'They have?'
'Yes.'
'That girl and young Vanringham?'
'Yes.'
'And the Princess hasn't found out that young Vanringham was being sued?'
'No.'
Mr Chinnery subsided into a chair.
'Phew! What a relief! When I saw Bulpitt coming down those stairs a moment ago, I near swooned. Then everything's fine.'
'Splendid.'
There's nothing now to stop the Princess buying the house.'
'Nothing. By the way,' said Sir Buckstone, glad at the prospect of having a companion in misfortune, 'she has decided not to.'
'What?'
'Everybody says "What?"' grumbled Sir Buckstone.
Mr Chinnery was heaving like a stage sea.
'She isn't going to buy the house?'
'No.'
'And you won't be getting any money?'
'Not a penny.'
'Then how about my five hundred pounds?'
'Ah,' said Sir Buckstone buoyantly. That's what we'd all like to know, wouldn't we?'
In the silence which followed, Lady Abbott entered the room. Behind her, neatly dressed in one of Tubby's suits, came Mr Bulpitt.
Sir Buckstone and Mr Chinnery, perhaps naturally in the circumstances, were not in that serene frame of mind which enables a man to be a close observer, but if they had been they would have noted that, since they had seen her last, a subtle change had taken place in Lady Abbott's demeanour. She had lost to quite a perceptible extent that statuesque calm which gave people meeting her for the first time the sensation of being introduced to some national monument. If such an idea had not been so absurd, one would have said that she was excited.
'Sam wants to talk to you, Buck,' she said.
The momentary exhilaration which had come to Sir Buckstone as the result of the shattering of Mr Chinnery's daydreams had already ebbed. He looked at his brother-in-law bleakly. The man was no longer a force for evil, but he did not find himself liking him any the more for that. He resented particularly the disgusting grin which was distorting his face. That anyone should be grinning at a moment when he had failed to sell the home of his ancestors and had been informed by his daughter that she was marrying a man without a bean seemed, to Sir Buckstone, intolerable.
'I don't want to talk to him!' he cried passionately. 'I don't want to talk to anyone but you! Get him out of here, and get Chinnery out of here, and let's relax! Toots, that damned woman isn't going to buy the house!'
'No, but Sam is.'
'Eh?'
'That's what he wants to talk to you about.'
It was twenty-five years since Lady Abbott had danced – if that word can legitimately be used to describe the languid stirrings of the lower limbs which used to afflict the personnel of the ensembles of musical comedies at the conclusion of a number in the days when she had earned her living on the stage – but she seemed to Sir Buckstone to be dancing now.
'He wants to turn it into a country club.'
'That's my line now, you see, Lord Abbott. Night clubs and country clubs. I took over the holdings of the late Elmer Zagorin.'
'He was a millionaire—'
'Multimillionaire,' corrected Mr Bulpitt, who liked exactness of speech. 'I'll tell you about him and the way he got mixed up with me. Quite a romance. He was the only guy I ever set out to plaster that I didn't plaster, and at the time I first started out to plaster him, he was suffering from onwee. Couldn't seem to get no enjoyment out of his riches. And then I started after him with the papers in connection with this suit for forty dollars for hair restorer, and it kind of gave him a new grip on things. He didn't have it long, poor stiff, because he croaked suddenly while in the act of laughing his head off at the way he'd fooled me. Heart failure. But he was grateful to me to the last.'
'And when his will came to be read, it was found that he had left everything to Sam.'
'On account I'd done him this kindness of making him get a kick out of things. Well, sir, I took the fifty million dollars and I came over to Europe and started living the life of Riley. And what do you know? First crack out of the box, I found I'd gotten onwee too. I bummed around in the south of France for a while, trying to take an interest. No good. I put in a couple of weeks in Paris. No good again. Onwee. I missed the old zestful life. So when I come to London and hear of this job of plastering young Vanringham, it was like the answer to a prayer.'
'Tell him how you got the idea about the house, Sam.'
