CHARLIE
It’s curious, but no one seems to be able to recall what Charlie used to talk about before the country went what may be called, with screaming effect, dry. Of course there must have been a lot of unsatisfactory weather even then, and I don’t doubt that he slipped in a word or two when the talk got around to the insanity of the then-current styles of women’s dress. But though I have taken up the thing in a serious way, and have gone about among his friends making inquiries, I cannot seem to find that he could ever have got any farther than that in the line of conversation. In fact, he must have been one of those strong silent men in the old days.
Those who have not seen him for several years would be in a position to be knocked flat with a feather if they could see what a regular little chatterbox Charlie has become. Say what you will about prohibition—and who has a better right?—you would have to admit, if you knew Charlie, that it has been the making of him as a conversationalist.
He never requires his audience to do any feeding for him. It needs no careful leading around of the subject, no tactful questions, no well-timed allusions, to get him nicely loosened up. All you have to do is say good evening to him, ask him how everybody over at his house is getting along, and give him a chair—though this last is not essential—and silver-tongued Charlie is good for three hours straight on where he is getting it, how much he has to pay for it, and what the chances are of his getting hold of a couple of cases of genuine pinch-bottle, along around the middle of next week. I have known him to hold entire dinner parties spellbound, from cocktails to finger bowls, with his monologue.
Now I would be well down among the last when it came to wanting to give you the impression that Charlie has been picked for the All-American alcoholic team. Despite the wetness of his conversation he is just a nice, normal, conscientious drinker, willing to take it or let it alone, in the order named. I don’t say he would not be able to get along without it, but neither do I say that he doesn’t get along perfectly splendidly with it. I don’t think I ever saw any one who could get as much fun as Charlie can out of splitting the Eighteenth Amendment with a friend.
There is a glamour of vicarious romance about him. You gather from his conversation that he comes into daily contact with any number of picturesque people. He tells about a friend of his who owns three untouched bottles of the last absinthe to come into the country; or a lawyer he knows, one of whose grateful clients sent him six cases of champagne in addition to his fee; or a man he met who had to move to the country in order to have room for his Scotch.
Charlie has no end of anecdotes about the interesting women he meets, too. There is one girl he often dwells on, who, if you only give her time, can get you little bottles of Chartreuse, each containing an individual drink. Another gifted young woman friend of his is the inventor of a cocktail in which you mix a spoonful of orange marmalade. Yet another is the justly proud owner of a pet marmoset which becomes the prince of good fellows as soon as you have fed him a couple of teaspoonfuls of gin.
It is the next best thing to knowing these people yourself to hear Charlie tell about them. He just makes them live.
It is wonderful how Charlie’s circle of acquaintances has widened during the last two years; there is nothing so broadening as prohibition. Among his new friends he numbers a conductor on a train that runs down from Montreal, and a young man who owns his own truck, and a group of chaps who work in drug stores, and I don’t know how many proprietors of homey little restaurants in the basements of brownstone houses.
Some of them have turned out to be but fair-weather friends, unfortunately. There was one young man, whom Charlie had looked upon practically as a brother, who went particularly bad on him. It seems he had taken a pretty solemn oath to supply Charlie, as a personal favor, with a case of real Gordon, which he said he was able to get through his high social connections on the other side. When what the young man called a nominal sum was paid, and the case was delivered, its bottles were found to contain a nameless liquor, though those of Charlie’s friends who gave it a fair trial suggested Storm King as a good name for the brand. Charlie has never laid eyes on the young man from that day to this. He is still unable to talk about it without a break in his voice. As he says—and quite rightly, too—it was the principle of the thing.
But for the most part his new friends are just the truest pals a man ever had. In more time than it takes to tell it, Charlie will keep you right abreast with them—sketch in for you how they are, and what they are doing, and what their last words to him were.
But Charlie can be the best of listeners, too. Just tell him about any little formula you may have picked up for making it at home, and you will find the most sympathetic of audiences, and one who will even go to the flattering length of taking notes on your discourse. Relate to him tales of unusual places where you have heard that you can get it or of grotesque sums that you have been told have been exchanged for it, and he will hang on your every word, leading you on, asking intelligent questions, encouraging you by references to like experiences of his own.
But don’t let yourself get carried away with success and attempt to branch out into other topics. For you will lose Charlie in a minute if you try it.
But that, now I think of it, would probably be the very idea you would have in mind.
LLOYD
Lloyd wears washable neckties.
HENRY
You would really be surprised at the number of things that Henry knows just a shade more about than anybody else does. Naturally he can’t help realizing this about himself, but you mustn’t think for a minute that he has let it spoil him. On the contrary, as the French so well put it. He has no end of patience with others, and he is always willing to oversee what they are doing, and to offer them counsel. When it comes to giving his time and his energy there is nobody who could not admit that Henry is generous. To a fault, I have even heard people go so far as to say.
