'I want a table, please,' said Pat.
'Madame is a member?'
'A table, please. A nice, large one. I like plenty of room. And when Mr Carmody arrives tell him that Miss Wyvern and Mr Carroll are inside.'
'Very good, Madame. Certainly, Madame. This way, Madame.'
Just as simple as that! John, making a physically impressive but spiritually negligible tail to the procession, wondered, as he crossed the polished floor, how Pat did these things. It was not as if she were one of those massive imperious women whom you would naturally expect to quell head waiters with a glance. She was no Cleopatra, no Catherine of Russia – just a slim, slight girl with a tip-tilted nose. And yet she had taken this formidable magnifico in her stride, kicked him lightly in the face and passed on. He sat down, thrilled with a worshipping admiration.
Pat, as always happened after one of her little spurts of irritability, was apologetic.
'Sorry I bit your head off, Johnnie,' she said. 'It was a shame, after you had come all this way just to see an old friend. But it makes me so angry when you're meek and sheep-y and let people trample on you. Still, I suppose it's not your fault.' She smiled across at him. 'You always were a slow, good-natured old thing, weren't you, like one of those big dogs that come and bump their head on your lap and snuffle. Poor old Johnnie!'
John felt depressed. The picture she had conjured up was not a flattering one; and, as for this 'Poor old Johnnie!' stuff, it struck just the note he most wanted to avoid. If one thing is certain in the relations of the sexes, it is that the Poor Old Johnnies of this world get nowhere. But before he could put any of these feelings into words Pat had changed the subject.
'Johnnie,' she said, 'what's all this trouble between your uncle and father? I had a letter from father a couple of weeks ago, and as far as I could make out Mr Carmody seems to have been trying to murder him. What's it all about?'
Not so eloquently, nor with such a wealth of imagery as Colonel Wyvern had employed in sketching out the details of the affair of the dynamite outrage for the benefit of Chas Bywater, Chemist, John answered the question.
'Good heavens!' said Pat.
'I – I hope...' said John.
'What do you hope?'
'Well, I – I hope it's not going to make any difference?'
'Difference? How do you mean?'
'Between us. Between you and me, Pat.'
'What sort of difference?'
John had his cue.
'Pat, darling, in all these years we've known one another haven't you ever guessed that I've been falling more and more in love with you every minute? I can't remember a time when I didn't love you. I loved you as a kid in short skirts and a blue jersey. I loved you when you came back from that school of yours, looking like a princess. And I love you now more than I have ever loved you. I worship you, Pat darling. You're the whole world to me, just the one thing that matters the least little bit. And don't you try to start laughing at me again now, because I've made up my mind that, whatever else you laugh at, you've got to take me seriously. I may have been Poor Old Johnnie in the past, but the time has come when you've got to forget all that. I mean business. You're going to marry me, and the sooner you make up your mind to it, the better.'
That was what John had intended to say. What he actually did say was something briefer and altogether less effective.
'Oh, I don't know,' said John.
'Do you mean you're afraid I'm going to stop being friends with you just because my father and your uncle have had a quarrel?'
'Yes,' said John. It was not quite all he had meant, but it gave the general idea.
'What a weird notion! After all these years? Good heavens, no. I'm much too fond of you, Johnnie.'
Once more John had his cue. And this time he was determined that he would not neglect it. He stiffened his courage. He cleared his throat. He clutched the tablecloth.
'Pat...'
'Oh, there's Hugo at last,' she said, looking past him. 'And about time. I'm starving. Hullo! Who are the people he's got with him? Do you know them?'
John heaved a silent sigh. Yes, he could have counted on Hugo arriving at just this moment. He turned, and perceived that unnecessary young man crossing the floor. With him were a middle-aged man and a younger and extremely dashing-looking girl. They were complete strangers to John.
II
Hugo pranced buoyantly up to the table, looking like the Laughing Cavalier, clean-shaved.
He was wearing the unmistakable air of a man who has been to a welter-weight boxing contest at the Albert Hall and backed the winner.
