‘In a sense, madam. Mr West was anxious that I should go to the pub and drink his health.’
Then don’t let me keep you. Thank you, madam.’
‘Give my love to the boys in the back room.’
‘I will indeed, madam.’
A silence followed his departure. Homer broke it. ‘That’s a very peculiar butler,’ he said.
‘As a matter of fact, he’s only a synthetic butler. He’s really a broker’s man. Crips has been having a little trouble with the people who do the repairs, and they sent him down to watch over their interests. But Crips is mailing them a cheque tonight, so we shall be losing him shortly.’
‘Oh?’ said Homer. This revelation did not seem to have interested him greatly. He had the air of a man whose mind is on other things. ‘Well, he’s given me an idea.’
‘That’s good.’
‘What he was saying about going and drinking at the Goose and Gander. Do you suppose they would have champagne there?’
‘I shouldn’t think so.’
Then I shall have to do what I can with whisky. You see, said Homer, seeming to feel that if you cannot confide in a sister, in whom can you confide, ‘I love Vera Upshaw and I have the most extraordinary difficulty in telling her so. Whenever we are alone together, I find myself talking the merest trivialities. It cannot go on. I must break the spell somehow, and, as I say, that fellow has given me an idea. It has occurred to me that a judicious intake of alcoholic stimulant might do it. It’s worth trying, anyway,’ said Homer, and he was out of the room at a speed that rivalled Chippendale’s.
He left Barney staring after him with bulging eyes and drooping jaw, and it was thus that Crispin, entering at this moment, found her. What with his betrothal and Brotherly Love’s victory at a hundred to eight, he had been feeling that everything was for the best in this best of all possible worlds, but the sight of the woman he loved apparently on the verge of having a fit of some kind lowered his high spirits by several degrees, and he uttered a bleat of concern.
‘Hullo! I say! Is something wrong, darling? You look like a startled codfish. Suits you, of course. Very becoming. But it gives me the idea that something has happened to upset you. What’s the matter, my angel?’
‘I’ve had a shock.’
‘Too bad. But it was bound to come. You can’t shove policemen into brooks and not get what they call a delayed reaction. It’ll pass off. What you need is a drink.’
A strong shudder shook Barney.
‘Don’t mention that word to me! Homer’s gone off to the Goose and Gander to get pie-eyed.’
‘Has he, by Jove? Who’s Homer?’
‘My brother.’
‘Of course, yes. I know the chap you mean. He was in here just now, wasn’t he? Fellow with horn-rimmed spectacles and a mouse in his bedroom. Why is he going to get pie-eyed?’
‘To give him nerve to propose to Vera Upshaw.’ Crispin understood now. As a preliminary to both his breach of promise cases he had had to fortify himself in this manner before being able to express himself.
‘Well, that’s all right,’ he said consolingly, relieved that nothing worse had been responsible for his loved one’s agitation, ‘Nothing wrong with working himself up, is there?’
‘Of course there is. She’s a designing Delilah.’
‘Why do you say that? She’s probably a very nice girl.’
‘She isn’t! She’s a vampire. I spotted it as soon as I saw her. She’s after him for his money. She deliberately followed him down here so as to entrap him.’
‘Well, you may be right, but even so, aren’t you overlooking something?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘She’s bound to refuse him. I wouldn’t for the world say anything derogatory about any brother of yours, but let’s face it, Homer… Odd name, that. I wonder why they gave it him. The fact is, parents are apt to lose their heads at the font. Chippendale was telling me about a fellow who got labelled Chingachgook. And look at me, Crispin, and I wouldn’t like this to go any further, but I was also christened Lancelot and Gawain, my mother being fond of Tennyson. But where was I? Oh, yes. I was about to say that Homer, while a sterling chap and full of good stories about mice and all that, isn’t an oil painting. You couldn’t call him the answer to a maiden’s prayer.
‘But he makes a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year. There isn’t a hope that she’ll refuse him.’
