‘You relieve my mind,’ he said. ‘I had a dream about you the other night.’
‘Never mind your dreams.’
‘I dreamed I saw you coming out of the church with your sixth wife under an arch of crossed movie scripts, held by two rows of directors. But you say you aren’t even engaged.’
‘It’s not myself I’m worrying about, it’s Pickering.’
‘Who’s Pickering?’
‘The man those lawyers sent me.’
‘And you’re worried about him? Don’t you like him?’
‘Yes, very much.’
‘But he’s no good for the job?’
‘He’s excellent for the job. But a complication has arisen.’
‘Which is?’
‘He’s gone all haywire over a girl.’
‘I don’t wonder that that worries you. He sounds the very last man you ought to have around you in your delicate condition. Putting ideas into your head.’
‘No, there you are wrong, Eph. No danger of that. I told you I wasn’t worried about myself. My anxiety is all for Pickering.’
‘Why? Is he your illegitimate son or something? ‘
‘No, he’s no relation, but I’m as fond of him as if he were. From our first meeting we have got along together like ham and eggs, and I don’t want to see him ruining himself at the very outset of his career. He ought not to be dreaming of marriage at his age. He’s much too young.’
‘How old is he?’
‘About twenty-five.’
‘He’d be much too young if he were sixty-five.’
‘So I wish you would talk to him.’
‘I will.’
‘You’ve had so much experience.’
‘More than you could shake a stick at in a month of Sundays. We’re used to these hot-headed young Romeos at Bachelors Anonymous. ‘
‘They come to you, do they?’
‘No, we generally go to them. Word reaches us that some young pipsqueak is contemplating matrimony, and we look him up. We regard him as an out-patient. And I may say that we are nearly always successful, though it sometimes happens, of course, that the madness has spread too far. Is the name Otis Bewstridge familiar to you?’
‘Never heard it.’
‘Heir to the Bewstridge Potato Chips millions. When we tried to dissuade him from marrying his fourth show girl, he blacked the eye of one of our members who was reasoning with him. But his was an exceptional case. Generally reasoning does what we want. Tell me about this Pickering. Is his case a severe one?’
‘You bet your bottom affidavit it’s a severe one. He raves about her eyes.’
‘That’s bad.’
‘He says her voice is like silver bells tinkling across a meadow in the moonlight.’
‘That’s worse.’
‘He also has much to say about the dimple in her left cheek.’
‘I don’t like the sound of that at all. You say there is no danger of you imbibing his views, but how are we to be certain? I shall take the earliest opportunity of talking to him like a Dutch uncle. Is this he?’ asked Mr Trout as a fresh young voice raised in joyous song made itself heard from beyond the door. Mr Llewellyn said it was, and next moment Joe entered, looking like the jovial innkeeper in Act One of an old-fashioned comic opera.
Seeing Mr Trout, he halted.
‘Oh, sorry, I.L.,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know you were in conference.’
‘Just chewing the fat,’ said Mr Llewellyn. ‘This is my old friend Trout.’
In his present mood any old friend of Mr Llewellyn was an old friend of Joe’s. Nothing could have been more cordial than his manner.
‘How do you do?’ he said. ‘How do you do, Mr Trout? What a beautiful world it is, is it not?’
Mr Trout gave a short dry cough, as if to indicate that he had seen better in his time, but Joe was not to be discouraged.
‘Full of love and joy and laughter,’ he proceeded, flashing on the lawyer as sunny a smile as had ever been seen in the S.W.7 postal division of London. ‘It makes one want to sing and dance and turn hand-springs, doesn’t it?’
Another short cough seemed to suggest that Mr Trout was conscious of no urge in this direction.
‘I’m off to get my hair trimmed. Can’t take a girl to dinner looking like an English sheepdog,’ said Joe, and with another smile as dazzling as its predecessor he floated from the room.
A weighty silence followed his departure. Mr Llewellyn broke it.
‘See what I mean?’