'Hullo, Pat,' he said jovially. 'Hullo, John. Sorry I'm late. Mitt – if that is the word I want – my dear old friend . . . I've forgotten your name,' he added, turning to his companion.
'Molloy, brother. Thomas G. Molloy.'
Hugo's dear old friend spoke in a deep, rich voice, well in keeping with his appearance. He was a fine, handsome, open-faced person in the early forties, with grizzled hair that swept in a wave off a massive forehead. His nationality was plainly American, and his aspect vaguely senatorial.
'Molloy,' said Hugo, 'Thomas G. and daughter. This is Miss Wyvern. And this is my cousin, Mr Carroll. And now,' said Hugo, relieved at having finished with the introductions, 'let's try to get a bit of supper.'
The service at the Mustard Spoon is not what it was; but by the simple process of clutching at the coat tails of a passing waiter and holding him till he consented to talk business Hugo contrived to get fairly rapid action. Then, after an interval of the rather difficult conversation which usually marks the first stages of this sort of party, the orchestra burst into a sudden torrent of what it evidently mistook for music, and Thomas G. Molloy rose and led Miss Molloy out on to the floor. He danced a little stiffly, but he knew how to give the elbow and he appeared, as the crowd engulfed him, to be holding his own.
'Who are your friends, Hugo?' asked Pat.
'Thos G....'
'Yes, I know. But who are they?'
'Well, there,' said Hugo, 'you rather have me. I sat next to Thos at the fight, and I rather took to the fellow. He seemed to me a man full of noble qualities, including a loony idea that Eustace Rodd was some good as a boxer. He actually offered to give me three to one, and I cleaned up substantially at the end of the seventh round. After that, I naturally couldn't very well get out of giving the man supper. And as he had promised to take his daughter out tonight, I said bring her along. You don't mind?'
'Of course not. Though it would have been cosier, just we three.'
'Quite true. But never forget that, if it had not been for this Thos, you would not be getting the jolly good supper which I have now ample funds to supply. You may look on Thos as practically the Founder of the Feast.' He cast a wary eye at his cousin, who was leaning back in his chair with the abstracted look of one in deep thought. 'Has old John said anything to you yet?'
'John? What do you mean? What about?'
'Oh, things in general. Come and dance this. I want to have a very earnest word with you, young Pat. Big things are in the wind.'
'You're very mysterious.'
'Ah!' said Hugo.
Left alone at the table with nothing to entertain him but his thoughts, John came almost immediately to the conclusion that his first verdict on the Mustard Spoon had been an erroneous one. Looking at it superficially, he had mistaken it for rather an attractive place: but now, with maturer judgement, he saw it for what it was – a blot on a great city. It was places like the Mustard Spoon that made a man despair of progress. He disliked the clientele. He disliked the head waiter. He disliked the orchestra. The clientele was flashy and offensive and, as regarded the male element of it, far too given to the use of hair oil. The head waiter was a fat parasite who needed kicking. And, as for Ben Baermann's Collegiate Buddies, he resented the fact that they were being paid for making the sort of noises which he, when a small boy, had produced – for fun and with no thought of sordid gain – on a comb with
a bit of tissue paper over it.
He was brooding on the scene in much the same spirit of captious criticism as that in which Lot had once regarded the Cities of the Plain, when the Collegiate Buddies suddenly suspended their cacophony, and he saw Pat and Hugo coming back to the table.
But the Buddies had only been crouching, the better to spring. A moment later they were at it again, and Pat, pausing, looked expectantly at Hugo.
Hugo shook his head.
'I've just seen Ronnie Fish up in the balcony,' he said. 'I positively must go and confer with him. I have urgent matters to discuss with the old leper. Sit down and talk to John. You've got lots to talk about. See you anon. And, if there's anything you want, order it, paying no attention whatever to the prices in the right-hand column. Thanks to Thos, I'm made of money tonight.'
Hugo melted away: Pat sat down: and John, with another abrupt change of mood, decided that he had misjudged the Mustard Spoon. A very jolly little place, when you looked at it in the proper spirit. Nice people, a distinctly lovable head waiter, and as attractive a lot of musicians as he remembered ever to have seen. He turned to Pat, to seek her confirmation of these views, and, meeting her gaze, experienced a rather severe shock. Her eyes seemed to have frozen over. They were cold and hard. Taken in conjunction with the fact that her nose turned up a little at the end, they gave her face a scornful and contemptuous look.
