Mr Mulliner Speaking (27 page)

'A little tighter, perhaps, sir,' he suggested, obsequiously, casting a critical eye upon Dudley's knots. 'It would never do for you to fall and kill yourself, sir, ha, ha!'

'Did you say ''ha, ha''?' said Dudley, in a pale voice.

'I did venture—'

'Don't do it again.'

'Very good, sir.' The butler ambled to the window and looked out. 'I fear the sheets will not reach quite to the ground, sir. You will have a drop of a few feet.'

'But,' added Bobbie, hastily, 'you've got the most lovely, soft, squashy flower-bed to fall into.'

It was not till some minutes later, when he had come to the end of the sheet and had at last nerved himself to let go and complete the journey after the fashion of a parachutist whose parachute has refused to open, that Dudley discovered that there was an error in Miss Wickham's description of the terrain. The lovely soft flower-bed of which she had spoken with such pretty girlish enthusiasm was certainly there, but what she had omitted to mention was that along it at regular intervals were planted large bushes of a hard and spiky nature. It was in one of these that Dudley, descending like a shooting star, found himself entangled: and he had never supposed that anything that was not actually a cactus plant could possibly have so many and such sharp thorns.

He scrambled out and stood in the moonlight soliloquizing softly. A head protruded from the window above.

'Are you all right, sir?' inquired the voice of Simmons.

Dudley did not reply. With as much dignity as a man punctured in several hundred places could muster, he strode off.

He had reached the drive and was limping up it towards the gate which led to the road which led to the station which led to the milk-train which led to London, when the quiet of the night was suddenly shattered by the roar of a gun. Something infinitely more painful than all the thorns which had recently pierced him smote the fleshy part of his left leg. It seemed to be red-hot, and its effect on Dudley was almost miraculous. A moment before he had been slouching slowly along, a beaten and jaded man. He now appeared to become electrified. With one sharp yell he lowered the amateur record for the standing broad jump, and then, starting smartly off the mark, proceeded to try to beat the best professional time for the hundred-yard dash.

The telephone at the side of Dudley's bed had been ringing for some time before its noise woke him. Returning to his rooms in Jermyn Street shortly before seven a.m., he had quelled his great hunger with breakfast and then slipped with a groan between the sheets. It was now, he saw from a glance at his watch, nearly five in the afternoon.

'Hello?' he croaked.

'Dudley?'

It was a voice which twenty-four hours ago would have sent sharp thrills down the young man's spine. Twenty-four hours ago, if he had heard this voice on his telephone, he would have squealed with rapture. Hearing it now, he merely frowned. The heart beneath that rose-pink pyjama jacket was dead.

'Yes?' he said, coldly.

'Oh, Dudley,' purred Miss Wickham, 'are you all right?'

'As far,' replied Mr Finch, frigidly, 'as a bloke can be said to be all right whose hair has turned white to the roots and who has been starved and chucked out of windows into bushes with six-inch thorns, and chivvied and snootered and shot in the fleshy part of the leg—'

An exclamation of concern broke in upon his eloquence.

'Oh, Dudley, he didn't hit you?'

'He did hit me.'

'But he promised that he wouldn't aim at you.'

'Well, next time he goes shooting visitors, tell him to aim as carefully as he can. Then they may have a sporting chance.'

'Is there anything I can do?'

'Outside of bringing me the blighter's head on a charger, nothing, thanks.'

'He insisted on letting off the gun. That was the condition I said he had made. You remember?'

'I remember. The trifling condition I wasn't to worry about.'

'It was to make the thing seem all right to mother.'

'I hope your mother was pleased,' said Dudley, politely.

'Dudley, I do wish there was something I could do for you. I'd like to come up and nurse you. But I'm in disgrace about the car, and I'm not allowed to come to London just yet. I'm 'phoning from the Wickham Arms. I believe I shall be able to get up, though, by Saturday week. Shall I come then?'

'Do,' said Dudley, cordially.

'That's splendid! It's the seventeenth. All right, I'll try to get to London latish in the morning. Where shall we meet?'

'We shan't meet,' said Dudley. 'At lunch-time on the seventeenth I shall be tooling off to Australia. Good-bye!'

He hung up the receiver and crawled back into bed, thinking imperially.

'Right ho,' said Algy Crufts. 'Then I shall go alone.'

'Right ho,' said Ambrose Wiffin. 'Go alone.'

'Right ho,' said Algy Crufts. 'I will.'

'Right ho,' said Ambrose Wiffin. 'Do.'

'Right ho, then,' said Algy Crufts.

'Right ho,' said Ambrose Wiffin.

'Right ho,' said Algy Crufts.

