Gertrude seemed spellbound,
‘Reggie did that?'
'Yes.'
'But - but why?"
‘I’m telling you. Because he's got this distorted sense of humour. Anything for a laugh.' 'But where does the fun come in?'
'Don't ask me. But he tells me he often does it. Goes to girls, I mean, and kids them that the fellows they're engaged to are regular hell hounds. Just to see them jump.'
‘But it seems so unlike Reggie.'
‘I thought so, too. But there it is.’
‘Why, he's a little fiend!'
'In human shape. Absolutely.'
The little brute!'
"Yes.'
'Poor old Ambrose!’ ‘Yes.'
'I'll never speak to Reggie again.’
Gertrude's eyes blazed. Then suddenly the fire was quenched. A tear stole down her cheek. 'Monty,' she said remorsefully. 'Hullo?'
'No. I don't know how to tell you.’ Tell me?'
A struggle seemed to take place inside Gertrude Butterwick. 'Yes, I will. I must. Monty, do you know why I came here?'
'To take me off to dinner? It'll be dinner-time soon, I suppose. Whose table are you at?'
'The captain's. But never mind that -’
'I'm at Jimmy the One's. What a nuisance we aren't together.'
'Yes. But never mind that. I want to tell you. I feel such a beast.' ‘Eh?’
Gertrude gulped. Her eyes fell. The blush of shame was on her chee.k.
'I came here to return the Mickey Mouse you gave me.’ ‘What!'
‘I did. You'll hardly believe this, Monty-' 'Believe what?'
This evening, Reggie came to me and told me about you exactly what you say he told Miss Blossom about Ambrose.' Monty stared. 'He did?'
'Yes. He said that there was never a moment when you were not making love to three girls at a time -' 'Good heavens!'
‘- and that you were so artful that you could persuade each of them that she was the only one you cared for.'
‘Well, I'm dashed! ‘
Another gulp escaped Gertrude.
'And, oh, Monty darling, I believed him 1'
There was a tense silence. Monty registered amazement, pain, incredulity, and indignation.
'Well, really!'he said.
‘I know, I know!'
"Well, really,’ said Monty, 'this beats everything. Upon my sacred Sam, I positively am dashed. I wouldn't have thought it of you, Gertrude. You have hurt me inexpressibly, old egg. How you could be such a mutton-headed little juggins -’
‘I know, I know. But, you see, coming right on top of that tattoo thing on your chest -'
‘I explained that. Explained it fully.'
'I know. Still, you can't blame me for thinking things.’
'Yes, I can. A pure, sweet English girl ought not to think things.'
'Well, anyway, I don't believe it any longer. I know you love me. You do, don't you?'
'Love you? Well, when you reflect that in order to win you I became assistant editor of Tiny Tots, a journal for the Nursery and the Home, and then secretary to old Emsworth - and what a soft snap that was! - and after that one of Percy Pilbeam's skilled birds, I should think you ought to be able to realize by this time that I love you. If you can't get that into your fat head -'
'It is fat, isn't it?' said Gertrude, with remorse.
'Pretty fat,' assented Monty sternly. 'Why, look at what happened just now. Would anybody but a fat-head have taken up the attitude you did when you found me in here with Miss Blossom? I don't mind telling you that I was not a little wounded by your manner. You shot a very nasty look at me.'
'It seemed so odd that you should be stroking her head.'
'Not stroking. Patting. And that only in the very lightest possible way. My motives were pure to the last drop. I thought I had made that clear. The girl was in trouble, and I patted her cupola in precisely the same spirit - no more, no less - as that in which I would have patted a bull pup with stomachache.’ 'Of course.'
'It's no pleasure to me to pat girls' heads.' 'No, no - I quite understand.'
Faintly from along the corridor there came the sound of a bugle blowing.
'Dinner!’ said Monty, with a sigh of satisfaction. He felt he needed it. He kissed Gertrude.
'Come along,' he said. 'Shake a leg. old egg. And afterwards we will walk on the boat deck and talk of this and that.'
