'Oh!' she said.
The music stopped. The floor emptied. Mr Molloy and his daughter returned to the table. Hugo remained up in the gallery, in earnest conversation with his old friend, Mr Fish.
III
Ronald Overbury Fish was a pink-faced young man of small stature and extraordinary solemnity. He had been at school with Hugo and also at the University. Eton was entitled to point with pride at both of them, and only had itself to blame if it failed to do so. The same remark applies to Trinity College, Cambridge. From earliest days Hugo had always entertained for R. O. Fish an intense and lively admiration, and the thought of being compelled to let his old friend down in this matter of the Hot Spot was doing much to mar an otherwise jovial evening.
'I'm most frightfully sorry, Ronnie, old thing,' he said immediately the first greetings were over. 'I sounded the aged relative this afternoon about that business and there's nothing doing.'
'No hope?'
'None.'
Ronnie Fish surveyed the dancers below with a grave eye. He removed the stub of his cigarette from its eleven-inch holder, and recharged that impressive instrument.
'Did you reason with the old pest?'
'You can't reason with my Uncle Lester.'
'I could,' said Mr Fish.
Hugo did not doubt this. Ronnie, in his opinion, was capable of any feat.
'Yes, but the only trouble is,' he explained, 'you would have to do it at long range. I asked if I might invite you down to Rudge and he would have none of it.'
Ronnie Fish relapsed into silence. It seemed to Hugo, watching him, that that great brain was busy, but upon what train of thought he could not conjecture.
'Who are those people you're with?' he asked at length.
'The big chap with the fair hair is my cousin John. The girl in green is Pat Wyvern. She lives near us.'
'And the others? Who's the stately-looking bird with the brushed-back hair who has every appearance of being just about to address a gathering of constituents on some important point of policy?'
'That's a fellow named Molloy. Thos G. I met him at the fight. He's an American.'
'He looks prosperous.'
'He isn't so prosperous as he was before the fight started. I took thirty quid off him.'
'Your uncle, from what you have told me, is pretty keen on rich men, isn't he?'
'All over them.'
'Then the thing's simple,' said Ronnie Fish. 'Invite this Mulcahy or whatever his name is to Rudge, and invite me at the same time. You'll find that in the ecstasy of getting a millionaire on the premises your uncle will forget to make a fuss about my coming. And once I am in I can talk this business over with him. I'll guarantee that if I can get an uninterrupted half-hour with the old boy I can easily make him see the light.'
A rush of admiration for his friend's outstanding brain held Hugo silent for a moment. The bold simplicity of the move thrilled him.
'What it amounts to,' continued Ronnie Fish, 'is that your uncle is endeavouring to do you out of a vast fortune. I tell you, the Hot Spot is going to be a gold mine. To all practical intents and purposes he is just as good as trying to take thousands of pounds out of your pocket. I shall point this out to him, and I shall be surprised if I can't put the thing through. When would you like me to come down?'
'Ronnie,' said Hugo, 'this is absolute genius.' He hesitated. He had no wish to discourage his friend, but he desired to be fair and above-board. 'There's just one thing. Would you have any objection to performing at the village concert?'
'I should enjoy it.'
'They're sure to rope you in. I thought you and I might do the Quarrel scene from Julius Caesar again.'
'Excellent.'
'And this time,' said Hugo generously, 'you can be Brutus.'
'No, no,' said Ronnie, moved.
'Yes, yes.'
'Very well. Then fix things up with this American bloke, and leave the rest to me. Shall I like your uncle?'
'No.'
'Ah, well,' said Mr Fish equably, 'I don't for a moment suppose he'll like me.'
IV
The respite afforded to their patrons' ear-drums by the sudden cessation of activity on the part of the Buddies proved of brief duration. Men like these ex-Collegians, who have really got the saxophone virus into their systems, seldom have long lucid intervals between the attacks. Very soon they were at it again, and Mr Molloy, rising, led Pat gallantly out on to the floor. His daughter, following them with a bright eye as she busied herself with her lip-stick, laughed amusedly.
'She little knows!'
