Agnes clutched at the table. She had thought for a moment that she was going to faint. And so the long evening wore on.
Mark you, I do not altogether blame Agnes Flack. Hers had been a sheltered life, and nothing like Captain Jack Fosdyke had ever happened to her before. Here was a man who, while looking like something out of a full page coloured advertisement in a slick paper magazine, seemed to have been everywhere and to know everybody.
When he took her out in the moonlight and spoke nonchalantly of Lady Astor, Lord Beaverbrook, Borneo head hunters, Mervyn Leroy and the brothers Schubert one can appreciate her attitude and understand how inevitable it was that Sidney McMurdo should have gone right back in the betting. In accepting the addresses of Sidney McMurdo, she realized that she had fallen into the error of making her selection before walking the length of the counter.
In short, to hurry on this painful part of my story, when Sidney McMurdo eventually arrived with his suitcase and bag of clubs and was about to clasp Agnes Flack to his forty-four-inch bosom, he was surprised and distressed to observe her step back and raise a deprecating hand. A moment later she was informing him that she had made a mistake and that the photograph on her dressing-table at even date was not his but that of Captain Jack Fosdyke, to whom she was now betrothed.
This, of course, was a nice bit of news for a devoted fiancé to get after a four-hour journey on a hot day in a train without a dining-car, and it is not too much to say that for an instant Sidney McMurdo tottered beneath it like a preliminary bout heavyweight who has been incautious enough to place his jaw en rapport with the fist of a fellow member of the Truck Drivers’ Union. Dimly he heard Agnes Flack saying that she would be a sister to him, and this threat, for he was a man already loaded up with sisters almost beyond capacity, brought him out of what had promised to be a lasting coma.
His eyes flashed, his torso swelled, the muscles leaped about all over him under his pullover, and with a muttered “Is zat so?” he turned on his heel and left her, but not before he had asked for and obtained his supplanter’s address. It was his intention to visit the latter and begin by picking him up by the scruff of the neck and shaking him like a rat. After that he would carry on as the inspiration of the moment dictated.
My efforts up to the present having been directed towards limning the personalities of Agnes Flack and Captain Jack Fosdyke, I have not as yet given you anything in the nature of a comprehensive character study of Sidney McMurdo. I should now reveal that he was as fiercely jealous a man as ever swung an aluminium putter. Othello might have had a slight edge on him in that respect, but it would have been a very near thing. Rob him of the girl he loved, and you roused the lion in Sidney McMurdo.
He was flexing his muscles and snorting ominously when he reached the cosy bungalow which Captain Jack Fosdyke had rented for the summer season. The Captain, who was humming one of the song hits from last year’s war dance of the ’Mgubo-Mgompis and cleaning an elephant gun, looked up inquiringly as he entered, and Sidney glowered down at him, his muscles still doing the shimmy.
“Captain Fosdyke?”
“The same.”
“Pleased to meet you.”
“Naturally.”
“Could I have a word with you?”
“A thousand.”
“It is with reference to your sneaking my girl.”
“Oh, that? Are you this McMurdo bird of whom I have heard Agnes speak?”
“I am.”
“You were engaged, I understand, till I came along?”
“We were.”
“Too bad. Well, that’s how it goes. Will you be seeing her shortly?”
“I may decide to confront her again.”
“Then you might tell her I’ve found that elephant gun I mentioned to her. She was anxious to see the notches on it.”
Sidney, who had been about to call his companion a sneaking, slinking serpent and bid him rise and put his hands up, decided that later on would do. He did not at all like this talk of notches and elephant guns.
“Are there notches on your elephant gun?”
“There are notches on all my guns. I use them in rotation. This is the one I shot the chief of the ’Mgopo-Mgumpis with.”
The chill which had begun to creep over Sidney McMurdo from the feet upwards became more marked. His clenched fists relaxed, and his muscles paused in their rhythmic dance.
“You shot him?”
“Quite.”
“Er—do you often do that sort of thing?”