Few things (said Mr Mulliner) are more painful than an altercation between two boyhood friends. Nevertheless, when these occur, the conscientious narrator must record them.

It is also, no doubt, the duty of such a narrator to be impartial. In the present instance, however, it would be impossible to avoid bias. To realize that Algy Crufts was perfectly justified in taking an even stronger tone, one has only to learn the facts. It was the season of the year when there comes upon all right-thinking young men the urge to go off to Monte Carlo: and the plan had been that he and Ambrose should catch the ten o'clock boat-train on the morning of the sixteenth of February. All the arrangements had been made – the tickets bought; the trunks packed; the 'One Hundred Systems of Winning at Roulette' studied from end to end: and here was Ambrose, on the afternoon of February the fourteenth, calmly saying that he proposed to remain in London for another fortnight.

Algy Crufts eyed him narrowly. Ambrose Wiffin was always a nattily-dressed young man, but to-day there had crept into his outer crust a sort of sinister effulgence which could have but one meaning. It shouted from his white carnation: it shrieked from his trouser-crease: and Algy read it in a flash.

'You're messing about after some beastly female,' he said.

Ambrose Wiffin reddened and brushed his top hat the wrong way.

'And I know who it is. It's that Wickham girl.'

Ambrose reddened again, and brushed his top hat once more – this time the right way, restoring the
status quo
.

'Well,' he said, 'you introduced me to her.'

'I know I did. And, if you recollect, I drew you aside immediately afterwards and warned you to watch your step.'

'If you have anything to say against Miss Wickham. . .'

'I haven't anything to say against her. She's one of my best pals. I've known young Bobbie Wickham since she was a kid in arms, and I'm what you might call immune where she's concerned. But you can take it from me that every other fellow who comes in contact with Bobbie finds himself sooner or later up to the Adam's apple in some ghastly mess. She lets them down with a dull, sickening thud. Look at Roland Attwater. He went to stay at her place, and he had a snake with him . . .'

'Why?'

'I don't know. He just happened to have a snake with him, and Bobbie put it in a fellow's bed and let everyone think it was Attwater who had done it. He had to leave by the milk-train at three in the morning.'

'Attwater had no business lugging snakes about with him to country houses,' said Ambrose primly. 'One can readily understand how a high-spirited girl would feel tempted . . .'

'And then there was Dudley Finch. She asked him down for the night and forgot to tell her mother he was coming, with the result that he was taken for a Society burglar and got shot in the leg by the butler as he was leaving to catch the milk-train.'

A look such as Sir Galahad might have worn on hearing gossip about Queen Guinevere lent a noble dignity to Ambrose Wiffin's pink young face.

'I don't care,' he said stoutly. 'She's the sweetest girl on earth, and I'm taking her to the Dog Show on Saturday.'

'Eh? What about our Monte Carlo binge?'

'That'll have to be postponed. Not for long. She's up in London, staying with an aunt of sorts, for another couple of weeks. I could come after that.'

'Do you mean to say you have the immortal crust to expect me to hang about for two weeks, waiting for you?'

'I don't see why not.'

'Oh, don't you? Well, I'm jolly well not going to.'

'Right ho. Just as you like.'

'Right ho. Then I shall go alone.'

'Right ho. Go alone.'

'Right ho. I will.'

'Right ho. Do.'

'Right ho, then.'

'Right ho,' said Ambrose Wiffin.

'Right ho,' said Algy Crufts.

At almost exactly the moment when this very distressing scene was taking place at the Drones Club in Dover Street, Roberta Wickham, in the drawing-room of her aunt Marcia's house in Eaton Square, was endeavouring to reason with her mother, and finding the going a bit heavy. Lady Wickham was notoriously a difficult person to reason with. She was a woman who knew her mind.

'But, mother!'

Lady Wickham advanced her forceful chin another inch.

'It's no use arguing, Roberta . . .'

'But, mother! I keep telling you! Jane Falconer has just rung up and wants me to go round and help her choose the cushions for her new flat.'

'And I keep telling you that a promise is a promise. You voluntarily offered after breakfast this morning to take your cousin Wilfred and his little friend, Esmond Bates, to the moving-pictures to-day, and you cannot disappoint them now.'

'But if Jane's left to herself she'll choose the most awful things.'

'I cannot help that.'

'She's relying on me. She said so. And I swore I'd go.'

'I cannot help that.'

'I'd forgotten all about Wilfred.'

'I cannot help that. You should not have forgotten. You must ring your friend up and tell her that you are unable to see her this afternoon. I think you ought to be glad of the chance of giving pleasure to these two boys. One ought not always to be thinking of oneself. One ought to try to bring a little sunshine into the lives of others. I will go and tell Wilfred you are waiting for him.'

