'Oh, hullo,' said Freddie. He seemed to her distrait and out of tune with her joyous mood. 'How have you been lately? Bobbing along? My cousin George tells me you've been having cat trouble.'
'A spot,' said Leila Yorke buoyantly, 'the merest spot. I'll tell you all about it while you're giving me lunch.'
'Frightfully sorry, but I can't give you lunch. I'm fixed up with my uncle Rodney.'
'Where?'
'Barribault's.'
'I'll join you,' said Leila Yorke.
18
CATERING as it does mainly for Texas millionaires who have just learned that another oil well has been discovered on their property and maharajahs glad to have got away from the pomp and ceremony of the old palace for a while, there is always an atmosphere of hearty - though never unrefined - gaiety about the lobby of Barribault's Hotel at the luncheon hour, and it was an atmosphere that fitted well with Leila Yorke's mood. Freed from the cloying society of the Castle-wood cats and stimulated by her recent interview with J. Sheringham Adair, she had recovered all her normal exuberance. The dullest eye could discern that she was in the pink. Far too much so, Freddie considered, as he eyed her morosely. Wanting to be alone to brood on his grief, preferably in some cemetery, he found her vivacity hard to bear.
'Widgeon,' she said, raising her glass and beaming with good-will, 'I would like you to join me in a toast, and no heel-taps. To the fellow who first invented life, for he started a darned good thing. What did you say?'
Freddie, who had said 'Oh?', said he had said 'Oh?', and she proceeded.
'You see before you. Widgeon, a woman who, if such goings-on were allowed in this posh caravanserai, would be clapping her ands in glee and dancing around on the tips of her toes.'
'Oh?' said Freddie.
'Today, and you may give this to the Press, I am glad, glad, glad, like Polyanna, and with good reason. I have seen the light and realize what a mug's game it was ever to think of writing that stark novel of squalor I spoke to you about. I have abandoned the idea in toto.’
'Oh?' said Freddie.
There rose before me the vision of all those thousands of half-witted women waiting with their tongues out for their next ration of predigested pap from my pen, and I felt it would be cruel to disappoint them. Be humane, I told myself. Who am I to deprive them of their simple pleasures, I soliloquized. Keep faith with your public, my girl, I added, still soliloquizing.'
'Oh?' said Freddie.
'And there was another aspect of the matter. Inasmuch as these blighted novels of squalor have to be at least six hundred pages long, hammering one out would have been the most ghastly sweat, and the first lesson an author must learn is to make things as easy for himself as possible. The ideal toward which one strives is unconscious cerebration. I look forward to a not distant date when I shall be able to turn out the stuff in my sleep.'
'Oh?' said Freddie.
She gave him a sharp glance. Though preferring always to bear the major burden of any conversation in which she took part, she liked more give-and-take than this. A little onesided this exchange of ideas was becoming, she felt.
'Aren't you saying "Oh?" a good deal as of even date?' she said. 'You seem distrait. Widgeon.'
'I am a bit.'
'What's eating you?'
Freddie laughed a mirthless laugh, the sort of laugh a lost soul in an Inferno might have uttered, if tickled by some observation on the part of another lost soul.
'What isn't?'
'Hard morning at the office?'
'Well, I got fired, if you call that hard.'
Leila Yorke was all warm-hearted sympathy.
'My poor unhappy boy! What was the trouble?'
'Oh, nothing you'd understand. Technical stuff. I made a bloomer yesterday when copying out an affidavit, as the foul things are called, and when I arrived this morning - late again, because I'd been hanging round trying to get a word with Sally - Shoesmith sent for me and applied the boot. He said he had felt the urge for a long time and had struggled to fight against it, but this had made it irresistible. He gave me a month's salary in lieu of notice, saying it was well worth the money to get rid of me immediately. He added that this was the happiest day of his life.'
'Didn't you plead with him?'
'Certainly not. I ticked him off. Remembering what you had told me about his murky past, I said that I might not be his dream employee, but at least I didn't kiss girls behind rhododendron bushes. Oddly enough, I never have. Rose bushes, yes, but not rhododendrons. "Kiss fewer girls behind rhododendron bushes, Shoesmith," I said, and I turned on my heel and walked out.'