“Invariably, when chaps smirch the honour of the Fosdykes. If a bally bounder smirches the honour of the Fosdykes, I shoot him like a dog.”
“Like a dog?”
“Like a dog.”
“What sort of dog?”
“Any sort of dog.”
“I see.”
There was a pause.
“Would you consider that being plugged in the eye smirched the honour of the Fosdykes?”
“Unquestionably. I was once plugged in the eye by the chief of the ’Mgeebo-Mgoopies. And when they buried him the little port had seldom seen a costlier funeral.”
“I see,” said Sidney McMurdo thoughtfully. “I see. Well, goodbye. It’s been nice meeting you.”
“It always is,” said Captain Jack Fosdyke. “Drop in again. I’ll show you my tommy gun.”
Sidney McMurdo had not much forehead, being one of those rugged men whose front hair finishes a scant inch or so above the eyebrows, but there was just room on it for a ruminative frown, and he was wearing this as he left the bungalow and set out for a walk along the shore. He was fully alive to the fact that in the recent interview he had cut a poorish figure, failing entirely to express himself and fulfil himself.
But how else, he asked himself, could he have acted? His was a simple nature, easily baffled by the unusual, and he frankly did not see how he could have coped with a rival who appeared to be a combination of mass murderer and United States Armoury. His customary routine of picking rivals up by the scruff of the neck and shaking them like rats plainly would not have answered here.
He walked on, brooding, and so distrait was he that anyone watching him would have given attractive odds that before long he would bump into something. This occurred after he had proceeded some hundred yards, the object into which he bumped being a slender, streamlined, serpentine female who looked like one of those intense young women who used to wreck good men’s lives in the silent films but seem rather to have died out since the talkies came in. She was dark and subtle and exotic, and she appeared to be weeping.
Sidney, however, who was a close observer, saw that the trouble was that she had got a fly in her eye, and to whip out his pocket handkerchief and tilt her head back and apply first aid was with him the work of an instant. She thanked him brokenly, blinking as she did so. Then, for the first time seeming to see him steadily and see him whole, she gave a little gasp, and said:
“You!”
Her eyes, which were large and dark and lustrous, like those of some inscrutable priestess of a strange old religion, focused themselves on him as she spoke, and seemed to go through him in much the same way as a couple of red-hot bullets would go through a pound of butter. He rocked back on his heels, feeling as if someone had stirred up his interior organs with an egg beater.
“I have been waiting for you—oh, so long.”
“I’m sorry,” said Sidney. “Am I late?”
“My man!”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I love you,” explained the beautiful unknown. “Kiss me.”
If she had studied for weeks she could not have found a better approach to Sidney McMurdo and one more calculated to overcome any customer’s sales resistance which might have been lurking in him. Something along these lines from a woman something along her lines was exactly what he had been feeling he could do with. A lover who has just got off a stuffy train to find himself discarded like a worn-out glove by the girl he has worshipped and trusted, is ripe for treatment of this ki
nd.
His bruised spirit began to heal. He kissed her, as directed, and there started to burgeon within him the thought that Agnes Flack wasn’t everybody and that it would do her no harm to have this demonstrated to her. A heartening picture flitted through his mind of himself ambling up to Agnes Flack with this spectacular number on his arm, saying to her: “If you don’t want me, it would appear that there are others who do.”
“Nice day,” he said, to help the conversation along.
“Divine. Hark to the wavelets, plashing on the shore. How they seem to fill one with a sense of the inexpressibly ineffable.”
“That’s right. They do, don’t they?”
“Are they singing us songs of old Greece, of Triton blowing on his wreathed horn and the sunlit loves of gods and goddesses?”
“I’m afraid I couldn’t tell you,” said Sidney McMurdo. “I’m a stranger in these parts myself.”
She sighed.
“I, too. But it is my fate to be stranger everywhere. I live a life apart; alone, aloof, solitary, separate; wrapped up in my dreams and vision. ’Tis ever so with the artist.”