Crispin saw her point. He appreciated the seriousness of the situation. He mused awhile and was rewarded with an idea.
‘Do you know what I think you ought to do?’
‘What?’
‘Go to the Goose and Gander and reason with him.’
‘Oh, Crips, what a help you are!’
‘Always glad to lend a hand. Shall I come with you?’
‘No. Thanks for the kind offer, but what I have to say to Homer is for his ears alone.’
One of the advantages a sister has when arguing with a brother is that she is under no obligation to be tactful. If she wishes to tell him that he is an idiot and ought to have his head examined, she can do so and, going further, can add that it is a thousand pities that no-one ever thought of smothering him with a pillow in his formative years. Barney did both these things almost immediately after she had entered the saloon bar of the Goose and Gander, and Homer, sipping whisky, said that he did not know what she was talking about.
More than thirty years had passed since in their mutual nursery Barney had settled a dispute with her brother by beating him over the head with a doll which was her constant companion, but she would gladly have done it now, had she had a doll with her. Her thoughts strayed for a moment to a heavy ash tray which was lying on the table, but wiser counsels prevailed, and she confined herself to words.
‘You do too know what I’m talking about. I’m talking about you and this gold-digging Vera of yours.’
It is not easy for a man drinking whisky and already not far from the Plimsoll line to achieve dignity, but Homer made a fair approach to it.
‘I must ask you not to speak of Miss Upshaw like that,’ he said, stiffening visibly. ‘You are merely being absurd. She is incapable of sordid thoughts about money. She is a rare soul who lives on the spiritual plane. One senses it in every line she writes. Read her Daffodil Days. Read her Morning’s At Seven.’
Barney indulged in a brief commination service in which both the works he had named featured largely. She would not, she said, read either of them on a bet.
‘Intensely spiritual,’ said Homer, now speaking rather thickly and experiencing some difficulty in pronouncing the words. ‘Ethereal. Refined. Graceful. Light. Dainty. You might say Elfin.’
‘All right, I’ll take your word for it, but you can’t go by that. Half the heels in New York write like angels. Oh, why is it,’ said Barney, becoming emotional, ‘that you and I are such abysmal saps? It’s like some sort of family curse. It seems only yesterday that you were warning me against marrying Wally Clayborne, and I wouldn’t listen. I didn’t ask myself why a man like Wally, handsome, dynamic and the pet of the sporting set, should want to marry a girl whose only charm was her money. I just fell for him with a dub thud. How clear and sensible you were then, and now here you are, all tangled up yourself with a female Wally Clayborne. It’s the old business of snakes and rabbits.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘It seems to be a natural law that every rabbit should go out of its class and fall under the spell of a snake. You’re a rabbit, I was a rabbit. I was hypnotized by Wally, who, I admit, had everything, including the moral code of a tom cat, and now you’ve let this Vera Upshaw hypnotize you. Of course she’ll marry you if you ask her, but what will there be in it for you? Do you think you’ll be able to hold her any more than I was able to hold Wally? She’ll be off around the corner, having affairs, before she’s digested the wedding cake.’
Homer rose, his dignity impaired by a momentary hiccup. A burst of song from the public bar next door
drowned his opening words, compelling him to repeat them.
‘I will listen to no more of this,’ he said austerely.
That’s your privilege,’ said Barney. A gallant fighter, she knew when she was beaten.
‘I am going back to the house.’
‘All keyed up? All ready to put your fat head in the snake’s mouth? Well, I won’t come with you. I shall go next door and meet the boys. That singing sounds promising.’
It was with a brother’s love for a sister at its lowest ebb that Homer started on his way back to the Hall. Resentment of the subversive stuff to which they had been compelled to listen had turned his ears pink, and his eyes glowed militantly behind their spectacles. Never in his life, he told himself, had he heard such pernicious nonsense as had proceeded from the lips of one whom he had always regarded as fairly well-balanced. Sisters, he supposed, tended to be critical of the objects of their brothers’ affections, but to sully a woman like Vera Upshaw with foul innuendos was unpardonable. Even a sister, looking into those dear candid eyes, should have been able to detect the pure white soul that lay beyond them. All that stuff about going around the corner and having affairs. Nauseating.
