A Favorite Tie

A SPECIAL kind of gratitude comes over us when we remember the friend who rushes to our rescue in a minor but embarrassing situation.

Of course there may be mortals who have never found themselves in a predicament. If so, they have but a fragmentary notion of what the universe can do to man. Everyone who knows what it means to be ‘up a tree’ has seen the world with a difference. The most familiar landscape takes on weird proportions when viewed through saucer eyes.

There we were, at a disadvantage, up in the air, out on a limb. And here came somebody with a ladder for our tree. As long as we live we shall remember him, for he was willing to associate with us when we were out of our element, off our base, and no great ornament to any sphere.

The emergency need not be a very deadly one in order to arouse deep gratitude. Strangely enough, our opening moments with a new friend are likely to be trivial. In this incidental world we are not very often played into each other’s presence with slow music.

The adventure of the Busy Commuter is a case in point. He had finished breakfast and was hurrying out to catch his early train when his wife asked him to help her take the extra leaf out of the dining-room table. She had given a luncheon party the day before, and it would delay him only half a minute, she said, to pull on one end of the table while she pulled on the other and removed the leaf. Then he might skip along and she would put the table together herself.

He hated to think of her struggling alone with the heavy walnut table. So, while she was placing the spare leaf against the closet wall, he bent over, stretched himself almost flat, reached with his long arms to the far end of the banquet board, and snapped the two halves together.

The trouble was that when he leaned over the end of his necktie slipped its moorings and dangled into the gap where the extra leaf had been. When the two halves snapped together, they took his tie in their bite. This table was equipped with a patent snap that locked securely.

When the housewife returned from putting away the extra leaf, she found her husband tethered by his own necktie, his face mirrored in the polished surface beneath his chin.

The last thing she had meant to do was to catch him in a trap at train time. She tugged at the little ring under the table that was supposed to pull the wire that unfastened the catch. The fabric of the necktie was jammed in the lock and the unfastener would not work.

‘I’ll get the scissors,’ she said capably. ‘We’ll have to cut off the tie.’

‘No,’ objected her husband, head downward, addressing his own reflection in black walnut. ‘This is one of my favorite ties.’

‘Couldn’t you work the knot downward,’ she ventured, ‘far enough so that you could slip your head out, leaving the tie?’

‘My dear,’ said he reasonably, ‘do you see how near the table I am?’

She saw. ‘But, darling,’ she persisted, ‘if you should pull gently upward, loosening the knot at the same time, couldn’t you gradually work loose?’

‘I tried that while you were in the cupboard,’ said he. ‘I nearly tore the tie. You’ll have to pick the lock open some way.’

‘I’ll get a gimlet!’ said the wife, to whom a ‘gimlet’ meant any jimmying device she could steal from her husband’s toolbox.

‘Not a gimlet!’ he called after her. ‘Just bring me a looking glass and I’ll hold it out over the edge of the table and tell you what needs to be done to the lock.’

Swiftly she brought the long-handled mirror from her dressing table for him, and a can opener for herself.

‘If you’ll slide under the table now,’ said he, ‘I’ll tell you what to do.’

Doubling like a dolphin, she went under. Her husband held the mirror at arm’s length so that by twisting his chin around he could see the dim outlines of the under-table situation in the glass. It is hard for a mechanically-minded man to explain a tricky catch in nontechnical terms to a novice, but he was doing his best. So was the novice. Nothing she could do with the can opener would budge the lock. Flushed with exertion, she looked up and saw his face in the glass. His head rose like a centrepiece of stemware from the middle of his own breakfast table, yet he was talking as earnestly as if on a platform delivering a lecture illustrated with lantern slides.

Up to this moment she had been absorbed in the gravity of the situation, but meeting his instructive eye in the mirror was too much.

‘Don’t laugh,’ he advised. ‘It saps your strength.’

‘I’m not laughing,’ gasped she in stitches, ‘only you don’t know how funny you do look.’

‘If it comes to looking funny,’ retorted the husband, addressing the lady in the mirror, ‘it’s too bad you can’t see yourself.’

‘May I come in?’ called a voice from the porch, so unexpectedly that the housewife under the table jumped and hit her head a crack ou the joists above. There in the garden door stood their newest and most fastidious neighbor, who had stopped to return the hedge clippers on his way to the train.

‘We’ll just unfasten this table,’ said he, as if tables that took ties in their teeth were the regular thing, and with scarcely a look at the Head of the House he joined the lady below.

Four hands are better than two on the under side of a table: two to brace the can opener, two to force the lock. ‘Now if you’ll just hold it open like that,’ said he, ‘I’ll go up and pull.’

Apart sprang the table. Upright sprang mine host. Upright also, complete with can opener, sprang mine hostess. Off went the two men just in time for the train, and the episode was as if it had never happened. Not once did the rescuer mention the event or appear to think he had surprised the couple at any employment except what they went in for every morning after breakfast. And when, weeks later, the victim of the snapping table decided to tell the neighborhood about it, he found that nobody had heard of it, not even the rescuer’s wife. The life saver had not shown his medals to a soul.

‘What a little thing to remember for years!’ — but it was a clue to character and the starting point of a friendship. The fellow man who does not laugh at our predicaments until we are ready to laugh at them, or report them to others until we have a chance to report them, is somebody to bank on. He is reliable as well as congenial. And he is rather scarce.

FRANCES LESTER WARNER