Mr Trout said he did indeed. His face was very grave.
‘Got it right up his nose,’ said Mr Llewellyn.
‘I have seldom seen a case where the symptoms were more clearly marked,’ said Mr Trout. ‘He is taking her to dinner.’
‘That’s what he’s doing.’
‘And getting his hair trimmed into the bargain.’
‘You consider that bad?’
‘Don’t you?’
‘I must say it struck me as sinister.’
‘Nothing could be more so. The first thing one notices about these young fellows when they go down with the ailment is that they are always getting their hair trimmed. That and having a shampoo and manicure are the infallible signs that the case is serious. A man who has his hair trimmed and his hands manicured before taking a girl to dinner means business. But it’s the dinner that does it, of course.’
‘I proposed to Grayce at dinner,’ said Mr Llewellyn, wincing at the recollection. ‘It’s the low lighting.‘
‘That and the music.’
‘And the champagne. Pickering is sure to order champagne.’
‘He must be stopped. I must call the boys together for an emergency meeting.’
‘But aren’t they all in California?’
‘That’s right, so they are. I was forgetting.’
‘You could reason with him by yourself.’
‘Hardly ever effective. It’s the weight of mass argument that gets results. If only Fred Basset and Johnny Runcible and G. J. Flannery were here.’
‘But they aren’t, dammit, and he’s taking the girl to Barribault’s.’
‘Why do you say that as if it were significant?’
‘Because they have a blasted fiddler there who comes to your table and plays gooey love songs, the sort of stuff that makes a girl all sentimental and feeling that she wants to marry the nearest thing in sight. Let that guy get going around them, and there isn’t a hope that she’ll turn Pickering down.’
A look of resolution had come into Mr Trout’s face. He was plainly a man who had reached a decision.
‘That settles it,’ he said.
‘Settles what?’
‘There is nothing to do but use Method B.’
‘Method B?’
‘It is not a course of action I am fond of, and we never use it except in particularly obstinate cases where verbal argument has failed and the subject is standing firm on his resolve to get his hair trimmed and take the girl to dinner. Should that happen, we fall back on Method B. We give him a Mickey Finn.’
It was plain from the quick lighting-up of Mr Llewellyn’s face that Method B had his full approval. He was a man prone to sudden enthusiasms, and while they lasted he was entirely under their influence. Mr Trout had convinced him that the only life that held out any hope of happiness was that of the bachelor, and Joe’s open partiality for Sally had appalled him. If ever a man needed to be saved from himself, he felt, it was Joseph Pickering.
‘That would fix him,’ he said, ‘fix him good. When I first came to America, a man I met in a bar slipped a Mickey Finn into my drink, and I was out for hours. And when I came to, you could have paraded all the beautiful girls in New York in front of me and I wouldn’t have given them a glance. I seemed to have lost the taste.’
The brightness of his face vanished. He spoke despondently.
‘But we haven’t got a Mickey Finn.’
‘I have,’ said Mr Trout, producing a white pellet from his vest pocke
t. ‘I always carry a small supply. So do Fred Basset, Johnny Runcible and G. J. Flannery. The subjects, especially when young, so often refuse to listen to reason and become violent. It was only by employing Method B that we were able to dissuade Otis Bewstridge from taking his show girl to dinner. Drastic, you may say, but we of Bachelors Anonymous stop at nothing when duty calls. We regard ours as a holy cause.’
It was some time before Joe returned. His delay had been occasioned, he said, by the fact that in addition to the hair trim he had had a shampoo and a manicure. He took up the conversation where he had left off.
‘I was speaking, if you remember, Mr Trout, of what a beautiful world this is. With your permission I would like to go deeper into this matter. What makes it so beautiful is that there are so many delightful people in it. Everywhere I went after I had left you I met a series of the most absolute corkers. Take the fellow who trimmed my hair. Many men are standoffish with strangers, but this chap was affability itself. He never stopped talking. _He told me the entire plot of a picture he has seen on his night off, and he held me spellbound. I wonder if it was one of yours, I.L. It was about—’
‘Have a drink,’ said Mr Llewellyn. ‘Not a bad idea.’
