Mr. Bingle | Page 8

took to staying away from home for
days at a time. It was at this stage of the affair that the children began to
see him through their mother's eyes. Certain disclosures were inevitable.
In a word, Mrs. Hooper hired detectives, and finding herself in a
splendid position to secure all she wanted in the way of alimony,
heralded Mr. Hooper's shortcomings to the world. The only good that
ever came out of the unfortunate transaction, so far as Mr. Hooper was
concerned, was to be found in the blessed realisation that she had
actually deprived herself of the right to nag him, and that was
something he knew would prove to be a constant source of irritation to
her.
But when his children turned against him, he faltered. He had not

counted on that. They not only went off to live with their mother, but
they virtually wiped him out of their lives, quite as if he had passed
away and no longer existed in the flesh. The three of them stood by the
mother--as they should have done, we submit, considering Mr.
Hooper's habits--and shuddered quite as profoundly as she when the
name of the erring parent was mentioned in their presence. Mr. Hooper
couldn't for the life of him understand this treachery on the part of his
pampered offspring, on whom he had lavished everything and to whom
he had denied nothing in the way of luxury. It was hard for him to
realise that he was as much of a scamp and scapegrace in their young
eyes as he was in the eyes of his wife--and the whole of his wife's
family, even to the remotest of cousins.
In the bright days of their early married life, before he knew the
difference between what he looked upon as affectionate teasing and
what he afterwards came to know as persistent nagging, he deeded over
to her the house and lot in Madison Avenue. He did that willingly,
cheerfully. Two days after the divorce was granted, he paid over to her
one hundred thousand dollars alimony. He did that unwillingly,
gloomily. And the very next week the stock market went the wrong
way for him, and he was cleaned out. He hadn't a dollar left of the
comfortable little fortune that had been his. He remained drunk for
nearly two months, and when he sobered up in a sanitarium--and took
the pledge for the first and last time--he came out of the haze and found
that he hadn't a friend left in New York. Every man's head was turned
away from him, every man's hand was against him.
He sent for his son to come to the cheap hotel in which he was living.
The son sent back word that he never wanted to see his face again.
Whereupon Joseph Hooper for the first time declared that the sons and
daughters of men are curses, and slunk out of New York to say it aloud
in the broad, free stretches of the world across which he drifted without
aim or purpose for years and years and always farther away from the
home he had lost.
He always said to himself--but never so much as a word of it to any one
else--that if his wife hadn't driven him to distraction with her nagging

he would have avoided the happy though disastrous pitfalls into which
he stumbled in his desperate efforts to find appreciation. He would
have remained an honourable, faithful spouse to her, and an
abstainer--as such things go. He would have shared with her the love
and respect of their three children, and he would have staved off
bankruptcy with the very hundred thousand dollars that she exacted as
spite money. But she was a nagger, and he was no Job. There was a
modicum of joy in the heart of him, however: having been cleaned out
to the last penny, he was in no position to come up monthly with the
thousand dollars charged against him by the court for the support and
maintenance of two of his children until they reached their majority. He
took a savage delight in contemplating the rage of his late wife when
she realised that the children would have to be provided for out of the
income from the one hundred thousand she had received in a lump sum,
and he even thanked God that she was without means beyond this
hateful amount. It tickled him to think of her anguish in not being able
to spend the income from her alimony on furs and feathers with which
to bedeck herself. Instead of spending the five thousand on herself she
would be obliged to put it on the backs and into the stomachs of her
three brats! He chuckled vastly over this