'Yes, that will be lovely. Oh, Monty, I'm so glad you came on this boat. What fun we shall have.'
'Rather!'
‘I wonder if there will be dancing in the evenings?' 'Sure to be. I'll find out from Albert Peasemarch.’ ‘Who's he?' The steward chap.'
'Oh, the steward. He seems rather a character.'
'Quite a character.'
'What was all that about the mop?'
Monty quivered. His eyes became a little glassy.
‘Mop?'
'Why did he bring a mop?’ Monty moistened his lips. 'Did he bring a mop?' 'Yes, don't you remember?' Monty pulled himself together.
'Of course, yes. So he did. But heaven knows why. I remember wondering at the time. Must have misunderstood something I said, I suppose. Half these stewards on liners are practically loonies. What on earth should I want a mop for? A mop, I mean! So damn silly. I say, do let's push along and collect that dinner.'
'All right. Where's my mouse?"
‘Here it is.'
Gertrude regarded the Mickey Mouse with tender remorse.. 'Just imagine, Monty 1 I brought this to give it back to you.
Because I thought everything was over between us.’ ‘Ha, ha!' laughed Monty jovially. 'Of all the cuckoo ideas !’ 'I feel so ashamed of myself.'
‘Quite all right, quite all right. All set now for the quick dash to the trough?'
'In one minute. I just want to bathe my eyes in your bathroom.'
Monty clutched at the door handle. He needed some strong support. Everything seemed to have gone black.
'No!' he cried, with extraordinary vehemence. 'You don't want to bathe any bally eyes.'
‘Aren't they red?'
‘Of course they're not. They look fine. They always look fine. You've got the most terrific eyes.' 'Do you think so?'
‘Everybody thinks so. It's all over London. Like twin stars.'
It was the right note. There was no more talk of going into the bathroom. She allowed him to turn her round, to steer her through the door, to lead her out into the passage. They began to walk along it together. Her hand was in his, and she prattled at his side.
Monty did not prattle. He was vibrating gently, as a man will who has just escaped from a great peril. He felt faint and hollow.
Everything was fine. The luck of the Bodkins had held, and the danger was past. But it would be some little time before he rounded into mid-season form again.
As his crusading ancestor, the Sieur Pharamond de Bodkyn, to whom we have alluded, had put it, writing home to his wife and telling her how he had been unhorsed at the Battle of Joppa - 'Ytte was suche a dam near squeake as I never wante to have agayne in a month of Sundays. E'en now am I sweatinge atte every pore, and meseems I hardlie knowe if I stande on ye head or ye heels.'
Chapter 13
It was not until the third morning of the voyage that Mr Ivor Llewellyn proceeded to put into operation the scheme outlined by his sister-in-law Mabel Spence for drawing the fangs of the Customs spy whose dark shadow was blotting the sunshine from his life. To be exact, at fourteen minutes past ten on the third morning of the voyage.
Considering with what enthusiasm he had welcomed the idea when it had been proposed, this delay may strike the reader as strange. Brought up from childhood in the creed that the presidents of motion-picture corporations are men who think on their feet and do it now, he may be saying to himself that this is scarcely the old Llewellyn form and speculating as to the possibility of that great executive brain having lost its grip a bit. The matter is, however, as Monty Bodkin would have said, susceptible of a ready exp
lanation. Just as he was about to get action, up sprang a terrific gale and took his mind off business.
For the first few hours after leaving Cherbourg nothing could have been calmer and serener than the ocean. The vessel purred through waters that seemed to be trying to compete in blueness and blandness with those of the Mediterranean. People played deck tennis, shuffleboard became rampant, and the heartiest of meals were consumed by one and all. In short, 'Youth on the prow and pleasure at the helm' only faintly expresses the conditions on board.
