What on earth to do was the question in her mind, and it so entirely absorbed it that she fortunately had little left for the rather easy views of the Idiot himself.

"What is a dinner, anyhow?" the Idiot added, after the silence had to his mind become oppressive. "Is it a mere meal? Do the Poet and Mr. and Mrs. Pedagog and Mr. Whitechoker come here merely to get something to eat? Or do they come for the pleasure of our society, or for the pleasure of leaving home, or what? As I understand it, people go out to dine not because they have not a sufficiency of food at home, but because they wish to meet other people. That's what I do. I can always have something better to eat at home than I can get at somebody else's house; and furthermore, it is a more natural meal. Dinners generally are made up of pretty little things that nobody likes, and have no sustenance in them. A successful dinner lies not in successful cooking, but in pleasing conversation. Wherefore, it is not the cook, but the host and hostess who make a failure or a success of a dinner."

"Then I presume if we simply spread the table and let you talk our guests will be satisfied?" said Mrs. Idiot, blandly.

"Precisely," the Idiot replied. "It will be delightful. Just think of the menu! Instead of oysters I will indulge in a few opinions as to the intellectual qualities of bivalves generally, finishing up with a glowing tribute to the man who is content to be a clam and not talk too much. In the place of _purée_ we will tackle some such subject as the future of Spain. I think I could ladle out a few sound ideas on that subject that would be as clear as the purest _consommé_. Then for fish, that would be easy. A good trout story, with imagination sauce, would do very well. For the _entrée_ I will give you one of my most recent poems, and the roast will be--"

"And the rest of us are to sit and twiddle our thumbs while you soliloquize?" demanded Mrs. Idiot. "I rather think not. I will provide the roast, my dear John, and it will consist largely of remarks upon the ways of cooks."

"A very proper subject for a roast," observed the Idiot, complacently, "and in your present frame of mind I think it will be not only well done, but rare as well, with plenty of crisp. And so we can simply talk this dinner through. It will be novel, certainly, and if you provide plenty of bread and butter no one need go away hungry."

"Very true," Mrs. Idiot answered. "And now that you have had your fun, suppose we put our minds on the serious aspect of the case. Two hours from now four people are coming here hungry--"

"I have it!" cried the Idiot, delightedly. "Let's _borrow_ a cook! I don't believe it's ever been done before. It would be splendid, not only in getting us out of our troubles, but in establishing an entirely new principle in domestic science. What is the use of neighbors who will not be neighborly and lend you their most cherished possession?"

"None at all," sighed Mrs. Idiot, despairingly.

"Now, when we lived in our flat in New York the people up-stairs borrowed our ice," said the Idiot; "the people down-stairs borrowed our dining-room chairs; the people across the hall borrowed butter and milk and eggs, and I think we once borrowed a lemon from the people on the top floor."

"Never!" cried Mrs. Idiot.

"Yes, we did, my dear," insisted the Idiot. "At least I did. You and the children were off in the country, and one hot summer's night, two years ago, I was consumed with a desire for a glass of lemonade, and as there were no lemons in the house, or the flat, I sent out to borrow. I began at the basement and worked up towards the roof, and ultimately got what I wanted, although, as I have said, it was the top-flat people I got it from."

"And did you ever return it?" demanded Mrs. Idiot.

"I regret to say that I didn't," said the Idiot. "But I will, and with interest. I wonder what two years' interest on a lemon is!" he added. "I suppose that a borrowed lemon compounded at the rate of six per cent. could be paid off by a lemon and one small Bermuda potato. I will send my check for both to those people to-morrow. What was their name?"

"I never knew," said Mrs. Idiot. "I never liked them, and I never called. I am sorry you are under obligations to them."

"Only for a lemon, though, dear," said the Idiot, "at six per cent."

"But what does all this prove?" demanded the poor little housekeeper.

"That the principle of lending is recognized among neighbors," the Idiot explained. "If a neighbor will lend a lemon, surely a neighbor will lend a cook. The principle involved is the same in both cases. Particularly so in this case, for my experience with cooks has been that they are, after all, for the most part nothing but human lemons. If the departed Bridget had been anything but full of sourness she would not have left us so unexpectedly."

"You don't really think for a moment, do you, that the Jimpsonberrys would lend us their cook, or that she would come, or that I would ask them?" said Mrs. Idiot.

"Well, I suppose not," said the Idiot. "I suppose not. _But I don't see why!_ First, the Jimpsonberrys, as our neighbors, ought to be willing to get us out of our trouble. Second, we don't ask their cook to come for nothing. By coming she will receive an addition to her wages which will help her to endow a policeman with a moderate fortune some day when she marries him. As for your asking Mrs. Jimpsonberry to lend us her cook for a few hours, that is the main objection. When one borrows one must give collateral, and it may be that it would embarrass you to offer Mike as security for the safe return of the Jimpsonberrys' cook. Anyhow, I see weak points in my plan, and we'd better abandon it. If the Jimpsonberrys' cook is the only available incendiary in the neighborhood, we'd better stop where we are. When we dined at Jimpsonberrys' last week I went away feeling that Jimpsonberry ought to collect fire insurance on that dinner. It wasn't cooked; it was a plain case of arson."

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.

"Hello!" he said.

"Oh! Hello, 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."

"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 classes. I can never become one of the third class, 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 association 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."

"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.

"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."

"I shall never believe, my dear John," said Mrs. Pedagog, "that in your day boys ever placed giant crackers under their uncles' chairs."

"We never did, my love," Mr. Pedagog responded, quickly.