John, like Pat a short while before, had fallen into a train of thought. From this he now woke with a start to the realization that he was alone with this girl and presumably expected by her to make some effort at being entertaining.
'I beg your pardon?' he said.
Even had he been less preoccupied, he would have found small pleasure in this tete-à-tête. Miss Molloy – her father addressed her as Dolly – belonged to the type of girl in whose society a diffident man is seldom completely at ease. There hung about her like an aura a sort of hard glitter. Her challenging eyes were of a bright hazel – beautiful but intimidating. She looked supremely sure of herself. She reminded him of a leopardess, an animal of which he had never been fond.
'I was saying,' she explained, 'that your Girl Friend little knows what she has taken on, going out to step with Soapy.'
'Soapy?'
It seemed to John that his companion had momentarily the appearance of being a little confused.
'My father, I mean,' she said quickly. 'I call him Soapy.'
'Oh?' said John.
'Soapy,' said Miss Molloy, developing her theme, 'is full of Sex-Appeal, but he has two left feet.' She emitted another little gurgle of laughter. 'There! Would you just look at him now!'
John was sorry to appear dull, but, eyeing Mr Molloy as requested, he could not see that he was doing anything wrong. On the contrary, for one past his first youth, the man seemed to him enviably efficient.
'I'm afraid I don't know anything about dancing,' he said apologetically.
'At that, you're ahead of Soapy. He doesn't even suspect anything. Whenever I get out on the floor with him and come back alive I reckon I've broke even. It isn't so much his dancing on my feet that I mind – it's the way he jumps on and off that slays me. Don't you ever hoof?'
'Oh, yes. Sometimes. A little.'
'Well, come and do your stuff, then. I can't sit still while they're playing that thing.'
John rose reluctantly. Their brief conversation had made it clear to him that in the matter of dancing this was a girl of high ideals, and he feared he was about to disappoint her. If she regarded with derision a quite adequate performer like Mr Molloy, she was obviously no partner for himself. But there was no means of avoiding the ordeal. He backed her out into midstream, hoping for the best.
Providence was in a kindly mood. By now the floor had become so congested that skill was at a discount. Even the sallow youths with the marcelled hair and the india-rubber legs were finding little scope to do anything but shuffle. This suited John's individual style. He, too, shuffled: and, playing for safety, found that he was getting along better than he could have expected. His tension relaxed, and he became conversational.
'Do you often come to this place?' he asked, resting his partner against the slim back of one of the marcelled hair brigade who, like himself, had been held up in the traffic block.
'I've never been here before. And it'll be a long time before I come again. A more gosh-awful aggregation of yells for help than this gang of whippets,' said Miss Molloy, surveying the company with a critical eye, 'I've never seen. Look at that dame with the eyeglass.'
'Rather weird,' agreed John.
'A cry for succour,' said Miss Molloy severely. 'And why, when you can buy insecticide at any drug-store, people let these boys with the shiny hair go around loose beats me.'
John began to warm to this girl. At first, he
had feared that he and she could have little in common. But this remark told told him that on certain subjects, at any rate, they saw eye to eye. He, too, had felt an idle wonder that somebody did not do something about these youths.
The Buddies had stopped playing: and John, glowing with the strange, new spirit of confidence which had come to him, clapped loudly for an encore.
But the Buddies were not responsive. Hitherto, a mere tapping of the palms had been enough to urge them to renewed epileptic spasms; but now an odd lethargy seemed to be upon them, as if they had been taking some kind of treatment for their complaint. They were sitting, instruments in hand, gazing in a spell-bound manner at a square-jawed person in ill-fitting dress clothes who had appeared at the side of Mr Baermann. And the next moment, there shattered the stillness a sudden voice that breathed Vine Street in every syllable.
'Ladies and gentlemen,' boomed the voice, proceeding, as nearly as John could ascertain, from close to the main entrance, 'will you kindly take your seats.'
'Pinched!' breathed Miss Molloy in his ear. 'Couldn't you have betted on it!'