And then, quite suddenly on the second morning, just as the first shy deck stewards were beginning to steal out with cups of soup and the fluting cry of the shuffleboard addicts was making itself heard in the drowsy stillness, the skies turned from blue to grey, the horizon became dark with unwholesome-looking clouds, and the wind, veering to the north, blew with a gradually increasing force till presently it was howling through the rigging with a shrill melancholy wail and causing the R.M.S. Atlantic to behave more like a Russian dancer than a respectable ship. Ivor Llewellyn, prone in his bunk and holding on to the woodwork, was able to count no fewer than five occasions when the vessel lowered Nijinsky's record for leaping in the air and twiddling the feet before descending.
For a whole day and part of the following night the Atlantic staggered on her way, buffeted by the hurricane - or, as the dull and unimaginative officer who wrote up the ship's log described it, the 'fresh north-easterly breeze'. Then the wind dropped, the sea grew smooth, and the third day of the voyage found the sun smiling through once more.
Among the first to greet it, if 'greet' is the right word to use of a man who, passionately fond of his sleep, is routed out of bed by the night-watchman at five o'clock in the morning, was Albert Peasemarch. Together with his forty-nine companions in the Glory Hole, he rose, dressed himself sketchily and, having partaken of bread and jam and tea, went to work on the alleyways of his section of the C deck. At eight-fifty a bell rang informing him that his presence was desired in Stateroom C 31. He went in and found Mr Llewellyn propped up among the pillows, looking pale and interesting.
'Good morning, sir,' said Albert Peasemarch, with that bright courtesy which stewards, no matter how early they may have risen, always contrive to put on like a garment. 'You wish for breakfast, sir? What may I bring you? Boiled eggs? Eggs and bacon? Bloaters? Haddock? Sausages? Curry? Many gentlemen like to start the day with curry.'
A shudder closely resembling those given by the R.M.S. Atlantic when shipping heavy seas shook Mr Llewellyn, and his eyes flickered as if he had received a blow. In the interval between the completion of his mopping and scrubbing and this summons from his feudal overlord, Albert Peasemarch had returned to the Glory Hole and made a more careful toilet, so that he was now his usual spruce and ingratiating self. Nevertheless, the seigneur of State-room C 31 gazed upon him with a sullen loathing. Watching Mr Llewellyn's face, you might have supposed that he was looking at his wife's brother
George, or even at his wife's cousin Egbert's sister Genevieve, who was employed in the Reading Department at three hundred and fifty dollars a week.
'Coffee!' he said, mastering his emotion.
'Coffee, sir? Yes, sir. And with the coffee, sir?"
'Just coffee.'
'Just coffee, sir? Very good, sir. Odd,' said Albert Peasemarch, who had never been one of those men who are taciturn in the morning, 'how widely gentlemen's tastes vary with respect to the first meal of the day. A man in my position meets all sorts, as you can well imagine. I had a bloke in one of my sheds on the old Laurentic who liked nothing so much as a raw Spanish onion. And there was another who was always after me to try to get him a dozen oysters. Sir?'
'Get that coffee,' said Mr Llewellyn huskily.
'Very good, sir. Still feeling a little shaky, no doubt, after that capful of wind we ran into. I noticed that you kept to your bed yesterday, and I said to myself: "There's one bloke that's copped it. There's one gentleman," I said, "whose dining-room steward isn't going to be run off his feet." I may say that your absence excited remark, sir. There was a Mr Ambrose Tennyson inquiring after you this morning. Also a Miss Passenger, a muscular young lady who, I understand, is the leader of this hockey troupe that's going to the States. Now, there's a thing we didn't see so much of when you and I were young, sir. You didn't find ladies racing down fields with mallets in their hands then. Well, sir, I mustn't stand here talking, must I? You're wanting your coffee. I forget what it was you said you desired with the -’
Mr Llewellyn's eyes bulged.
‘COFFEE!'he said.
Albert Peasemarch's brain grasped the position. The gentleman wanted coffee. Not Spanish onions. Not oysters. Coffee.
'Coffee, sir - yes, sir. You shall have it in one moment, sir. I'll just draw the shade back from your port-hole, sir. You will find it a nice, sunny morning.'
He did so, rather in the manner of some important functionary unveiling a statue, and a golden glow filled the state-room.
