The Corbin necklace

“Your grandmother’s necklace?” I inquired. It had been ten minutes or so since we’d mentioned it. Evidently, though, it was still on his mind. “Oh, something fabulous,” I told him.

But I saw at once that the reply hadn’t passed muster. It had struck him, apparently, as a typically adult remark, frivolous, or ignorant--or both. I don’t like being a typical adult to Punch so I tried to do better.

“I don’t know much about pearls,” I said. “They’re a special subject. And I haven’t even seen the necklace since your mother wore it at some ball or other--oh, pre-war. Perhaps a dozen years ago. But you can put it at this, safely enough. If it were sold and the money it brought invested, even conservatively, it would produce an income one could live on.”

“If you had to sell it to a fence, though,” Punch observed, “you wouldn’t get near so much for it. And a regular jeweler would know where it came from, if you’d stolen it, and call up the police. I suppose the way to do would be to break the string and sell the pearls one or two at a time. Even that would be pretty hard to do.”

“You aren’t planning to steal the necklace yourself, are you?” I inquired.

He smiled politely, by way of acknowledging the joke, but without losing his thoughtful air.

“It was horribly silly putting it in the paper, anyhow.”

“Putting what in the paper?”

“About how Gran was going to give it to Judy for a wedding present. I’ve got it here. I tore it out of Tuesday’s paper. I thought perhaps it was just as well not to have it lying around the house.”

He removed it in a wad from a pocket in his knickerbockers and brought it around for me to see.

There were columns about Judith Corbin’s approaching wedding in all the papers, these days. Justifiably, too, perhaps. If news is whatever people are curious about, the Corbins have been news for three generations. But the particular article which Punch had put into my hand was written in the vein I most detest, knowing, insinuating, pandering to the most abject form of snobbery.

“Confound American newspapers!” I said.

Punch caught me up sharply. “It isn’t their fault,” he declared. “They’re better than the newspapers in any other country.”

His Americanism, I may remark, is almost rabid. As a result of his having been dragged all over Europe for most of his boyhood, the temperature of his patriotism is far above normal; say about one hundred and four. It goes rather oddly with the rest of him for in the other respects he’s an incorruptible realist.

“My remark about American newspapers is stricken out,” I said hastily. “I didn’t mean to insult our country. But I agree with you that the reference to the necklace is unfortunate. Of course your mother....”

I was going to say, “knows best,” or something like that, just to avoid any implied criticism of Victoria. But Punch broke in.

“I don’t think it was mother who told them. She’s been kind of funny about that necklace.”

Well, there were old reasons why the necklace should be a sore point with Victoria. I didn’t feel like going into them with her thirteen-year-old son.

“Where is it?” I asked. “In the bank, I suppose?”

“No, it isn’t. It’s down here. Grandmother’s got it in that silly old safe of hers. Isn’t that the worst possible place to keep anything that people might want to steal? It isn’t supposed to be hard at all to open an ordinary safe. If Gran would just give it to me and let me hide it for her, somewhere, it would be a whole lot safer.”