'Very upsetting. I don't wonder you're feeling off your oats.'
'Oh, it isn't that. Being fired doesn't worry me, because pretty soon I shall be making a vast fortune.'
'How's that?'
'Sorry, I can't tell you,' said Freddie, remembering Mr. Molloy's injunctions of secrecy. 'It's just an investment of sorts I'm going to clean up on. No, what I'm down among the wines and spirits about,' he went on, abandoning reserve in his desire to unburden himself to a sympathetic confidant, 'is Sally. Has she told you what happened?'
'Not a word. What did happen?'
Freddie dipped his finger in his empty glass, secured the olive and swallowed it with a moody gulp.
'If something's gone wrong between you and Sally, you need another of those,' said Leila Yorke maternally.
'You think so?'
'I'm sure of it. Waiter! Encore de Martini cocktails. Talking of waiters,' she said, as the man withdrew, 'my missing husband's one.'
'You don't say?'
'Saw him with my own eyes flitting to and fro with the hashed chicken in pastry at the Pen and Ink Club luncheon. But don't let's get off on the subject of my affairs. Everything's going to be all right as far as I'm concerned. I have an octopus stretching its tentacles hither and thither in search of him, and you know what these octopi are like. They never fail. Forget me and tell me about you and Sally. Have you really parted brass rags?'
'It looks like it.'
'What did you do to the girl?'
'I didn't do anything.'
'Come, come!'
'It was my cousin George.'
'The zealous officer who got into my ribs for ten of the best the other day for concert tickets? How does he come into it?'
Freddie scowled darkly at an inoffensive Texas millionaire who had seated himself at a near-by table. He had nothing specific against the man, but he was in the mood to scowl at anyone who came within his orbit of vision, and would have looked equally blackly at a visiting maharajah. When a Widgeon has lost the woman he loves, the general public is well advised to keep at a safe distance.
'I must begin by saying,' he began by saying, 'that of all the fatheaded, clothheaded half-wits that ever blew a police whistle, my cousin George is the worst. He's like that fellow in the poem whose name led all the rest.'
'I know the fellow you mean. Had a spot of bother with angels getting into his bedroom in the small hours, if I remember rightly. So George is fatheaded, is he?'
'Has been from birth. But on this occasion he lowered all previous records. Oh, I know he has some sort of a story in…What's that word beginning with an "X"? It's on the tip of my tongue.'
'Xylophone?'
'Extenuation. I know he can put up a kind of story in extenuation of his muttonheaded behaviour. The woman was undoubtedly wet.'
'You're going too fast for me. What woman?'
'The one who came to Peacehaven.'
'Friend of yours?'
'I know her slightly.'
'Ah!'
'Don't say "Ah!" in that soupy tone of voice. Only the other day I had to rebuke Sally for doing the same thing. That, of course,' said Freddie, heaving a sigh that seemed to come up from the soles of his clocked socks, 'was when she and I were on speaking terms.'
'Aren't you now?'
'Far from it. This morning I saw her in your garden and called to her, and she gave me the sort
of look she would have given a leper she wasn't fond of, and streaked back into the house. It was hanging around, hoping to establish contact again, that made me late at the office. Mark you, I can understand her point of view. She was unquestionably wearing my pyjamas.'
'Sally?'
'No, the woman.
'The one you know slightly?'
'Yes.'
'Wearing your pyjamas?'
'The ones with the purple stripe.'
'H'm!'
Freddie raised a hand. Not even his cousin George, when on traffic duty, could have put more dignity into the gesture. On his face was a look rather similar to the one Sally had given him that morning in the garden.
'Don't say "H'm". It's as bad as "All!". I could explain the whole thing so easily, if she'd only let me have a word with her and not shoot off like a sprinter hoping to break the hundred yards record every time I open my mouth. This woman got caught in the rain and barged into Peacehaven for shelter. She met George, and he saw she was wet---‘
'The trained eye. Nothing escapes the police.'