Not that it had had any effect on his great love. More than ever he yearned to see Vera Upshaw and pour out his heart to her, and the next moment he was given the opportunity of doing so. He had come to the gate and was about to pass through, and there she was, just beyond it. She was linked in a close embrace with a ginger-headed young man in whom he recognized his host’s nephew Gerald West, and as he stared dumbfounded she kissed him. And when we say kissed, we use the word in its most exact meaning. It was the sort of kiss which in the days before Hollywood adopted the slogan of Anything Goes would never have been permitted on the silver screen. The Philadelphia censors would have insisted on its being cut by a great many feet.
Homer drew back. He had the odd feeling that somebody had poured a brimming bucket of iced water over him.
Many men in a similar situation would have found their love, seeming so indestructible till then, expiring with a pop, leaving them convinced that they had been vouchsafed a merciful warning and would do well to make a sharp revision of their matrimonial plans. Homer was one of them. It was as though he had made an abrupt recovery from a particularly severe fever. All molten passion a brief moment earlier, he was his calm, cool, collected self again. Homer, the great lover, had vanished without a trace, and in his place stood J. Homer Pyle of Pyle, Wisbeach and Hollister, the corporation lawyer on whom no-one had been able to slip a fast one in the last fifteen years.
The only thing that marred his sense of well-being was the thought that his sister Bernadette was now in a position to say ‘I told you so’.
How long he remained there, weighing the sweet against the bitter, he could not have said, but he was still doing this when he perceived an expensive-looking car coming through the gate with Willoughby in the back seat. He sprang into the road and hailed it.
‘Hi, Scrope. Just a minute, Scrope. Want to speak to you, Scrope.’
‘Yes?’ said Willoughby. He spoke grumpily. He had by no means forgiven Homer for his officiousness in the matter of The Girl in Blue. The last thing he desired was to have to interrupt his journey in order to chat with a man capable of putting miniatures in middle drawers.
Homer advanced to the car and clutched it in a firm grip, as if to arrest its progress in the-event of it taking it into its head to start again.
‘You going to London, Scrope?’
‘Yes.’
‘Can you give me a lift?’
‘I suppose so,’ said Willoughby, still grumpy. ‘Why do you want to go to London?’
It would have been possible for Homer to say that he had had a cable from America which made his immediate presence in the metropolis imperative, but he decided that the truth from one man of the world to another man of the world would carry more weight.
‘There’s a woman here I want to avoid,’ he said.
He could not have framed a sentence more calculated to win Willoughby’s sympathy. That sturdy bachelor never turned a deaf ear to appeals from men desirous of avoiding women. He had been doing it himself for years and considered it the foundation stone on which the good life should be based.
‘Jump in,’ he said, and Homer jumped in.
Tell me all about it,’ he said, and Homer told him all about it.
‘If I were you,’ said Willoughby, the narrative concluded, ‘I’d take the next plane back to New York. Never mind about your luggage. Leave it behind,’ said Willoughby, and Homer said that the same idea had occurred to him.
2
Jerry was pacing to and fro near the gate. He was feeling shaken, but happy to have placed his relations with Vera Upshaw on a satisfactory basis. It had not been easy to detach her from his person and explain to her without being abrupt that his affections were engaged elsewhere and that her suggestion that everything between them should be just as it was before, Gerald dear, was not to be considered for an instant, but he had managed it. The thought of Jane had lent him eloquence, and even without telling her that he would greatly prefer to be dead in a ditch than married to her he had been able to make himself clear.
She had not been pleased, but dudgeon in the circumstances was only to be expected, and a little dudgeon, he told himself, never did anyone any harm. The thing to fix the mind on was that she had left him and he was alone again, free to meditate on Jane, undisturbed.
