‘Yes.’
‘You followed my advice? ‘
‘Yes.’
‘Close embrace?’
‘Yes.’
‘Till ribs squeaked?’
‘Yes.’
‘Result, complete reconciliation? ‘
‘Yes.’
‘You don’t sound very ecstatic.’
‘I’ve got a spot of Llewellyn trouble.’
‘Is that all?’
‘It’s enough for me.’
‘Don’t let it get you down. These things always iron themselves out. It’s like when my father starts throwing his weight about. We just sit tight and let him rave, knowing that he will eventually come off the boil and resume his place in the comity of nations. And now I must leave you, Joe. In fact, I must rush. I’m putting on the nose-bag with a popsy. ‘Jerry withdrew, but the truth of the old saying that if you particularly want to be left undisturbed to brood over your problems the telephone is sure to ring was exemplified once more a moment later. This time it was Mr Trout.
‘Pickering? A hearty good evening to you, Pickering. Glad to find you in, Pickering. You might have been out, and I want a word with you.’
Even though separated from him by a length of wire Joe had no difficulty in diagnosing the speaker’s mental state. Mr Trout’s voice was the voice of one who, putting his fate to the touch to win or lose it all, has found himself a winner. Its volume made that plain. No man, Joe felt, to whom the adored object had handed the pink slip could so nearly have fractured his ear drum, and forgetting his own troubles for the moment he rejoiced in the other’s good fortune. Mr Trout might be the sort of man whose morning post was never without its quota of attractive offers from lunatic asylums, but he wished him well.
‘I gather from your manner,’ he said, ‘that you have offered your heart with good results. Over the coffee?’
‘No, Pickering, over the oysters. I couldn’t wait for the coffee. Swallowing my fifth oyster, I snatched her up on my saddle bow, ha ha, and carried her off. We are going to have coffee after I have finished telephoning. I was hoping to get Llewellyn.’
‘He’s in hospital.’
‘So Amelia told me. She was his nurse. But he is not in hospital. I phoned St Swithin’s, but he had gone.’
‘Gone?’
‘Leaving no trace. Some trouble about somebody wanting a sample of his blood. One supposes that he is on his way to Enniston Gardens. Well, if he comes, I want you to tell him about me and Amelia. Tell him tactfully, for it will be a shock.’
‘Why?’
‘Because, as she was leaving the hospital, he asked her to marry him.’
‘You don’t say!’
‘On the contrary I do say. And she told him she would think it over. Think it over! Ha,’ said Mr Trout. ‘I didn’t give her much chance to think it over. I must have electrified her.’
Joe gave him an admiring look, its effect, of course, largely diminished by the fact that they were talking on the telephone.
‘I told you women liked a dashing man.’
‘How right you were.’
‘You and Errol Flynn, not much to choose between you.’
‘I suppose not.’
‘Give my respects to the future Mrs Trout.’
‘I will.’
It now needed only Mr Llewellyn to make the little circle of Joe’s intimates complete, and shortly after Joe had said goodbye to Mr Trout the roster was filled. There was the sound of a turning key, and Mr Llewellyn walked in, looking a little ruffled, as if he had just escaped from a hospital against the wishes of its staff. His hair was disordered, and he had omitted to put on a tie.
Even to an unobservant eye it would have been apparent that he was not one of Joe’s admirers. In the look he gave him as he entered there was something of the open dislike which a resident of India exhibits when he comes to take his morning bath and finds a cobra in the bath tub. Not even at the nurse who had wanted to take a sample of his blood had he directed a more formidable glare.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said.
Joe conceded this.
‘What are you doing here? I told you to get out.’
Joe said he had been collecting his belongings.
‘As instructed,’ he added. He spoke curtly, for since their talk on the telephone he had not been well pleased with his former employer, deprecating his habit of firing good men simply, apparently, to gratify a passing whim.
‘And do you know why I told you to get out?’
‘I’ve been trying to think.’
‘I’ll tell you.’
Mr Llewellyn had swelled like a bull-frog, and his glare had intensified in animosity. A sense of grievance often has this effect.
‘Because you officiously insisted on my going to that damned hospital, when you must have known what would be the result if I did. This afternoon the inevitable happened. I asked my nurse to marry me. She said she would think it over. One can scarcely suppose that having thought it over she will not say Yes. No woman I’ve ever asked to marry me has not said Yes. There is something irresistible about me. Tomorrow, therefore, I shall be engaged, and from there to being married is but a step. I’m not saying anything against Amelia Bingham, she’s a very good sort, but I don’t want to be married, and thanks to you I shall be. And you wonder why I’ve fired you. Why are you grinning like a half-witted ape?’