"Why, of course not," laughed the Idiot. "They couldn't, you know. They hadn't been invented. What was your trouble with Uncle Jed, Mr. Pedagog?"

"Oh, our difference of opinion was rather of an ethical import," replied Mr. Pedagog, genially. "My Uncle Jed was a preacher, and he used to speak entirely from notes which he would make out the night before and place in the pocket of his black coat. All I did was to take the notes of his next day's sermon out of his pocket one Saturday evening, and put in their stead a--ah--a recipe for what we called Washington pie--and a very good pie it was."

"John!" ejaculated Mrs. Pedagog.

"I _did_, my dear," confessed the Schoolmaster, "and really I have never regretted it, although my particular uncle gave me a distressingly acrid and dreary lecture on my certain future when he found out what had happened. Yet what did happen, though mischievously intended, resulted in great good, for when the dear old gentleman stood up in the pulpit and started to preach the next morning, with the recipe for a Washington pie as the only available note at hand, he pulled himself together and preached off-hand the finest sermon of his life, and he discovered then the secret of his after-success. He became known ultimately as one of the most brilliant preachers of his time, and from that moment never went into the pulpit with any factitious aids to his memory."

"You mean cribs, don't you?" asked the Idiot.

"That is what college-boys call them, I believe," said Mr. Pedagog. "I will say further that a year before he died _my_ Uncle Jed told me that it was my mischievous act that had given him the hint which became the keynote of his eloquence," he added, complacently. "I shall always remember him affectionately."

"Of course," said the Idiot. "No doubt we all remember our Uncle Jeds affectionately. I certainly do. He was my mother's brother, and he meant well. I never really blamed him for not knowing how to sympathize with a boyish prank, because there has never been a school of instructions for uncles. Unclehood is about the hardest hood man has to wear, and as I have observed uncles and their habits, they either spoil or repel the small chaps and chappesses who happen to be made their nephews and nieces by an accident of birth. Uncles are either intensely genial or intensely irritable, and as far as I am concerned it is my belief that our colleges should include in their curriculum a chair of 'Uncleism.' Unclehood is a relationship that man has to accept. It is thrust upon him. He can't help himself. To be a father or a mother is a matter of volition. But even in a free country like our own, if a man has a brother or a sister he is liable to find himself an uncle at any time whether he wishes to be one or not. Then when it happens he's got to reason out a course of procedure without any basis in previous experience."

"Why don't you write a book on 'Hints to Uncles,' or 'The Complete Aunt,'" suggested Mr. Brief. "I have no doubt it would make good reading."

"Thanks for the idea," said the Idiot. "I think I'll do it. Not in the hope of profit, but for the benefit of the race."

"What has all this to do with attics?" asked Mrs. Idiot.

"The natural resting-place of the bad uncle," explained the Idiot. "Still, I maintain that it is every man's duty to keep an attic for the useless things, as Mrs. Pedagog calls them, which some day, when he least expects it, will carry his mind back to other days. The word itself, attic, carries the mind back to the splendors of Athens and other things that are out of date. When I was ill I found sincerest pleasure in rummaging. You can't rummage in a library if your library is properly looked after. You can't rummage in a bedroom in a well-kept house. You all know what parlors are--designed largely for the reception of people who come out to call upon you in their best Sunday clothes, and who would never think of calling upon you intimately, as a friend might, in his knickerbockers. You can't rummage there. The only place where one may rummage with any degree of success is in the attic, and my experience has been such that I believe my recent illness has contributed to my health. My mind has been carried back to conditions that used to be. Conditions which existed then and which were inferior to conditions which now prevail make me satisfied with the present. Where old-time conditions were better than the existing one I have naturally discovered how to improve. Rummaging, therefore, is improving to the mind and contributes to one's contentment."

"Then there are good economical reasons for the maintenance of an attic," the Idiot continued. "I found enough old boyhood collections of various things there to keep Tommy and Mollie happy for years without my having to pay out a penny for birthday presents--old stamps, old coins, old picture papers, and, I assure you, a lot of old newspapers, too, with better and more readable news in them than is now to be found in any of our modern bilious journals. Then the bundles of letters that came out of that place--my mother's letters to me, written while I was away at school; my father's letters in the old days at your house, Mrs. Pedagog, which did much to keep me straight then and re-reading of which doesn't hurt now; and, best of all," he added, with an affectionate glance at Mrs. Idiot, "a little bundle of my own letters to a certain person tied up with a blue ribbon, and full of pressed roses and autumn leaves and promises--"

"In the attic?" asked Mr. Brief, with a dry smile. "Is that where Mrs. Idiot keeps your promises?"

Mrs. Idiot blushed. "I have a cedar chest full of treasures up there," she said. "I thought it was locked."

"Well, anyhow, I found them," said the Idiot, cheerfully; "and while they were not especially good reading, they were good reminders of other days. It wouldn't be a bad idea if every married man were to read over the letters of his days of courtship once a year. I think it would bring back more forcibly than anything else the conditions of the contract which he was inviting the young partner of his joys to sign. If an attic never held anything but bundles of one's old love-letters it would demonstrate its right to become an institution."

"Very true," said the lawyer; "but," he added, prompted by that cautious spirit which goes always with the professional giver of advice, "suppose that side by side with that little bundle of pressed flowers and autumn leaves and promises one should chance to find another little bundle of pressed flowers and autumn leaves and promises--the promises written by some other hand than the hand that is rummaging in the cedar chest? What then? Would that prove a pleasing find?"