If, for instance, Henry happens to drop in while four of his friends are struggling along through a game of bridge he does not cut in and take a hand, thereby showing up their playing in comparison to his. No, Henry draws up a chair and sits looking on with a kindly smile. Of course, now and then he cannot restrain a look of pain or an exclamation of surprise or even a burst of laughter as he listens to the bidding, but he never interferes. Frequently, after a card has been played, he will lean over and in a good-humoured way tell the player what he should have done instead, and how he might just as well throw his hand down then and there, but he always refuses to take any more active part in the game. Occasionally, when a uniquely poisonous play is made, I have seen Henry thrust his chair aside and pace about in speechless excitement, but for the most part he is admirably self-controlled. He always leaves with a few cheery words to the players, urging them to keep at it and not let themselves get discouraged.
And that is the way Henry is about everything. He will stroll over to a tennis court, and stand on the side lines, at what I am sure must be great personal inconvenience, calling words of advice and suggestion for sets at a stretch. I have even known him to follow his friends all the way around a golf course, offering constructive criticism on their form as he goes. I tell you, in this day and generation, you don’t find many people who will go as far out of their way for their friends as Henry does. And I am far from being the only one who says so, too.
I have often thought that Henry must be the boy who got up the idea of leaving the world a little better than he found it. Yet he never crashes in on his friends’ affairs. Only after the thing is done does he point out to you how it could have been done just a dash better. After you have signed the lease for the new apartment Henry tells you where you could have got one cheaper and sunnier; after you are all tied up with the new firm Henry explains to you where you made your big mistake in leaving the old one.
It is never any news to me when I hear people telling Henry that he knows more about more things than anybody they ever saw in their lives.
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And I don’t remember ever having heard Henry give them any argument on that one.
JOE
After Joe had had two cocktails he wanted to go up and bat for the trap drummer. After he had had three he began to get personal about the unattractive shade of the necktie worn by the strange man at the next table.
OLIVER
Oliver had a way of dragging his mouth to one side, by means of an inserted forefinger, explaining to you, meanwhile, in necessarily obscured tones, the work which his dentist had just accomplished on his generously displayed back teeth.
ALBERT
Albert sprinkled powdered sugar on his sliced tomatoes.
The Saturday Evening Post, June 17, 1922
Welcome Home
If at any time you happened to be hunting around for an average New York couple you couldn’t make a better selection than my friends the Lunts. They are just about as average as they come.
The Lunts may not go so far as to say that they helped buy the island from the Indians, but they do feel that they have every reason to regard themselves as dyed-in-the-wool New Yorkers. Mr. Lunt has been living here for going on fourteen years now, and Mrs. Lunt is virtually a native, having come on from the West with her family that time her father got the good offer, when she was twelve years old.
I shouldn’t want to come out with the bald statement that the Lunts live as quiet a life as any couple in the city. You have to be pretty well up on your statistics before you can go around talking that way. But I will step right up and say that Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Watson Lunt plod along in about as homey and unspectacular a manner as you would want to see. In fact, their high point in riotous living was touched five years ago, when Mr. Lunt nerved himself up definitely to take the plunge and sign it J. Watson.
In the first place, they are not exactly in the position of having it to throw around. Mr. Lunt is in the advertising business, and anybody will be glad to tell you where that was shot to, during the past few seasons. He is generally considered quite a boy in his own line of work. It is practically an open secret that it was he who thought up the slogan, “Good-by, Button Troubles,” for the Anti-Button Suit people; though it is perhaps not so widely known that the famous line, “Ask the Prince of Wales,” used by the Never-Slip Sleeve-Garter Company, was one of his brain children. He would be the first to say that he deserves no particular credit; it is simply that his mind happens to work that way.
THRILLING HOURS WITH RADIO
He had been connected with a small and determinedly doggy advertising agency for some time. There was a stretch of months when the phrase “connected with” would have been putting it rather too firmly. It would have been more in line with the facts to say that he was hanging on to the agency. For things down there were looking so thin that the office force regarded itself as but one jump ahead of the boys on the park benches. Indeed, Mr. Lunt got into the habit—from which he will doubtless never wholly recover—of looking on every pay envelope that did not contain the official raspberry as just so much velvet.
Even now that business is beginning to get the roses back in its cheeks, Mr. Lunt is scarcely able to present any parks to the city. His is what you could call a fair salary, but couldn’t really hail as fair enough. The Lunts make both ends meet, and let it pass at that. There is no chance of tying them in a large and dashing bow. What with the rent of the four-room apartment, and the wages of the handmaiden who returns to the bosom of her family every evening, Mr. Lunt is glad to be able to call it a month twelve times a year.
So you will be among the first to see for yourself that the Lunts can contribute little towards keeping the white lights blazing on Broadway of an evening. Eleven o’clock usually finds the apartment dark, and Mr. and Mrs. Lunt fairly into the swing of the night’s gay round of sleep.
