When
Bingo receives his envelope from
Wee Tots
on the first of the month, it
is too often his practice, in defiance of Mrs Bingo’s expressed wishes, to
place its contents on the nose of some horse of whose speed and resolution he
has heard good reports, and such horses have a nasty habit of pausing half-way
down the stretch to pick daisies. And this had happened now. A mistaken
confidence in
Sarsaparilla
for the three o’clock at Ally Pally had not
only cleaned him out but had left him owing his bookie ten quid. This tenner
would have to be coughed up in the course of the next few days, and tenners in
this iron age are hard to come by.
He had
explored every avenue. He had bought a ticket for the club Darts sweep with his
last ten bob, but had drawn a blank. He had tried to touch P. P. Purkiss for an
advance of salary, but P. P. Purkiss had said that it was foreign to the policy
of
Wee Tots
to brass up in advance. It really began to look as if he
would be forced to the last awful extreme of biting Mrs Bingo’s ear, which
would mean that he might hear the last of it somewhere round about the
afternoon of their golden wedding day, but scarcely before then.
It was
a pretty poignant position of affairs, and what made Bingo so frightfully sick
about it all was that if he had been the merest fraction of a second slippier
when the hat for the Darts sweep was circulating, he would have been on velvet,
for he would have secured that sweep’s most glittering prize. He had started to
reach out for a ticket, and just as his fingers were about to close on it Oofy
Prosser had reached out ahead of him and scooped it in. And that ticket, when
opened had been found to contain the name of Horace Davenport.
Horace
Davenport is a bird, who, while lacking many of the other qualities which go to
make a superman, has always thrown a beautiful dart. Both at school and at the
University his skill had been a byword among the sporting set, and the passage
of the years had in no way diminished his accuracy. His eye was not dimmed nor
his natural force abated, and anyone drawing his name in the sweep was entitled
to regard the contents of the kitty as money in the bank. And this singular bit
of goose, as I say, had fallen to the lot of Oofy Prosser, a bloke already
stinking with the stuff. That was Oofy at the next table to us at lunch, the
stout, pimpled chap. You probably noticed how rich he looked. That a fellow as
oofy as Oofy should get the money seemed to Bingo a crime.
But the
last thing he had anticipated was that the same reflection should have
occurred to Oofy. Yet so it proved. He was in the club the morning before the
Darts contest, and Oofy came up to him, looking, it seemed to Bingo, pensive.
Though it is always hard to read the play of expression on Oofy’s face, because
of the pimples.
“What
ho, Bingo,” said Oofy.
“What
ho, Oofy,” said Bingo.
“I
wonder, Bingo,” said Oofy, perking himself beside him and stroking the third
pimple from the left in a meditative sort of way, “if you have ever reflected
how weird life is.”
Bingo
agreed that life was pretty weird in spots, and Oofy said that what struck him
about life-and he was a man who had gone into the thing—was that there was
mismanagement somewhere.
“Gross
mismanagement,” said Oofy. “Well, as an instance of what I mean, take this
Darts sweep. Think of all the eager, hard-up waifs who would have given their
left eyeball to draw Horace Davenport. And who gets him? I do. And what ensues?
Horace is bound to win, so I spear thirty-three pound ten. What’s the use of
thirty-three pound ten to me? Do you know what my annual income is? No, I won’t
tell you, it would make you sick. It isn’t right, Bingo,” said Oofy warmly. “All
wrong, Bingo. I shall give this ticket away. Would you like it, Bingo?”
Bingo,
leaping in the air like a rising trout, said he would, and Oofy seemed to
ponder. Then he said that giving Bingo the ticket might destroy Bingo’s self-respect,
and when Bingo urged very strongly that in his opinion the risk ought to be
taken he pondered again.
“No,”
he said at length, “I should hate to have it on my mind that I had sapped a
friend’s self-respect. I will sell you this ticket, Bingo, for the nominal
price of a flyer.”
A sharp
cry of agony escaped Bingo. He had sufficient capital for the club luncheon at
four-and-sixpence, but no more. Then an idea struck him.
“Will
you hold it open for a couple of hours?”
“Certain,”
said Oofy. “I shall be here till a quarter past one. Slip me the money then,
and the ticket is yours.”
The
idea that had struck Bingo was this. In his bedroom at home there was a set of
diamond cuff links, a present from Mrs Bingo on his last birthday, worth, he
estimated, five pounds of any pawnbroker’s money. What simpler than to secure
these, thrust them up the spout, snaffle the Horace Davenport ticket, get his
hooks on the thirty-three pounds ten, rush back to the pawnbroker’s, de-spout
the links and return to Position One? It would afford a masterly solution of
the whole difficulty.
The
Bingo residence, being one of those houses off Wimbledon Common, takes a bit of
getting to, but he made good time there and sneaking in unobserved was able to
present himself at the club at ten minutes past one. Oofy was still there. The
five changed hands. And Bingo, who had stuck out for eight pounds ten at the
pawnbroker’s so as to have a bit of spending money, went off to the Savoy grill
to revel. There are moments in a man’s life when the club luncheon at
four-and-sixpence is not enough.
And he
had just got back to the office after the repast and was about to settle down
to the composition of a thoughtful editorial on What Tiny Hands Can Do For
Nannie, wishing that his own tiny hands could take her by the scruff of the
neck and heave her out on her left ear, when Mrs Bingo rang up to say that, her
mother having had one of her spells at her South Kensington abode, she was
buzzing along there and would not be able to get home to-night.
Bingo
said he would miss her sorely, and Mrs Bingo said she knew he would, and Bingo
was preparing to toodle-oo and ring off, when Mrs Bingo uttered a sudden yip.
“Oh,
Bingo, I knew there was something else. All this excitement about Mother put
it out of my head. Your diamond links have been stolen!”