'I'm coming to that. Just a short while back, this Miss Prudence Whittaker brings me clothes, and after I'd put them on, we got chatting, and she tells me the heart-balm suit is off, on account she's become reconciled to her loved one whom she thought faithless – which he wasn't really; just one of those tiffs – and what she wants is a job for her sweetie, because she has an idea his stepmother is going to cast him off like a soiled glove. And then she tells me that the deal for the house has fallen through, and I say to myself, "Why not?" It would make a sweet country club, Lord Abbott. Just the right distance from London. Plenty of room. Spacious grounds. Picturesque outlook. The boys and girls would come out in their cars in thousands. So, if you're prepared to talk turkey, I'm in the market. I'm planning to put Miss Whittaker in to run it. Got a lot of sense, that girl. Oh, and I almost forgot to mention it, I'm going to settle half a million dollars on that niece of mine the day she marries. I was trying to tell you that up in the bedroom, but you wouldn't wait.'
'I think it's a good idea, don't you, Buck?' said Lady Abbott.
Sir Buckstone made no immediate reply. He was gazing at his brother-in-law, torn with remorse that he should have been so blind to his sterling qualities. What had ever given him the idea that he disliked Samuel Bulpitt, he could not imagine. Samuel Bulpitt, standing there with that delightful smile on his face – the one he had mistaken for a disgusting grin – and scratching his head with the hand which could at will write a cheque for millions seemed to him the ideal man, the sort of chap he had been hoping to meet all his life.
'Well, I'll be damned!' he said, at length.
Nor was the ecstasy of Mr Chinnery greatly inferior to his own. Five hundred pounds might not seem much to one of the ex-Mrs Chinnerys, who took the large view about money, but it meant much to him. All these weary months, he had been thinking of that five hundred pounds as a loving father might have thought of a prodigal son who had gone for ever. And now it was going to return to the fold. He removed his horn-rimmed spectacles and wiped them in a sort of trance.
'Gosh!' he murmured.
'Well, I'll be damned!' repeated Sir Buckstone.
'I told you everything would be all right,' said Lady Abbott.
Forty miles away, in his London flat, Joe Vanringham heaved himself out of the chair in which he had been sitting. It seemed to him that a ten-mile walk through the streets might do something to help him pass the leaden hours. He went out and banged the door behind him.
He paused and stood listening. Then he opened the door again and went back.
The telephone was ringing.
P.G. Wodehouse
IN ARROW BOOKS
If you have enjoyed Summer Moonshine, you'll love
Big Money
On an afternoon in May, at the hour when London pauses in its labours to refresh itself with a bite of lunch, there was taking place in the coffee-room of the Drones Club in Dover Street that pleasantest of functions, a reunion of old school friends. The host at the meal was Godfrey, Lord Biskerton, son and heir of the sixth Earl of Hoddesdon, the guest his one-time inseparable comrade, John Beresford Conway.
Happening that morning to go down to the City to discuss with his bank-manager a little matter of an overdraft, Lord Biskerton had run into Berry Conway in Cornhill. It was three years since they had last met, and in his lordship's manner, as he gazed across the table, there was something of the affectionate reproach a conscientious trainer of performing fleas might have shown towards one of his artists who had straye
d from the fold.
'Amazing!' he said.
Lord Biskerton was a young man with red hair and what looked like a preliminary scenario for a moustache of the same striking hue. He dug into his fried sole emotionally.
'Absolutely amazing,' he repeated. 'It beats me. I am mystified. Here we have two birds – you, on the one hand; I, on the other – who were once as close as the paper on the wall. Our chumminess was a silent sermon on Brotherly Love. And yet I'm dashed if we've set eyes on one another since the summer Peanut Brittle won the Jubilee Handicap. I can't understand it.'
Berry Conway shifted a little uncomfortably in his seat. He seemed embarrassed.
'We just happened to miss each other, I suppose.'
'But how?' Lord Biskerton was resolved to probe this thing to its depths. 'That's what I want to know. How? I go everywhere. Races, restaurants, theatres, all the usual round. It seems incredible that we haven't met before. If you ask most people, they will tell you the difficult thing is to avoid meeting me. It poisons their lives, poor devils. ''Oh, my sainted aunt!'' they mutter. ''You again?'' and they dash down side-streets, only to bump into me coming up the other way. Then why should you have been immune?'
'Just the luck of the Conways, I expect.'
'Anyway, why haven't you looked me up? You must have known where I was. I'm in the 'phone book.'
Berry fingered his bread.