Her diagnosis was plainly correct. In response to the request, most of those on the floor had returned to their tables, moving with the dull resignation of people to whom this sort of thing has happened before: and, enjoying now a wider range of vision, John was able to see that the room had become magically filled with replicas of the sturdy figure standing beside Mr Baermann. They were moving about among the tables, examining with an offensive interest the bottles that stood thereon and jotting down epigrams on the subject in little note-books. Time flies on swift wings in a haunt of pleasure like the Mustard Spoon, and it was evident that the management, having forgotten to look at its watch, had committed the amiable error of serving alcoholic refreshment after hours.
'I might have known,' said Miss Molloy querulously, 'that something of the sort was bound to break loose in a dump like this.'
John, like all dwellers in the country as opposed to the wicked inhabitants of cities, was a law-abiding man. Left to himself, he would have followed the crowd and made for his table, there to give his name and address in the sheepish undertone customary on these occasions. But he was not left to himself. A moment later, it had become plain that the dashing exterior of Miss Molloy was a true index to the soul within. She grasped his arm and pulled him commandingly.
'Snap into it!' said Miss Molloy.
The 'it' into which she desired him to snap was apparently a small door that led to the club's service quarters. It was the one strategic point not yet guarded by a stocky figure with large feet and an eye like a gimlet. To it his companion went like a homing rabbit, dragging him with her. They passed through; and John, with a resourcefulness of which he was surprised to find himself capable, turned the key in the lock.
'Smooth!' said Miss Molloy approvingly. 'Nice work! That'll hold them for awhile.'
It did. From the other side of the door there proceeded a confused shouting, and somebody twisted the handle with a good deal of petulance, but the Law had apparently forgotten to bring its axe with it tonight, and nothing further occurred. They made their way down a stuffy passage, came presently to a second door: and passing through this, found themselves in a back-yard, fragrant with the scent of old cabbage stalks and dish-water.
Miss Molloy listened. John listened. They could hear nothing but a distant squealing and tooting of horns, which, though it sounded like something out of the repertoire of the Collegiate Buddies, was in reality the noise of the traffic in Regent Street.
'All quiet along the Potomac,' said Miss Molloy with satisfaction. 'Now,' she added briskly, 'if you'll just fetch one of those ash-cans and put it alongside that wall and give me a leg-up and help me round that chimney and across that roof and down into the next yard and over another wall or two, I think everything will be more or less jake.'
V
John sat in the lobby of the Lincoln Hotel in Curzon Street. A lifetime of activity and dizzy hustle had passed, but it had all been crammed into just under twenty minutes: and, after seeing his fair companion off in a taxi cab, he had made his way to the Lincoln, to ascertain from a sleepy night-porter that Miss Wyvern had not yet returned. He was now awaiting her coming.
She came some little while later, escorted by Hugo. It was a fair summer night, warm and still, but with her arrival a keen east wind seemed to pervade the lobby. Pat was looking pale and proud, and Hugo's usually effervescent demeanour had become toned down to a sort of mellow sadness. He had the appearance of a man who has recently been properly ticked off by a woman for Taking Me to Places Like That.
'Oh, hullo, John,' he murmured in a low, bedside voice. He brightened a little, as a man will who, after a bad quarter of an hour with an emotional girl, sees somebody who may possibly furnish an alternative target for her wrath. 'Where did you get to? Left early to avoid the rush?'
'It was this way . . .' began John. But Pat had turned to the desk, and was asking the porter for her key. If a female martyr in the rougher days of the Roman Empire had had occasion to ask for a key, she would have done it in just the voice which Pat employed. It was not a loud voice, nor an angry one – just the crushed, tortured voice of a girl who has lost her faith in the essential goodness of humanity.
'You see . . .' said John.
'Are there any letters for me?' asked Pat.
'No, no letters,' said the night-porter: and the unhappy girl gave a little sigh, as if that was just what might be expected in a world where men who had known you all your life took you to Places which they ought to have Seen from the start were just Drinking-Hells, while other men, who also had known you all your life, and, what was more, professed to love you, skipped through doors in the company of flashy women and left you to be treated by the police as if you were a common criminal.
'What happened,' said John, 'was this . . .'
'Good night,' said Pat.
