“The guv’nor,” said Parker, breaking the silence, “has some nice little objay dar, sir.”
“Little what?”
“Objay dar, sir.”
Light dawned upon Archie.
“Of course, yes. French for junk. I see what you mean now. Dare say you’re right, old friend. Don’t know much about these things myself.”
Parker gave an appreciative flick at a vase on the mantelpiece.
“Very valuable, some of the guv’nor’s things.” He had picked up the small china figure of the warrior with the spear, and was grooming it with the ostentatious care of one brushing flies off a sleeping Venus. He regarded this figure with a look of affectionate esteem which seemed to Archie absolutely uncalled-for. Archie’s taste in Art was not precious. To his untutored eye the thing was only one degree less foul than his father-in-law’s Japanese prints, which he had always observed with silent loathing. “This one, now,” continued Parker. “Worth a lot of money. Oh, a lot of money.”
“What, Pongo?” said Archie incredulously.
“Sir?”
“I always call that rummy-looking what-not Pongo. Don’t know what else you could call him, what!”
The valet seemed to disapprove of this levity. He shook his head and replaced the figure on the mantelpiece.
“Worth a lot of money,” he repeated. “Not by itself, no.”
“Oh, not by itself?”
“No, sir. Things like this come in pairs. Somewhere or other there’s the companion-piece to this here, and if the guv’nor could get hold of it, he’d have something worth having. Something that connoozers would give a lot of money for. But one’s no good without the other. You have to have both, if you understand my meaning, sir.”
“I see. Like filling a straight flush, what?”
“Precisely, sir.”
Archie gazed at Pongo again, with the dim hope of discovering virtues not immediately apparent to the casual observer. But without success. Pongo left him cold–even chilly. He would not have taken Pongo as a gift, to oblige a dying friend.
“How much would the pair be worth?” he asked. “Ten dollars?”
Parker smiled a gravely superior smile. “A leetle more than that, sir. Several thousand dollars, more like it.”
“Do you mean to say,” said Archie, with honest amazement, “that there are chumps going about loose–absolutely loose–who would pay that for a weird little object like Pongo?”
“Undoubtedly, sir. These antique china figures are in great demand among collectors.”
Archie looked at Pongo once more, and shook his head.
“Well, well, well! It takes all sorts to make a world, what!”
What might be called the revival of Pongo, the restoration of Pongo to the ranks of the things that matter, took place several weeks later, when Archie was making holiday at the house which his father- in-law had taken for the summer at Brookport. The curtain of the second act may be said to rise on Archie strolling back from the golf-links in the cool of an August evening. From time to time he sang slightly, and wondered idly if Lucille would put the finishing touch upon the all-rightness of everything by coming to meet him and sharing his homeward walk.
She came in view at this moment, a trim little figure in a white skirt and a pale blue sweater. She waved to Archie; and Archie, as always at the sight of her, was conscious of that jumpy, fluttering sensation about the heart, which, translated into words, would have formed the question, “What on earth could have made a girl like that fall in love with a chump like me?” It was a question which he was continually asking himself, and one which was perpetually in the mind also of Mr. Brewster, his father-in-law. The matter of Archie’s unworthiness to be the husband of Lucille was practically the only one on which the two men saw eye to eye.
“Hallo–allo–allo!” said Archie. “Here we are, what! I was just hoping you would drift over the horizon,”
Lucille kissed him.
“You’re a darling,” she said. “And you look like a Greek god in that suit.”
“Glad you like it.” Archie squinted with some complacency down his chest “I always say it doesn’t matter what you pay for a suit, so long as it’s right. I hope your jolly old father will feel that way when he settles up for it.”