So intently was he doing this that it was only when a motor horn tooted immediately behind him, causing him to skip like the high hills, that he became aware that she had returned from her trip to London. She was looking radiant at the wheel of the car with which the bounty of Scrope, Ashby and Pemberton had provided her, and he thought, as he had so often thought before, that there was something about her that made all other girls of his acquaintance seem like battered repaints. He hastened to the window and poked his head in.
Their conversation-opened on perhaps a pedestrian note.
‘Hullo,’ he said.
‘Hi,’ she replied.
‘So you’re back.’
‘Yes, I’m back!’
‘Did you have a nice drive?’
‘Terrific.’
‘Tired?’
‘Not a bit.’
‘Did you see the lawyer?’
‘Yes, I saw him. His name’s Stoganbuhler.’
‘Well, sooner him than me.’
There was a momentary silence. Then Jane said:
‘Will I what?’ and when Jerry asked her to clarify the question, she said, ‘Certainly.’
‘When I left, we were talking of this and that and you said “Jane, will you?”, and before you could proceed further Chippendale came butting in. So now, devoured by curiosity, I ask Will I what?’
‘Marry me. Be my wife. Team up.’
‘Oh, was that it? Need you ask?’
‘I thought I’d better. Will you, Jane?’
‘Of course I will. I can hardly wait. So now what you do is climb in and kiss me, don’t you think?’
‘It was just what I was planning to do.’
‘But I wish you weren’t going to do it with your face all over lipstick.’
‘Is it?’
‘Smothered.’
‘I had better explain.’
‘I think so. If you can.’
‘That was a girl I used to be engaged to. She broke it off, and wanted it to be on again. She made a sudden dive for me. I ought to have uppercut her as she bored in, but I missed my chance. However, everything is all right. I told her I was engaged to you.’
‘But you weren’t.’
‘I may have anticipated a little, but I am now, aren’t I?’
‘You certainly are.
‘Gosh, how happy we’re going to be.’
‘There won’t be any more of your ex-fiancées dropping in and kissing you?’
‘No, that’s the lot.’
‘Good.
One likes to know.’
It was some time later that Jane, when able to speak, said ‘Jerry’, and Jerry, who had been murmuring incoherently, said ‘Yes?’
‘There’s one little thing I ought to tell you.’
‘I know it.’
‘About my money?’
‘Yes. Uncle Bill turned up just now with the story.’
‘And don’t you mind?’
‘Not if you don’t.’
‘I’m delighted. When Stoganbuhler broke the news, I felt like laughing my head off. It would only have come between us.’
‘Nothing could ever come between us.’
‘What’s money?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Dross, wouldn’t you call it?’
‘Just the word.’
‘Who wants money if they’ve got G. G. F. West? Though I’m afraid we shall be awfully hard up. I’ve got to give your uncle all he lent me for this car and my other extravagances. I’ve been spending a fortune. Like a drunken sailor, as he said. You won’t mind love in a cottage, will you, or in a small flat somewhere?’
‘We can do better than that. Uncle Bill has terminated the trust, and I’m loaded. Loaded enough, anyway. Any time you want a little dross, ask me.’
‘Jerry! How wonderful.’
‘Not too bad, I agree.’
‘Oh, Jerry!’ said Jane.
‘Oh, Jane!’ said Jerry.
Odd, he reflected, how things turn out. If some unknown sadist had not selected him for jury duty, chuckling at the thought of how it was going to disorganize his working day, he would never have known that Jane existed. Giving credit where credit was due, he saw in the miracle of their meeting one more proof of his guardian angel’s efficiency. When that magician undertook a job, he certainly gave service.
In the intervals of kissing Jane he pondered on his guardian angel. For some reason he pictured him as smallish with one of those rather sharp faces. Horn-rimmed spectacles? Yes, probably horn-rimmed spectacles and a nervous bustling manner, the sort of fellow who would have made a good confidential secretary to a big financier.
What had he done to deserve such a helper? Not much, that he could see. Still, there it was, and he could at least be grateful.