'Hullo!' he said, alarmed. 'What's the matter?'
'Nothing.'
'Why are you looking like that?'
'Like what?'
'Well...'
John had little ability as a word-painter. He could not on the spur of the moment give anything in the nature of detailed description of the way Pat was looking. He only knew he did not like it.
'I suppose you expected me to look at you "with eyes overrunning with laughter?"'
'Eh?'
'"Archly the maiden smiled, and with eyes over-running with laughter said in a tremulous voice 'Why don't you speak for yourself, John'?"'
'I don't know what you're talking about.'
'Don't you know The Courtship of Miles Standish? I thought that must have been where you got the idea. I had to learn chunks of it at school, and even at that tender age I always thought Miles Standish a perfect goop. "If the great captain of Plymouth is so very eager to wed me, why does he not come himself and take the trouble to woo me? If I am not worth the wooing, I surely am not worth the winning." And yards more of it. I knew it by heart once. Well, what I want to know is, do you expect my answer direct, or would you prefer that I communicated with your agent?'
'I don't understand.'
'Don't you? No? Really?'
'Pat, what's the matter?'
'Oh, nothing much. When we were dancing just now, Hugo proposed to me.'
A cold hand clutched at John's heart. He had not a high opinion of his cousin's fascinations, but the thought of anybody but himself proposing to Pat was a revolting one.
'Oh, did he?'
'Yes, he did. For you.'
'For me? How do you mean, for me?'
'I'm telling you. He asked me to marry you. And very eloquent he was, too. All the people who heard him – and there must have been dozens who did – were much impressed.'
She stopped: and, as far as such a thing is possible at the Mustard Spoon when Ben Baermann's Collegiate Buddies are giving an encore of 'My Sweetie is a Wow', there was silence. Emotion of one sort or another had deprived Pat of words: and, as for John, he was feeling as if he could never speak again.
He had flushed a dusky red, and his collar had suddenly become so tight that he had all the sensations of a man who is being garrotted. And so powerfully had the shock of this fearful revelation affected his mind that his only coherent thought was a desire to follow Hugo up to the balcony, tear him limb from limb, and scatter the fragments on to the tables below.
Pat was the first to find speech. She spoke quickly, stormily.
'I can't understand you, Johnnie. You never used to be such a jellyfish. You did have a mind of your own once. But now . . . I believe it's living at Rudge all the time that has done it. You've got lazy and flabby. It's turned you into a vegetable. You just loaf about and go on and on, year after year, having your three fat meals a day and your comfortable rooms and your hot-water bottle at night . . .'
'I don't!' cried John, stung by this monstrous charge from the coma which was gripping him.
'Well, bed-socks, then,' amended Pat. 'You've just let yourself be cosseted and pampered till the You that used to be there has withered away and you've gone blah. My dear, good Johnnie,' said Pat vehemently, riding over his attempt at speech and glaring at him above a small, perky nose whose tip had begun to quiver even as it had always done when she lost her temper as a child. 'My poor, idiotic, fat-headed Johnnie, do you seriously expect a girl to want to marry a man who hasn't the common, elementary pluck to propose to her for himself and has to get someone else to do it for him?'
'I didn't!'
'You did.'
'I tell you I did not.'
'You mean you never asked Hugo to sound me out?'
'Of course not. Hugo is a meddling, officious idiot, and if I'd got him here now, I'd wring his neck.'
He scowled up at the balcony. Hugo, who happened to be looking down at the moment, beamed encouragingly and waved a friendly hand as if to assure his cousin that he was with him in spirit. Silence, tempered by the low wailing of the Buddy in charge of the saxophone and the unpleasant howling of his college friends, who had just begun to sing the chorus, fell once more.
'This opens up a new line of thought,' said Pat at length. 'Our Miss Wyvern appears to have got the wires crossed.' She looked at him meditatively. 'It's funny. Hugo seemed so convinced about the way you felt.'