He was referring to the gentle smile which had appeared on Joe’s face as he heard the name Amelia Bingham.
‘May I say a word?’ said Joe.
‘No.’
‘It’s just that—’
‘I don’t want to hear it.’
‘It’s simply—’
The telephone rang.
‘Answer that,’ said Mr Llewellyn. ‘If it’s for me, say I’m out.’
Joe, though half inclined to say ‘Answer it your ruddy self’, did as directed, and was surprised to hear the voice of that great lover Mr Trout. He had thought Mr Trout would be otherwise occupied.
‘Pickering? ‘
‘Yes.’
‘Is Llewellyn there?’
‘Just come in.’
‘Have you told him?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Let me speak to him. It will come as a shock to the poor fellow to hear that I have won Amelia from him, but he only has himself to blame. The idea of letting her think it over. You don’t win a woman that way. The way to win a woman—’
‘I know. Saddle bow stuff.’
‘Exactly.’
Joe handed the receiver to Mr Llewellyn.
‘Trout,’ he said.
Watching Mr Llewellyn as he telephoned, Joe was not surprised to see his face light up shortly after he had addressed Mr Trout as Benedict Arnold and asked him if he had sold any good forts lately. His share of the conversation after that was mostly gasps and gurgles, but it was soon evident that good relations had once more been established between him and his old friend. When he replaced the receiver, his face wore the expression which one notices on the faces of those who have been saved from the scaffold at the eleventh hour, and his voice when he spoke had so much of the carolling skylark in it that Percy Bysshe Shelley, had he been present, would have been fully justified in saying ‘Hail to thee, blithe spirit’.
‘Don’t tell me miracles are no longer box office,’ he chanted. ‘How wrong I was in supposing that my guardian angel was asleep at the switch. Do you know what?’
‘Yes.’
‘Amelia Bingham is going to marry Trout.’
‘Yes. That’s what I was trying to tell you. ‘
‘It’s colossal!’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s sensational.’
‘Yes.’
‘Don’t be so damned calm about it, Pickering. You don’t seem to realise what this means to me. Would you care to have a rough scenario of my future plans? I shall return immediately to California, where I shall become a member of Bachelors Anonymous. Trout is giving me a letter
to a friend of his named Runcible, and he assures me the boys will welcome me with open arms. Gosh, I feel like a million dollars!’
Joe laughed one of those hollow, mirthless ones.
‘I dare say you do,’ he said, ‘but I don’t.’
‘What’s the matter with you?’
‘You aren’t going to do my play as a picture.’
‘Who says so?’
‘You said so.’
‘Hell’s bells,’ said Mr Llewellyn, astounded. ‘You surely don’t believe everything the top man of a motion picture studio tells you? I remember now, I was feeling a little sore with you at the time, and I expressed myself with the generous strength which is so characteristic of me, but you don’t have to pay any attention to that. Of course I’m going to do your play. We’ve only to settle terms. How about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars?’
Joe rose from six to eight inches into the air with a hoarse cry, and Mr Llewellyn misread his emotion. He had so often heard stars cry hoarsely like that in response to an offer. Coming from Joe, who was not a star, it piqued him.
‘Dammit,’ he said, ‘you can’t expect top prices for your first picture. Two hundred and fifty thousand isn’t at all bad, ask anyone. Take it or leave it.’
‘I’ll take it,’ said Joe.
‘Good. Come and have some dinner.’
‘I was giving my fiancée dinner.’
‘I’ll come along,’ said Mr Llewellyn, who knew the pleasure his company was bound to add to a meal.
It was as at Joe’s suggestion he completed the writing and signing of a rough form of contract that the doorbell rang, and his torso and both his chins shook in sudden alarm.
‘Vera Dalrymple!’ he gasped.
Joe did not share his tremors. There had been a time when he had trembled with fear at the lady in question’s frown, but with that contract in his pocket and the air vibrant with wedding bells he felt more than equal to a dozen Vera Dalrymples.
‘Leave her to me, I.L.,’ he said. ‘Go and hide in the bathroom or under your bed or somewhere. I’ll attend to her.’
And with a firm step he strode to the door.
P. G. Wodehouse, Bachelors Anonymous
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