She followed the porter to the lift, and Hugo, producing a handkerchief, dabbed it lightly over his forehead.
'Dirty weather, shipmate!' said Hugo. 'A very deep depression off the coast of Iceland, laddie.'
He placed a restraining hand on John's arm, as the latter made a movement to follow the Snow Queen.
'No good, John,' he said gravely. 'No good, old man, not the slightest. Don't waste your time trying to explain tonight. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and not many like a girl who's just had to give her name and address in a raided nightclub to a plain-clothes cop who asked her to repeat it twice and then didn't seem to believe her.'
'But I want to tell her why . . .'
'Never tell them why. It's no use. Let us talk of pleasanter things. John, I have brought off the coup of a lifetime. Not that it was my idea. It was Ronnie Fish who suggested it. There's a fellow with a brain, John. There's a lad who busts the seams of any hat that isn't a number eight.'
'What are you talking about?'
'I'm talking about this amazingly intelligent idea of old Ronnie's. It's absolutely necessary that by some means Uncle Lester shall be persuaded to cough up five hundred quid of my capital to enable me to go into a venture second in solidity only to the Mint. The one person who can talk him into it is Ronnie. So Ronnie's coming to Rudge.'
'Oh?' said John, uninterested.
'And to prevent Uncle Lester making a fuss about this, I've invited old man Molloy and daughter to come and visit us as well. That was Ronnie's big idea. Thos is rolling in money, and once Uncle Lester learns that he won't kick about Ronnie being there. He loves having rich men around. He likes to nuzzle them.'
'Do you mean,' cried John, 'that that girl is coming to stay at Rudge?'
He was appalled. Limpidly clear though his conscience was, he was able to see that his rather spectacular association with Miss Dolly Molloy had displeased Pat, and the last thing he wished for was to be placed in a position which was virtually tantamount to hobnobbing with the girl. If she came to stay at Rudge, Pat might . . . What might not
Pat think?
He became aware that Hugo was speaking to him in a quiet, brotherly voice.
'How did all that come out, John?'
'All what?'
'About Pat. Did she tell you that I paved the way?'
'She did! And look here . . .'
'All right, old man,' said Hugo, raising a deprecatory hand. 'That's absolutely all right. I don't want any thanks. You'd have done the same for me. Well, what has happened? Everything pretty satisfactory?'
'Satisfactory!'
'Don't tell me she turned you down?'
'If you really want to know, yes, she did.'
Hugo sighed.
'I feared as much. There was something about her manner when I was paving the way that I didn't quite like. Cold. Not responsive. A bit glassy-eyed. What an amazing thing it is,' said Hugo, tapping a philosophical vein, 'that in spite of all the ways there are of saying Yes, a girl on an occasion like this nearly always says No. An American statistician has estimated that, omitting substitutes like "All right", "You bet", "O.K." and nasal expressions like "Uh-huh", the English language provides nearly fifty different methods of replying in the affirmative, including Yeah, Yeth, Yum, Yo, Yaw, Chess, Chass, Chuss, Yip, Yep, Yop, Yup, Yurp...'
'Stop it!' cried John forcefully.
Hugo patted him affectionately on the shoulder.
'All right, John. All right, old man. I quite understand. You're upset. A little on edge, yes? Of course you are. But listen, John, I want to talk to you very seriously for a moment, in a broad-minded spirit of cousinly good will. If I were you, laddie, I would take myself firmly in hand at this juncture. You must see for yourself by now that you're simply wasting your time fooling about after dear old Pat. A sweet girl, I grant you – one of the best: but if she won't have you she won't, and that's that. Isn't it or is it? Take my tip and wash the whole thing out and start looking round for someone else. Now, there's this Miss Molloy, for instance. Pretty. Pots of money. If I were you, while she's at Rudge, I'd have a decided pop at her. You see, you're one of those fellows that Nature intended for a married man right from the start. You're a confirmed settler-down, the sort of chap that likes to roll the garden lawn and then put on his slippers and light a pipe and sit side by side with the little woman, sharing a twin set of head phones. Pull up your socks, John, and have a dash at this Molloy girl. You'd be on velvet with a rich wife.'