‘I’ll fix it for you,’ said Mr Trout.
3
Sally was sitting in the lobby at Barribault’s, feeling sick. The Texas millionaires and Indian maharajahs grouped at the little tables around her noticed nothing untoward in her appearance, for her emotions did not show on the outside, but it was as though she had swallowed some nauseous draught and was finding it hard to bear up under the effects of it. She was seeing Joseph Pickering as he really was, and the revelation of his true nature was enough to appal any girl who had allowed herself to become fond of him.
Exactly when she had begun to be uneasy she could not have said, but it was probably when she had looked at her watch and seen that the hands pointed to ten minutes to eight. Arriving punctually at seven-thirty, she had been a little surprised not to find Joe already there, but she had taken a seat without any misgivings, for with traffic conditions what they were a man might well be a minute or two behind time. But twenty minutes behind time was another matter.
Her first thought was that he must have had an accident. It was only much later that some evil imp seemed to whisper in her ear the revolting truth. He was not coming. He had never intended to come. This was his way of repaying her for her failure to keep their luncheon appointment.
It seemed incredible that he could have been so petty, yet what other explanation could there be? If he had had an accident, he would have telephoned. Even if the accident had been a serious one and he had been taken to hospital, a doctor or someone would have telephoned. No, he was deliberately standing her up, as Mr Llewellyn would have said, and it was not long before the sensation of nausea gave way to a boiling fury, and it was as Joseph Pickering Ordinaries, once quoted so high, had experienced a sharp drop and were down in the cellar with no takers, that she heard her name spoken and looking up saw Jaklyn Warner.
Jaklyn, though never fortunate enough to penetrate to the ornate grill room, was a frequent visitor to Barribault’s lobby, for it seldom lacked the presence of one or two of his wealthier acquaintances who might be good for a small loan if approached with the right wistfulness. And he had never quite lost the hope that one of these nights some bighearted reveller, mellowed by Barribault’s cocktails, might invite him to come along and have a bite of dinner with him.
Tonight he had not seen anyone who looked like a promising prospect, but he had seen Sally, and he lost no time in joining her. His eagerness to ascertain her reactions to that letter of his was naturally acute.
‘Why, hullo, Sally,’ he said. ‘All alone?’
Sally’s voice as she replied was bleak.
‘Hullo, Jaklyn. Yes, I’m all alone.’
‘I wish I could ask you to have dinner with me, but unfortunately I’ve come out without my money and they don’t know me here, so I can’t sign the bill.’
‘I don’t want any dinner. You can see me home, if you like. Not Laburnam Road. Fountain Court, Park Lane.’
‘Yes, somebody told me you had moved.’
‘I’m living there with another girl.’
‘So whoever it was who told me said. Was it her you were waiting for?’
‘No, she’s gone to a dinner. Something to do with her old school.’
Jaklyn was relieved. He would have found a meeting with Daphne Dolby embarrassing. It is never agreeable for a man who is engaged to one girl and has just proposed to another to find himself in the company of both of them.
They walked the short distance to Fountain Court in silence. Years of studying other people’s moods had made Jaklyn an expert on when to speak and when not to, and he could see that Sally was upset about something and not disposed for conversation. It was only when she had opened the door of number 3A and he had followed her into the living-room that he ventured on the question that was occupying his mind to the exclusion of all other thoughts and said:
‘Sally.’
‘Yes?.’
‘Er,’ said Jaklyn.
He was not sure he liked the way she was looking at him. It seemed to him a speculative look, as if she were weighing him up, and he was a man who preferred not to be weighed up.
And indeed this was what Sally was doing. She had had no difficulty in interpreting that ‘Er’. She was to be given the opportunity of putting the clock back and establishing their relations on what might be called the old Much Middlefold basis.