Now and then they run so wild as to go to a movie—the movie house around the corner from them gets all the big feature pictures only a month or so after the Broadway film palaces are through with them, and you are pretty nearly always sure of a seat, if you make the theater by quarter past seven—and twice a month, say, they attend, in a body, some show that they have heard highly spoken of by their friends. The Lunts conscientiously read the newspaper dramatic reviews every morning, and ache for them when they are out of town and unable to procure a New York paper. But they regard them purely as reading matter. When they want dramatic criticism they ask their friends.
Occasionally they break out in a game of bridge with some other average New York couple, for a stake of half a cent a point. The losing side carefully copies down the sum lost on a slip of paper, and carries it over till the next meet, to be played off then.
The radio, which has recently come into their lives, has done great things for the Lunts. Now that Mr. Lunt has, with considerable difficulty and frequent muttered mention of biblical characters, got the apparatus installed, they are never at a loss for an evening’s stimulating pleasure. There they can sit, in their own living room, and listen to some kindly soul over in the Newark broadcasting station tell “How Johnny Musk-Ox Went to Old Daddy West Wind’s Party,” or they can hear a lecture on “Diseases of the Cranberry and How to Fight Them,” that keeps them right on the edge of their seats. As Mrs. Lunt says, she hasn’t the faintest idea what science is going to do next.
Every few weeks Mrs. Lunt puts on the black evening dress she picked up when one of the Fifty-seventh Street shops was having its sale, and Mr. Lunt dons his vintage dinner coat, and they go forth to a social gathering at the apartment of one of their friends. Conservative dancing is indulged in, to the strains of the phonograph. Between dances the ladies exchange amusing anecdotes of the bright things said by their children and the stupid things got off by their maids, while the gentlemen punctiliously offer one another cigarettes and solicitously ask if it doesn’t seem to be getting pretty warm. Over the refreshments things open up appreciably, and there is much hearty laughter over references to purely local incidents. Any strangers to the crowd who happen to have been invited can do little about helping the banter along.
On Sunday mornings Mr. Lunt gets in a lot of good wholesome sleep, so that he will be in condition to grapple with the puzzle page of the Sunday paper. Once that is off his mind he and his wife make an exhaustive study of the newspapers. Then Mrs. Lunt gets caught up on her correspondence, and Mr. Lunt, with the interest of the dilettante, endeavors to make the mainspring of the living-room clock listen to reason, or has a try at nailing together the place where the bookshelves have sprung.
It sometimes happens that one of their more prosperous friends asks the Lunts to make a day of it and come for a motor ride in the country. The friends would be surprised did they know what a treat a Sunday in the country isn’t, to the Lunts. As Mr. Lunt often says, there is no use talking, he likes his Sundays at home.
GAYETY ALWAYS ON TAP
Mrs. Lunt gets in a good deal more social life than her husband, for she can work it in in the afternoons. Intimates gather at her apartment, or she visits one of theirs, to put in a few rubbers of bridge or a few yards of sewing on lace-edged crêpe-de-chine underwear. In either case the afternoon comes to a climax in watercress sandwiches and tea.
You know, the curious thing about the Lunts, and the thing, perhaps, that goes farthest toward making them an average New York couple, is that they are not at all worked up over the calm of their existence. I don’t recall ever having seen their eyes brim with bitter tears over all the widely advertised gayety going on about them, in which they have no part. In fact, they really seem to go ahead on the idea that they are sitting comparatively pretty.
There is to them, as to the other average New Yorkers, something strangely reassuring in knowing that the hotels, the theaters, the dance clubs and the restaurants are always right there, ready and waiting for the time when the Lunts may have the price and the inclination to give the gay life a fair trial. In the same way there is a pleasant security in the thought of all the museums and the art
galleries, the concert halls and the lecture chambers, always in action. The Lunts are easily the next-to-the-last people to patronize them, but there is something soothing in the knowledge that, in case they should ever see the light, there they are, all set. It gives them a feeling like having money in the bank. Or at least something like that.
Once a year, however, the Lunts lay aside the cloistered life, and burn up Broadway. This is on the occasion of the annual metropolitan visit of Mr. Lunt’s Aunt Caroline, from the town where he spent his boyhood days.
There are times when, dreaming idly in the gloaming, one finds oneself drifting into wondering why, barring acts of God and business trips, Mr. Lunt’s Aunt Caroline should ever feel called upon to come to New York.
Of course she does want to see her nephew and niece, whom she groups under the general heading of “those poor children”—a little phrase of hers which does not imply that the Lunts are in a thin way financially or that they are in bad health; it simply expresses her kindly pity for them because they live in New York. But even allowing for her natural desire to be with her dear ones, it does not seem that the sacrifice involved is worth it.
For Aunt Caroline seems to have a peculiarly poisonous time of it in the big city. She is unalterably against New York—a feeling which she splits with the something over seventy thousand transients that daily knock at its portals. The city-by-the-Hudson’s hem, all right to visit is to them, and it is nothing more.
Complete Stories Page 55