When the dreadful thing occurred that night, every one turned on me.
The injustice of it hurt me most. They said I got up the dinner, that
I asked them to give up other engagements and come, that I promised all
kinds of jollification, if they would come; and then when they did come
and got in the papers and every one--but ourselves--laughed himself
black in the face, they turned on ME! I, who suffered ten times to their
one! I shall never forget what Dallas Brown said to me, standing with a
coal shovel in one hand and a--well, perhaps it would be better to tell
it all in the order it happened.
It began with Jimmy Wilson and a conspiracy, was helped on by a
foot-square piece of yellow paper and a Japanese butler, and it
enmeshed and mixed up generally ten respectable members of society and
a policeman. Incidentally, it involved a pearl collar and a box of soap,
which sounds incongruous, doesn't it?
It is a great misfortune to be stout, especially for a man. Jim was
rotund and looked shorter than he really was, and as all the lines of
his face, or what should have been lines, were really dimples, his face
was about as flexible and full of expression as a pillow in a tight
cover. The angrier he got the funnier he looked, and when he was raging,
and his neck swelled up over his collar and got red, he was entrancing.
And everybody liked him, and borrowed money from him, and laughed at his
pictures (he has one in the Hargrave gallery in London now, so people
buy them instead), and smoked his cigarettes, and tried to steal his
Jap. The whole story hinges on the Jap.
The trouble was, I think, that no one took Jim seriously. His ambition
in life was to be taken seriously, but people steadily refused to. His
art was a huge joke--except to himself. If he asked people to dinner,
every one expected a frolic. When he married Bella Knowles, people
chuckled at the wedding, and considered it the wildest prank of Jimmy's
career, although Jim himself seemed to take it awfully hard.
We had all known them both for years. I went to Farmington with Bella,
and Anne Brown was her matron of honor when she married Jim. My first
winter out, Jimmy had paid me a lot of attention. He painted my portrait
in oils and had a studio tea to exhibit it. It was a very nice picture,
but it did not look like me, so I stayed away from the exhibition. Jim
asked me to. He said he was not a photographer, and that anyhow the rest
of my features called for the nose he had given me, and that all the
Greuze women have long necks. I have not.