He went away to the bedroom, thinking, but not of the Redmantle Club,
for which, to say truth, he cared little. Nor were his thoughts in line
with the swingeing sentences he had just been writing in the
exercise-book. On the contrary, the young authority was openly inquiring
of himself: _Was_ economic independence the complete solution of the
Unrest? _Were_ there no Values in the world but Utilitarian Values?
The bedroom door shut, and Judge Blenso, who had replied with a mere
busy nod to Charles's announcement, desisted from his clacking, and
produced a late copy of "The Rider and Driver" from the little drawer of
his typewriter-table. He began to look at pictures with a happy
expression upon his striking face.
Why was Mr. Blenso called the Judge? An interesting point, on which I,
for one, unluckily can shed no light. But if he has also been called a
relative and secretary, that was for the sake of peace only. To say
outright that this fine large gentleman was Charles Garrott's nephew
(his half-nephew, to be exact) would necessitate a vast deal of
explanatory genealogy. That was a fact, as the family Bibles of the
Blensos and Minters clearly proved, but it is a fact that had better be
quietly ceded. Judge Blenso was a relative, and it is quite true that
his young half-uncle had been reared from infancy to address him as
Uncle George. Garrott, who had no other nephew in the world, had always
thought it a little unfair.
The Judge's disaster had come upon him in the prime of a gallant
widowerhood. He had dived from an unfamiliar pier, one luckless day, in
the interests of a stout young woman, who flattered herself that she was
drowning. Diving too close to avoid her bulk, Charles's relative had
struck his head upon a submerged beam which should not have been there;
and the stout young woman, so far from drowning, had promptly proved
that she could float enough for two. She had saved her rescuer's life,
in short.
But the beam had had the last word in the encounter, after all. When
Uncle George Blenso got well of his concussion, it was early discovered
that he was just a little "different"; also that his nominal Real Estate
and Loans business downtown was far, far from solvent. It was
accordingly proposed in the family that Uncle George should go to the
Garrott place in Prince William County; but this proposal had been
rejected at once by Uncle George, who protested indignantly that he was
a city man. The upshot was that Charles, being the only city relative
extant, had invited the Judge to share his third floor here, turning out
his young friend and room-mate, Donald Manford, for that express
purpose. That had seemed to settle the issue. But no; very soon the
lively kinsman was pointing out that he would need money, of course, for
clothes, club-dues, and so on, and accordingly it was arranged that he
should become Charles's literary assistant on a regular salaried basis.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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