It effected a marked change for the better in Mr Llewellyn. Taken in conjunction with the fact that he was now relieved of Albert Peasemarch's society, it definitely eased the strain. Even now, you could not have described him as rollicking, but he certainly felt less like a corpse on a slab. He lay there, watching the sunlight and thinking, and it was not long before his thoughts began to drift in the direction of Monty Bodkin.
Hitherto, when he had thought of Monty, it had been with the uneasy alarm of a rabbit meditating on a weasel. The face of Monty, rising before his eyes, had given him a sort of sick feeling. But now, so pronounced was the optimism engendered by the improved weather conditions, it seemed to him that he had been allowing the man's menace to agitate him unnecessarily. Mabel, he felt, was perfectly right. One had simply to offer the fellow a contract with the Superba-Llewellyn and he would fall over himself in his eagerness to oblige. There had been times, notably while in conference with imported English playwrights, when Mr Llewellyn had regretted that he had ever become a motion-picture president, but he saw now that it was the ideal walk in life. A motion-picture president could fix anybody.
His coffee, arriving a few minutes later, completed the restoration of his sense of well-being. So much so that quarter of an hour after that he was ringing the bell again and ordering a mushroom omelette, and a quarter of an hour after that smoking a cigarette, and half an hour after that ringing the bell once more and commanding Albert Peasemarch to summon Ambrose Tennyson.
And presently Ambrose, having been located on the promenade deck, where he was walking up and down like Napoleon on the Bellerophon, was ushered into his presence, given his instructions and despatched to Monty's state-room, an accredited ambassador.
Monty, like Mr Llewellyn, had proved a ready victim to the recent storm. It was his first experience of the Western Ocean in one of its less attractive moods, and he had succumbed while the ship was still, as it were, just shuffling its feet before actually going into its dance. For the whole of the previous day he had remained in bed, to awake this morning with a sense of having passed through the valley of the shadow and somehow scrambled safely to the other side, which at one time he had never expected to enjoy. He had not yet risen, but he had partaken of an excellent breakfast, and at the moment of Ambrose's arrival was chatting to Reggie, who had looked in to borrow cigarettes.
Ambrose's entry cast a certain constraint upon what had been a pleasant getting together of old friends. In Reggie's case, this was due to the fact that his brother's last words to him, spoken at the conclusion of that Lottie Blossom episode in the corridor, had been the statement that for two pins he would wring his neck, and there was no knowing, Reggie felt, whether on a well-equipped ship like this he might not, in the interval, have succeeded in obtaining those pins.
Monty, on his side, found the novelist's presence jarring upon him because the latter seemed to bring with him into the room an atmosphere of doom and desolation and despair, of charnel houses and winding sheets and spectral
voices wailing in the wind. There was a murky gloom about Ambrose Tennyson's aspect, as if he had just been reading a bad notice in a weekly review, and Monty, eyeing him, came shrewdly to the conclusion that Miss Blossom must have fulfilled her promise of having that word with him of which she had spoken so feelingly.
He was not mistaken. The lady belonging to the school of thought which holds that we should not let the sun go down on our wrath, the interview had taken place that same night shortly before the hour of retiring to rest, and it had sent Ambrose to bed in a condition of sandbagged pessimism which still prevailed in all its pristine intensity. Red hair and meekness are two things which seldom go together, and Lottie Blossom specialized in the former. The scene began and finished on the upper deck, and the interested listener who bet another interested listener two dollars that Ambrose would not be able to get a word in within the space of ten minutes by the smoking-room clock came very near to winning his wager. A musical-comedy training, followed by a post-graduate course in Hollywood studios, had taught Miss Blossom to talk first', talk quick and keep on talking. By the time she had had her say only broken fragments remained of what had once been a sturdy and promising young engagement.
These things put their stamp on a man, and one look at his brother was sufficient to send Reggie sliding from the room, muttering something about seeing Monty later. Ambrose was thus enabled to secure the latter's undivided attention. He approached the bed and stood for a moment glaring down at its occupant with the unlovable air of a First Murderer out of Shakespeare.