Left alone, Roberta wandered morosely to the window and stood looking down into the Square. From this vantage-point she was able to observe a small boy in an Eton suit sedulously hopping from the pavement to the bottom step of the house and back again. This was Esmond Bates, next door's son and heir, and the effect the sight of him had on Bobbie was to drive her from the window and send her slumping onto the sofa, where for a space she sat, gazing before her and disliking life. It may not seem to everybody the summit of human pleasure to go about London choosing cushions, but Bobbie had set her heart on it: and the iron was entering deeply into her soul when the door opened and the butler appeared.

'Mr Wiffin,' announced the butler. And Ambrose walked in, glowing with that holy reverential emotion which always surged over him at the sight of Bobbie.

Usually, there was blended with this a certain diffidence, unavoidable in one visiting the shrine of a goddess: but to-day the girl seemed so unaffectedly glad to see him that diffidence vanished. He was amazed to note how glad she was to see him. She had bounded from the sofa on his entry, and now was looking at him with shining eyes like a shipwrecked mariner who sights a sail.

'Oh, Ambrose!' said Bobbie. 'I'm so glad you came.'

Ambrose thrilled from his quiet but effective sock-clocks to his Stacombed hair. How wise, he felt, he had been to spend that long hour perfecting the minutest details of his toilet. As a glance in the mirror on the landing had just assured him, his hat was right, his coat was right, his trousers were right, his shoes were right, his buttonhole was right, and his tie was right. He was one hundred per cent, and girls appreciate such things.

'Just thought I'd look in,' he said, speaking in the guttural tones which agitated vocal cords always forced upon him when addressing the queen of her species, 'and see if you were doing anything this afternoon. If,' he added, 'you see what I mean.'

'I'm taking my cousin Wilfred and a little friend of his to the movies. Would you like to come?'

'I say! Thanks awfully! May I?'

'Yes do.'

'I say! Thanks awfully!' He gazed at her with worshipping admiration. 'But I say, how frightfully kind of you to mess up an afternoon taking a couple of kids to the movies. Awfully kind. I mean kind. I mean I call it dashed kind of you.'

'Oh, well!' said Bobbie modestly. 'I feel I ought to be glad of the chance of giving pleasure to these two boys. One ought not always to be thinking of oneself. One ought to try to bring a little sunshine into the lives of others.'

'You're an angel!'

'No, no.'

'An absolute angel,' insisted Ambrose, quivering fervently. 'Doing a thing like this is . . . well, absolutely angelic. If you follow me. I wish Algy Crufts had been here to see it.'

'Why Algy?'

'Because he was saying some very unpleasant things about you this afternoon. Most unpleasant things.'

'What did he say?'

'He said . . .' Ambrose winced. The vile words were choking him. 'He said you let people down.'

'Did he! Did he, forsooth! I'll have to have a word with young Algernon P. Crufts. He's getting above himself. He seems to forget,' said Bobbie, a dreamy look coming into her beautiful eyes, 'that we live next to each other in the country and that I know which his room is. What young Algy wants is a frog in his bed.'

'Two frogs,' amended Ambrose.

'Two frogs,' agreed Bobbie.

The door opened and there appeared on the mat a small boy. He wore an Eton suit, spectacles, and, low down over his prominent ears, a bowler hat: and Ambrose thought he had seldom seen anything fouler. He would have looked askance at Royalty itself, had Royalty interrupted a
tête-à-tête
with Miss Wickham.

'I'm ready,' said the boy.

'This is aunt Marcia's son Wilfred,' said Bobbie.

'Oh?' said Ambrose coldly.

Like so many young men, Ambrose Wiffin was accustomed to regard small boys with a slightly jaundiced eye. It was his simple creed that they wanted their heads smacked. When not having their heads smacked, they should be out of the picture altogether. He stared disparagingly at this specimen. A half-formed resolve to love him for Bobbie's sake perished at birth. Only the thought that Bobbie would be of the company enabled him to endure the prospect of being seen in public with this outstanding piece of cheese.

'Let's go,' said the boy.

'All right,' said Bobbie. 'I'm ready.'

'We'll find Old Stinker on the steps,' the boy assured her, as one promising a deserving person some delightful treat.

Old Stinker, discovered as predicted, seemed to Ambrose just the sort of boy who would be a friend of Bobbie's cousin Wilfred. He was goggle-eyed and freckled and also, as it was speedily to appear, an officious little devil who needed six of the best with a fives-bat.

'The cab's waiting,' said Old Stinker.

'How clever of you to have found a cab, Esmond,' said Bobbie indulgently.

'I didn't find it. It's his cab. I told it to wait.'