Had this occurred before Joe Pickering had revealed himself as the impossible character he really was, she would have had no hesitation in crushing Jaklyn’s hopes with what Mr Trout would have called a nolle prosequi, but now she found herself wavering.
What turned the scale was that he was looking so particularly wistful. It was so obvious that all this while he had been eating his heart out for the one girl in his life and now could endure it no longer. Impossible not to be touched by such fidelity, especially when the man you had mistakenly supposed loved you as you had mistakenly supposed you loved him had turned out not so much to have feet of clay as to be clay all the way up. It was not a subject she liked to let her mind dwell on, but she did feel very definitely that a girl idiotic enough to give a thought to Joseph Pickering ought to be placed under some kind of restraint.
She came to a decision.
‘I got your letter, Jaklyn.’
‘And?’
‘The answer is Yes. I’ll marry you if you really want me.’
‘Want you!’ said Jaklyn, with fervour.
He had concentrated all his faculties on making this fervour as convincing as possible, but it now occurred to him that it would be judicious before going further to render quite clear his complete ignorance of the change in Sally’s financial condition. There must be no suspicion on her part that he was in any way influenced by the fact of her having joined the ranks of the wealthy.
He proceeded to do so, regretting, for it would have been a neat way of putting it, that the popularity of the song of that tide made it impossible for him to say that he could not give her anything but love.
‘I’m afraid we shall be very poor, darling, but what of that? What’s wrong with being poor if you love each other? It’s fun. Everything becomes an adventure. The dreams, the plans, the obstacles that must be surmounted—the rich don’t have any of that. They don’t know how happy you can be in an attic. With a candle by the bed. When you blow out the candle, you make believe you’re in a room in a castle with silk hangings and cupids dancing on the ceiling. Wonderful, wonderful!’
He thought for a moment of going on to the crust of bread for breakfast, but was not sure that that might not be overdoing it. Even as it was, Sally showed herself unsympathetic to his poetic flight.
‘We shan’t be as hard-up as all that,’ she said in her practical way. ‘I’ve got twenty-five thousand pounds.’
‘What!
’
‘And this flat.’
Jaklyn was stunned. He stared at Sally dumbly as she told her story. When she had finished, he conceded that this did make a difference as far as their scale of living was concerned, but maintained that it was essentially a triviality.
‘After all,’ he said. ‘Money, what is it? Love is what matters.’
And on this admirable sentiment he took his leave.
4
Daphne Dolby returned shortly after he had left. She was in excellent spirits, having plainly enjoyed the reunion with the comrades of her girlhood.
‘Where were you at school, Sally?’ she asked.
‘I was privately educated, as they say in the reference books.’
‘There were times in my early days,’ said Daphne, ‘when I wished I had been, but I don’t know. It wasn’t so bad, looking back, and certainly the hell-hounds I used to regard with loathing seem to have improved with age. I loved them all tonight. I’m giving lunch to some of them tomorrow. Care to come along?’
‘I can’t, I’m afraid. I’d have loved to, but I’ve got to go to Valley Fields and spend the day with an old nurse.
‘The Nanny of your childhood?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m sorry for you. I know those old Nannies. Mine lives in Edinburgh, thank God. She—’
Daphne broke off. She sniffed. A stern look came into her face.
‘Sally! You’ve been smoking!’
‘Not me,’ said Sally. ‘My betrothed.’
‘What! You aren’t engaged?’
‘I am.’
‘You’ve kept it very dark. Since when?’
‘It only happened tonight.’
‘Who is he?’
‘His name’s Warner. Jaklyn Warner.’
The announcement caused a brief pause in the conversation. It is always disconcerting for a girl who is engaged to a man to be told by a friend that she, the friend, is also engaged to him. Daphne was less taken aback than most would have been, for she remembered that she had informed Jaklyn of Sally’s legacy, and her knowledge of him told her that this was how, given that information, he might have been expected to act. Her illusions where he was concerned were few.