'I don't go about much these days,' he said. 'I'm living in the suburbs now, down at Valley Fields.'
'You aren't married, are you?' asked Lord Biskerton with sudden alarm. 'Not got a little wife or any rot of that sort?'
'No. I live with an old family retainer. She used to be my nurse. And she seems to think she still is,' said Berry, his face darkening. 'I heard her shouting after me as I left the house this morning something about had I got on my warm woollies.'
'My dear chap!' Lord Biskerton raised his eyebrows. 'These intimate details. Keep the conversation clean. She fusses over you, does she? They will, these old nurses. Mine,' said Lord Biskerton, wincing at the memory, 'once kissed me on the platform at Paddington Station, thereby ruining my prestige at school for the whole of one term. Why don't you break away from this old disease? Why not pension her off?'
'Pension her off!' Berry gave a short laugh. 'What with? I suppose I had better tell you, Biscuit. The reason I've dropped out of things and am living in the suburbs and have stopped seeing my old friends lately is that I've come down in the world. I've no money now.'
The Biscuit stared.
'No money?'
'Well, that's exaggerating perhaps. To be absolutely accurate, I'm better off at the moment than I've been for two years, because I've just got a job as private secretary to Frisby, the American financier. But he only pays me a few pounds a week.'
'But doesn't a secretary have to know shorthand and all that sort of rather revolting stuff?'
'I learned shorthand.'
'Golly!' said the Biscuit. It was as if this revelation had brought the tragedy home to him in all its stark grimness. 'You must have been properly up against it.'
'I was. If an old sportsman, on whom I had absolutely no claim, hadn't lent me two hundred pounds, I should probably have starved.'
'But what on earth has been happening?' asked the Biscuit, bewildered. 'At school you were a sort of young millionaire. You jingled as you walked. A twopenny jam-sandwich for self and friend was a mere nothing to you. Where's all the money gone to? What came unstuck?'
Berry hesitated. His had been for some time a lonely existence, and the idea of confiding his troubles to a sympathetic ear was appealing.
'Do you really want to hear the story of my life, Biscuit?' he said wistfully 'Sure it won't bore you?'
'Bore me? My dear chap! I'm agog. Let's have the whole thing. Start from the beginning. Childhood – early surroundings – genius probably inherited from male grandparent – push along.'
'Well, you've brought it on yourself, remember.'
The Biscuit mused.
'When we first met,' he said, 'you were, if I recollect, about fourteen. An offensive stripling, all feet and red ears, but worth cultivating on account of your extraordinary wealth. How did you get the stuff? Honestly, I hope!'
'That came from an aunt. It was like this. I was an only child—'
'And I bet one of you was ample.'
'My mother died when I was born. I never knew my father.'
'I sometimes wish I didn't know mine,' said the Biscuit. 'The sixth Earl has his moments, but he can on occasion be more than a bit of a blister. Why didn't you know your father? A pretty exclusive kid, were you?'
'He was killed in a railway accident when I was three. And then this aunt adopted me. Her husband had just died, leaving her a fortune. That's where the money came from that you used to hear jingling at school. He was in the jute business, I believe. All I remember of him is that he had whiskers.'
'What a gruesome mess you must have been at three,' said the Biscuit meditatively. 'You were bad enough at fourteen. At three you must have made strong men shudder.'
'On the contrary. Hannah has often told me—'
'Who's Hannah?'
'Hannah Wisdom. My old retainer.'
'I see. The one who gets worried about your woollies. I thought for the moment you were introducing a new sex motive.'
'Hannah has often told me that I looked like a little angel in my velvet suit. I had long golden curls—'
'This is loathsome,' said the Biscuit austerely. 'Stop it. There are certain subjects which should not be mentioned when gentlemen are present. Get on with the story. Enter rich aunt. So far, so good. What happened then?'
'She did me like a prince. Sent me to school and Cambridge and surrounded me with every circumstance of luxury and refinement, so to speak.'
The Biscuit frowned.
'Obviously,' he said, 'there must be a catch somewhere. But I'm dashed if I can spot it yet. Up to now, you've been making my mouth water.'