‘---and told her to go up to my room and get into my pyjamas before she caught a nasty cold. He then went off to give his girl dinner, leaving her there, so when I got home, there I was, closeted with her.'
'And Sally came in?'
'Not immediately. She entered at the moment when I was giving the woman a helping hand with her knee. She had fallen and scraped it, and I was putting iodine on it,'
'On her knee?'
'Yes.'
'Her bare knee?'
'Well, would she have been clad in sheet armour at such a moment?'
‘H'm.'
Freddie repeated the George-like gesture which had resulted from her previous use of this monosyllable.
'Will you please not say "H'm"! The whole episode was pure to the last drop. Dash it, if a female has shaved about three inches of skin off her lower limbs and lockjaw is imminent unless prompt steps are taken through the proper channels, a fellow has to rally round with the iodine, hasn't he? You can't have women dying in awful agonies all over the sitting-room floor.'
'Something in that. But Sally got the wrong angle?'
'She appeared to misunderstand the position of affairs completely. I didn't see her at first, because I was bending over the flesh wound with my back turned, but I heard a sort of gasping yip and looked round, and there she was, goggling at me as if shocked to the core. For an instant there was silence, broken only by the sound of a voice saying, "Ouch!"---iodine stings like the dickens---and then Sally said, "Oh, I beg your pardon. I thought you were alone," and exited left centre. And by the time I'd rallied from the shock and dashed after her, she was nowhere in sight. The whole thing's a pretty ghastly mess,' said Freddie, and frowned blackly again, this time at a peer of the realm who, as peers of the realm so often did, had dropped in at Barribault's for a quick one before lunch and was sitting at a table across the room.
Leila Yorke was frowning, too, but the crease in her brow was a thoughtful crease. She was weighing the evidence and sifting it. A stern expression came into her face. She tapped Freddie on the arm.
'Widgeon, look me in the eye.'
He looked her in the eye.
'And answer me one question. Do you intend to do right by our Nell, or are you regarding this innocent girl as the mere plaything of an idle hour, as Angela Fosdyke said to Bruce Tallentyre in my Heather o} the Hills when she found him kissing her sister Jasmine at the Hunt Ball. It would be interesting to know, for on your answer much depends.'
Freddie, being sunk in one of Barribault's settees, than which none in London are squashier and more yielding to the frame, was unable to draw himself to his full height, but he gave her a cold, dignified look which made quite a good substitute for that manoeuvre. His voice, when he spoke, shook a little.
'Are you asking me if I love Sally?'
‘I am.'
'Of course I do. I love her madly.'
'Satisfactory, as far as it goes. But one must bear in mind that you love every girl you meet.'
'Where did you hear that?'
'Sally told me. I had it straight from the horse's mouth.'
Freddie pounded the table passionately. Leila Yorke, a specialist at that sort of thing, liked his wrist work.
'Listen,' he said, speaking thickly. 'Sally's all wrong about that. She's judging me on past form, and there was a time, I admit, when I was a bit inclined to flit from flower to flower and sip, but I gave all that up when she came along. There's no one in the ruddy world for me but her. You know Cleopatra ?'
'By name.'
'And the Queen of Sheba?'
'Just to nod to.'
'Well, lump them both together, and what have you got? Something I wouldn't cross the road for, if there was a chance of being with Sally. And you ask me if I love her. Tchah!'
'What did you say?'
'When?'
'On the cue "ask me if I love her".'
'I said "Tchah!" meaning to imply that the question is absurd, loony, incompetent, immaterial and irrelevant, as Shoesmith would say. Love her? Of course I love her. If not, why do you suppose I'm going steadily off my rocker because she won't speak to me and looks at me as if I were something more than usually revolting she had found under a flat stone?'
Leila Yorke nodded. His simple eloquence had convinced her.
'Widgeon, I believe your story. Many women wouldn't, for if ever there was a narrative that exuded fishiness at every pore, this is it. But I've always been a pushover for tales of love. Do you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to phone her and apprise her of the facts. I'll square you with her.'