John's collar tightened up another half-inch, but he managed to get his vocal cords working.
'He was quite right about the way I felt.'
'You mean . . . Really?'
'Yes.'
'You mean you're. . . . fond of me?'
'Yes.'
'But, Johnnie!'
'Damn it, are you blind?' cried John, savage from shame and the agony of harrowed feelings, not to mention a collar which appeared to have been made for a man half his size. 'Can't you see? Don't you know I've always loved you? Yes, even when you were a kid.'
'But, Johnnie, Johnnie, Johnnie!' Distress was making Pat's silver voice almost squeaky. 'You can't have done. I was a horrible kid. I did nothing but bully you from morning till night.'
'I liked it.'
'But how can you want me to marry you? We know each other too well. I've always looked on you as a sort of brother.'
There are words in the language which are like a knell. Keats considered 'forlorn' one of them. John Carroll was of opinion that 'brother' was a second.
'Oh, I know. I was a fool. I knew you would simply laugh at me.'
Pat's eyes were misty. The tip of her nose no longer quivered, but now it was her mouth that did so. She reached out across the table and her hand rested on his for a brief instant.
'I'm not laughing at you, Johnnie, you – you chump. What would I want to laugh at you for? I'm much nearer crying. I'd do anything in the world rather than hurt you. You must know that. You're the dearest old thing that ever lived. There's no one on earth I'm fonder of.' She paused. 'But this . . . it – it simply isn't on the board.'
She was looking at him, furtively, taking advantage of the fact that his face was turned away and his eyes fixed on the broad, swallow-tailed back of Mr Ben Baermann. It was odd, she felt, all very odd. If she had been asked to describe the sort of man whom one of these days she hoped to marry, the description, curiously enough, would not have been at all unlike dear old Johnnie. He had the right clean, fit look – she knew she could never give a thought to anything but an outdoor man – and the straightness and honesty and kindliness which she had come, after moving for some years in a world where they were rare, to look upon as
the highest of masculine qualities. Nobody could have been farther than John from the little, black-moustached dancing-man type which was her particular aversion, and yet . . . well, the idea of becoming his wife was just simply too absurd and that was all there was to it.
But why? What, then, was wrong with Johnnie? Simply, she felt, the fact that he was Johnnie. Marriage, as she had always envisaged it, was an adventure. Poor cosy, solid old Johnnie would have to display quite another side of himself, if such a side existed, before she could regard it as an adventure to marry him.
'That man,' said John, indicating Mr Baermann, 'looks like a Jewish black beetle.'
Pat was relieved. If by this remark he was indicating that he wished the recent episode to be taken as concluded, she was very willing to oblige him.
'Doesn't he?' she said. 'I don't know where they can have dug him up from. The last time I was here, a year ago, they had another band, a much better one. I think this place has gone down. I don't like the look of some of these people. What do you think of Hugo's friends?'
'They seem all right.' John cast a moody eye at Miss Molloy, a prismatic vision seen fitfully through the crowd. She was laughing, and showing in the process teeth of a flashing whiteness. 'The girl's the prettiest girl I've seen for a long time.'
Pat gave an imperceptible start. She was suddenly aware of a feeling which was remarkably like uneasiness. It lurked at the back of her consciousness like a small formless cloud.
'Oh!' she said.
Yes, the feeling was uneasiness. Any other man who at such a moment had said those words she would have suspected of a desire to pique her, to stir her interest by a rather obviously assumed admiration of another. But not John. He was much too honest. If Johnnie said a thing, he meant it.
A quick flicker of concern passed through Pat. She was always candid with herself, and she knew quite well that, though she did not want to marry him, she regarded John as essentially a piece of personal property. If he had fallen in love with her, that was, of course, a pity: but it would, she realized, be considerably more of a pity if he ever fell in love with someone else. A Johnnie gone out of her life and assimilated into that of another girl would leave a frightful gap. The Mustard Spoon was one of those stuffy, overheated places, but, as she meditated upon this possibility, Pat shivered.