'The catch,' said Berry, 'was this. During all those happy, halcyon years, when you and I were throwing inked darts at one another without a care in the world, my aunt, it now appears, had been going through her capital like a drunken sailor. I don't know if she ever endowed a scheme for getting gold out of seawater, but, if not, that's the only one she missed. Anybody who had anything in the way of a speculation so fishy that nobody else would look at it, used to come frisking up to her, waving prospectuses, and she would fall over her feet to get at her cheque-book.'
'Women,' commented the Biscuit, 'ought never to be allowed cheque-books. I've often said so. Mugs, every one of them.'
'She died two years ago, leaving me everything she possessed. This consisted of about three tons of shares in bogus companies. I was right up against it.'
'From Riches to Rags, what?'
'Yes.'
'Scaly,' said the Biscuit. 'Undeniably scaly.'
'My aunt's lawyer, a man named Attwater, happened by a miracle to be one of those fellows who pop up every now and then just to show that there is a future for the human race, after all. He had an eye like a haddock and a face like teak, and whenever he came to dinner at our place he always snubbed me like a fine old gentleman of the old school if I dared to utter a word; but, my gosh, beneath that rough exterior—! He lent me two hundred pounds to keep me going – two hundred solid quid – and if ever I have a son he is going to be christened Ebenezer Attwater Conway.'
'Better not have a son,' advised the Biscuit.
'That money just saved my life. I managed after running all over London for three months to get a sort of job. And at night I used to sweat away at learning typing and shorthand. Eventually I got taken on as secretary by a man in the Import and Export business. He retired about a month ago, and very decently shoved me off on to this fellow Frisby who was a friend of his. That's how Frisby comes to own my poor black body now. And that,' concluded Berry, 'is why I am living in the suburbs and have not been mixing much of late with
the Biskertons and the rest of the gilded aristocracy. And the really damnable part of it is that at the time when the crash came I was just going to buzz off round the world on a tramp steamer. I had to give that up, of course.'
The Biscuit appeared stupefied.
'You mean to tell me,' he said, 'that you've been avoiding me just because you were hard-up? You were ashamed of your honest poverty? I never heard anything so dashed drivelling in my life.'
Berry flushed.
'It's all very well to talk like that. You can't keep up with people who are much richer than you are.'
'Who can't?'
'Nobody can.'
'Well, I've been doing it all my life,' said Lord Biskerton stoutly, 'and – God willing – I hope to go on doing it till I am old and grey. Do you suppose for a moment, old bag, that I'm any richer than you are? Why, I only know what money is by hearsay.'
'You don't mean that?'
'I certainly do. If you want to see real destitution, old boy, take a look at my family. I'm broke. My guv'nor's broke. My Aunt Vera's broke. It's a ruddy epidemic. I owe every tradesman in London. The guv'nor hasn't tasted meat for weeks. And, as for Aunt Vera, relict of the late Colonel Archibald Mace, C.V.O., she's reduced to writing Glad articles for the evening papers. You know – things on the back page pointing out that there's always sunshine somewhere and that we ought to be bright, like the little birds in the trees. Why, I've known that woman's circumstances to become so embarrassed that she actually made an attempt to borrow money from me. Me, old boy! Lazarus in person.'
He laughed again, tickled by the recollection. Then, helping himself to fruit salad, he became grave once more and pointed the moral earnestly.
'The fact of the matter is, laddie, there's nothing in being an Earl nowadays. It's a mug's game. If ever they try to make you one, punch them in the eye and run. And being an Earl's son and heir is one degree worse.'
'But I've always thought of you as rolling in money, Biscuit. You've got that enormous place in Sussex—?'
'That's just what's wrong with it. Too enormous. Eats up all the family revenues, old boy. Oh, I know how you came to be misled. The error is a common one. You see a photograph in Country Life of an Earl standing in a negligent attitude outside the north-east piazza of his seat in Loamshire, and you say to yourself, ''Lucky devil! I'll make that bird's acquaintance and touch him.'' Little knowing that even as the camera clicked the poor old deadbeat was wondering where on earth the money was coming from to give the piazza the lick of paint it so badly needed. What with the Land Tax and the Income Tax and the Super Tax and all the rest of the little Taxes, there's not much in the family sock these days, old boy. It all comes down to this,' said the Biscuit, summing up. If England wants a happy, well-fed aristocracy, she mustn't have wars. She can't have it both ways.'