'You think you can?'
'Leave it to me.'
'I absolutely can't tell you how grateful I am.'
'Don't give it a thought.'
'Do it now!'
'Not now. I want my lunch. And here comes our host,' said Leila Yorke, as the portly form of Rodney, Lord Blicester came through the swing door. 'I wonder if he's heard about Johnnie Shoesmith easing you off the pay-roll.'
Much of the light that had been illuminating Freddie's face faded away. The fact that he was in for a stormy interview with an uncle who on these occasions never minced his words had been temporarily erased from his mind. 'I expect so.'
'Well, chin up. He can't eat you.'
'He'll have a jolly good try,' said Freddie. He had a momentary illusion that the spinal cord running down his back had been replaced by some sort of jellied substance.
19
THERE are lunches which are rollicking from start to finish, with gay shafts of wit flickering to and fro like lightning flashes, and others where the going is on the sticky side and a sense of oppression seems to weigh the revellers down like a London fog. The one presided over by Lord Blicester at the restaurant of Barribault's Hotel fell into the second class.
It was in no festive mood that he had come to Barribault's Hotel. Calling on Mr. Shoesmith earlier in the morning to enquire how that income tax thing was working out and informed by him that his nephew's services had been dispensed with, he had planned, on meeting Freddie, to speak his mind in no uncertain manner to that young blot on the London scene, and in the taxi on his way to the tryst had been rehearsing and polishing his lines, substituting here a stronger adjective, there a more forceful noun. The discovery that what he had been looking forward to as a tête-à-tête was going to be a threesome gave him an unpleasant feeling of being about to burst. No one was more alive than he to what is done and what is not done, and in the matter of pounding the stuffing out of an errant nephew when there are ladies present the book of etiquette, he knew, was rigid.
Throughout the meal, accordingly, his obiter dicta were few and his demeanour that of a volcano biding its time. And as Freddie appeared to be in a sort of trance and Leila Yorke's conversation was confined for the most part to comments on his increased weight since she had seen him last, coupled with recommendations of dietary systems which could not fa
il to cut him down to size, the thing was not a great social success.
But even the weariest river winds somewhere safe to sea, and when after the serving of coffee his fair guest left the table, saying that she had a telephone call to make, he prepared to relieve what Shakespeare would have called his stuff'd bosom of its pent-up contents. Fixing his nephew with a baneful eye, he said, 'Well, Frederick,' and Freddie said, 'Oh, hullo, Uncle Rodney,' as if noticing for the first time that his relative was among those present. His thoughts had been with Leila Yorke at the telephone. Observing the bright, encouraging smile she had given him as she left, he knew she would pitch it strong, but would she pitch it strong enough to overcome Sally's sales resistance? So much hung on the answer to this question that he was understandably pre-occupied.
Lord Blicester proceeded to arrest his attention. When moved, as he was now, he had an oratorical delivery not unlike that of a minor prophet of Old Testament days rebuking the sins of the people, and this he supplemented with appropriate gestures. The peer of the realm, who had finished his quick one and come into the restaurant and was lunching at a table across the way, became immediately aware, as he watched the drama with an interested eyeglass, that the thin feller over there was copping it properly from the fat feller, probably his uncle or something of that sort. His sympathies were with the thin feller. In his youth he, too, had known what it was to cop it from his elders. He belonged to a family whose senior members, when stirred, had never hesitated to dish it out.
It is one of the drawbacks to the historian's task that in recording dialogue between his characters he must select and abridge, giving merely the gist of their remarks and not a full stenographic transcript. It will be enough to say, therefore, that Lord Blicester, touching on his nephew's moral and spiritual defects, left nothing unspoken. The word 'wastrel' occurred with some frequency, as did the adjective 'hopeless'. By the time he had rounded into his peroration, the conclusion anyone hearing it would have come to was that it was a mystery how such a despicable member of the human family as Frederick Fotheringway Widgeon had even been allowed inside a respectable establishment like Barribault's Hotel.