“You’re a painter?”
“In ink, not in oils. I depict the souls of men and women. I am Cora McGuffy Spottsworth.”
The name was new to Sidney, who seldom got much beyond the golf weeklies and the house organ of the firm for which he worked, but he gathered that she must be a writer of sorts and made a mental note to wire Brentano’s for her complete output and bone it up without delay.
They walked along in silence. At the next ice-cream stand he bought her a nut sundae, and she ate it with a sort of restrained emotion which suggested the presence of banked-up fires, one hand wielding the spoon, the other nestling in his like a white orchid.
Sidney McMurdo was now right under the ether. As he sipped his sarsaparilla, his soul seemed to heave and bubble like a Welsh rarebit coming to the boil. From regarding this woman merely as a sort of stooge, to be exhibited to Agnes Flack as evidence that McMurdo Preferred, even if she had seen fit to unload her holdings, was far from being a drug on the market, he had come to look upon her as a strong man’s mate. So that when, having disposed of the last spoonful, she said she hoped he had not thought her abrupt just now in saying that she loved him, he replied “Not at all, not at all,” adding that it was precisely the sort of thing he liked to hear. It amazed him that he could ever have considered a mere number-three-iron-swinging robot like Agnes Flack as a life partner.
“It needs but a glance, don’t you think, to recognize one’s mate?”
“Oh, sure.”
“Especially if you have met and loved before. You remember those old days in Egypt?”
“Egypt?” Sidney was a little bewildered. The town she mentioned was, he knew, in Illinois, but he had never been there.
“In Egypt, Antony.”
“The name is Sidney. McMurdo, Sidney George.”
“In your present incarnation, possibly. But once, long ago, you were Mark Antony and I was Cleopatra.”
“Of course, yes,” said Sidney. “It all comes back to me.”
“What times those were. That night on the Nile!”
“Some party.”
“I drew Revell Carstairs in my Furnace of Sin from my memories of you in the old days. He was tall and broad and strong, but with the heart of a child. All these years I have been seeking for you, and now that I have found you, would you have had me hold back and mask my love from respect for outworn fetishes of convention?”
“You betcher. I mean, you betcher not.”
“What have we to do with conventions? The world would say that I have known you for a mere half-hour⎯”
“Twenty-five minutes,” said Sidney, who was rather a stickler for accuracy, consulting his wrist-watch.
“Or twenty-five minutes. In Egypt I was in your arms in forty seconds.”
“Quick service.”
“That was ever my way, direct and sudden and impulsive. I remember saying once to Mr. Spottsworth⎯”
Sidney McMurdo was conscious of a quick chill, similar to that which had affected him when Captain Jack Fosdyke had spoken of elephant guns and notches. His moral code, improving after a rocky start in his Mark Antony days, had become rigid and would never allow him to be a breaker-up of homes. Besides, there was his insurance company to be considered. A scandal might mean the loss of his second vice-presidency.
“Mr. Spottsworth?” he echoed, his jaw falling a little. “Is there a Mr. Spottsworth?”
“Not now. He has left me.”
“The low hound.”
“He had no option. Double pneumonia. By now, no doubt, he has been reincarnated, but probably only as a jellyfish. A jellyfish need not come between us.”
“Certainly not,” said Sidney McMurdo, speaking warmly, for he had once been stung by one, and they resumed their saunter.
Agnes Flack, meanwhile, though basking in the rays of Captain Jack Fosdyke, had by no means forgotten Sidney McMurdo. In the days that followed their painful interview, in the intervals of brushing up her fifty yards from the pin game in preparation for the Women’s Singles contest which was shortly to take place, she found her thoughts dwelling on him quite a good deal. A girl who has loved, even if mistakenly, can never be indifferent to the fortunes of the man whom she once regarded as the lode star of her life. She kept wondering how he was making out, and hoped that his vacation was not being spoiled by a broken heart.
The first time she saw him, accordingly, she should have been relieved and pleased. He was escorting Cora McGuffy Spottsworth along the boardwalk, and it was abundantly obvious even from a casual glance that if his heart had ever been broken, there had been some adroit work done in the repair shop. Clark Gable could have improved his technique by watching the way he bent over Cora McGuffy Spottsworth and stroked her slender arm. He also, while bending and stroking, whispered into her shell-like ear, and you could see that what he was saying was good stuff. His whole attitude was that of a man who, recognizing that he was on a good thing, was determined to push it along.
But Agnes Flack was not relieved and pleased; she was disturbed and concerned. She was perhaps a hard judge, but Cora McGuffy Spottsworth looked to her like the sort of woman who goes about stealing the plans of forts—or, at the best, leaning back negligently on a settee and saying “Prince, my fan”. The impression Agnes formed was of something that might be all right stepping out of a pie at a bachelor party, but not the type you could take home to meet mother.
Her first move, therefore, on encountering Sidney at the golf club one morning, was to institute a probe.
“Who,” she demanded, not beating about the bush, “was that lady I saw you walking down the street with?”
Her tone, in which he seemed to detect the note of criticism, offended Sidney.
“That,” he replied with a touch of hauteur, “was no lady, that was my fiancée.”
Agnes reeled. She had noticed that he was wearing a new tie and that his hair had been treated with Sticko, the pomade that satisfies, but she had not dreamed that matters had proceeded as far as this.
“You are engaged?”
“And how!”
“Oh, Sidney!”
He stiffened.
“That will be all of that ‘Oh, Sidney!’ stuff,” he retorted with spirit. “I don’t see what you have to beef about. You were offered the opportunity of a merger, and when you failed to take up your option I was free, I presume, to open negotiations elsewhere. As might have been foreseen, I was snapped up the moment it got about that I was in the market.”
Agnes Flack bridled.
“I’m not jealous.”
“Then what’s your kick?”
“It’s just that I want to see you happy.”
“I am.”
“How can you be happy with a woman who looks like a snake with hips?”
“She has every right to look like a snake with hips. In a former incarnation she used to be Cleopat
ra. I,” said Sidney McMurdo, straightening his tie, “was Antony.”
“Who told you that?”
“She did. She has all the facts.”
“She must be crazy.”
“Not at all. I admit that for a while at our first meeting some such thought did cross my mind, but the matter is readily explained. She is a novelist. You may have heard of Cora McGuffy Spottsworth?”
Agnes uttered a cry.
“What? Oh, she can’t be.”
“She has documents to prove it.”
“But Sidney, she’s awful. At my school two girls were expelled because they were found with her books under their pillows. Her publisher’s slogan is ‘Spottsworth for Blushes’. You can’t intend to marry a woman who notoriously has to write her love scenes on asbestos.”
“Well, what price your intending to marry a prominent international plug-ugly who thinks nothing of shooting people with elephant guns?”
“Only African chiefs.”
“African chiefs are also God’s creatures.”
“Not when under the influence of trade gin, Jack says. He says you have to shoot them with elephant guns then. It means nothing more, he says, than if you drew their attention to some ruling by Emily Post. Besides, he knows Bobby Jones.”
“So does Bobby Jones’s grocer. Does he play golf himself? That’s the point.”
“He plays beautifully.”
“So does Cora. She expects to win the Women’s Singles.”
Agnes drew herself up haughtily. She was expecting to win the Women’s Singles herself.
“She does, does she?”
“Yes, she does.”
“Over my dead body.”
“That would be a mashie niblick shot,” said Sidney McMurdo thoughtfully. “She’s wonderful with her mashie niblick.”
With a powerful effort Agnes Flack choked down her choler.
“Well, I hope it will be all right,” she said.
“Of course it will be all right. I’m about the luckiest man alive.”
“In any case, it’s fortunate that we found out our mistake in time.”
“I’ll say so. A nice thing it would have been, if all this had happened after we were married. We should have had one of those situations authors have to use a row of dots for.”