It was
a pure illusion, of course, but Bingo tells me that as he heard these words it
seemed to him that P. P. Purkiss, who was visible through the doorway of the
inner office, suddenly started doing an Ouled Nail Stomach dance. His heart
leaped sharply and became entangled with his tonsils. It was a matter of some
moments before he was able to disengage it and reply.
“My
links? Stolen? Absurd!”
“Well,
Nannie says she was tidying your room just now and couldn’t find them anywhere.”
Bingo
was himself again.
“Nannie
Byles,” he said sternly, “is temperamentally incapable of finding a brass drum
in a telephone booth. You are familiar with my views on that gibbering old
fathead. Don’t listen to a word she says.”
“Then you
wouldn’t advise sending for the police?”
“Certainly
not. The police are busy men. It is not fair to waste their time.”
“Nannie
says they would go round and make enquiries at all the pawnshops.”
“Exactly.
And while they were doing it, what would happen? About fifty murders would be
taking place and not a rozzer on duty to attend to them. One wishes sometimes
that these Nannies had the rudiments of a civic conscience. Don’t you worry
about those links. I can tell you just where they are. They are… no, I’ve
forgotten. But it’ll come back. Well, pip-pip, light of my life,” said Bingo,
and rang off.
His
first act on replacing the receiver was, you will scarcely be surprised to
learn, to grab his hat and nip round to the Drones for a quick one; for despite
the intrepid front he had put up the news that the A.W.O.L.ness of those links
had been discovered had shaken him to his foundations, and he was feeling a
little like some Eliza who, crossing the ice, heard the baying of the pursuing
bloodhounds.
But
with the first sip of the restorative Reason returned to its throne, assuring
him that there was absolutely no cause for alarm. The Darts tourney, Reason
pointed out, was to take place to-morrow morning. He had the Horace Davenport
ticket on his person. It followed then as doth the night the day, concluded Reason,
that he would be able to restore the missing trinkets the moment he got home
to-morrow afternoon.
He was
just musing affectionately on Horace Davenport and feeling how fortunate he was
in holding all rights to a dart hurler of his incomparable skill, when his
attention was attracted by a deep sigh in his vicinity, and looking up he saw
Horace approaching. And with a sudden sharp alarm he noted that something
seemed to have gone wrong with the Davenport works. The other’s face was pale
and drawn and the eyes behind their tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses were like
those of a dead fish.
“Stap
my vitals, Horace,” he cried, deeply concerned, for naturally what he would
have liked to see on the eve of the Darts tournament was a rosy-cheeked,
bright-eyed Horace Davenport, full of pep, ginger and the will to win. “You
look a bit down among the wines and spirits. What’s the matter?”
“Well,
I’ll tell you,” said Horace Davenport. “You know Valerie Twistleton.”
“Yes.”
“You
know I’m engaged to her.”
“Yes.”
“Well,
that is where you make your ruddy error,” said Horace Davenport. “I’m not. We
have parted brass rags.”
“Why on
earth?”
“Well,
if you ask me, I think she loves another.”
“What
rot!”
“I don’t
agree with you. We quarrelled about a mere trifle, and I maintain that no girl
would have handed a man his hat for a trifle as mere as that, unless she had
already decided to hitch on elsewhere and was looking out for a chance of
giving him the gate.”
Bingo’s
tender heart was touched, of course, but he could not forget Horace’s great
mission.
“Too
bad,” he said. “But you mustn’t brood on it, old man, or you’ll go putting
yourself off your stroke.”
“My
stroke?”
“For
the Darts binge to—morrow.”
“Oh,
that? I shall not be competing,” said Horace dully. “I’m going to scratch.”
Bingo
uttered a quick howl like that of a Labrador timber wolf which has stubbed its
toe on a jagged rock.
“Sker-ratch?”
“Exactly
what Oofy Prosser said when I told him, in the same agitated voice. But I’m
dashed if I can see why you’re all so surprised,” said Horace. “Is it likely,
after what has happened, that I would be in any mood for bunging darts?”
A
blinding light had flashed upon Bingo. I doubt if there are half-a-dozen
fellows in the club, or ten at the outside, more capable than he of detecting
funny business when such is afoot. He remembered now, what he ought to have
remembered before, that Oofy, despite his colossal wealth, had always been a
man who would walk ten miles in tight shoes to pick up even the meanest sum
that was lying around loose.
At the
thought of how the subtle schemer had chiselled him out of that flyer his soul
blazed in revolt, and it was with an eloquence of which he had not supposed
himself capable that he now began to plead with Horace Davenport to revise his
intention of scratching for the Darts tournament. And so moving were the words
in which he pictured the ruin which must befall him, should the other remove
his name from the list of competitors, that Horace’s better self awakened.
“This
opens up a new line of thought,” said Horace. “I didn’t know Oofy had sold you
that ticket. Well, to oblige you, Bingo, I will go through the hollow formality
of entering the arena. But build no hopes on that. You can’t aim darts when
your heart is broken. My eyes will be so dim with unshed tears that I doubt if
I’ll be able to get a single double.”
As if
the word “double” had touched a chord in his mind, he moved off in the
direction of the bar, and Bingo, clutching his head in both hands, started to
think more tensely than he had ever thought in his puff.
There
is no gainsaying the truth of Horace’s parting words. If there is one thing
calculated to take the edge off a fellow’s form in an athletic contest, it is
unrequited love. He recalled the time in his own bachelor days when a hopeless
yearning for a girl whose name he had forgotten had ruined his putting touch
for several weeks. What was needed here first and foremost, therefore, was some
scheme for reconciling these two sundered hearts. The re-insertion of the love
light in Valerie Twistleton’s eyes would put Horace Davenport right back in
mid-season form and the ticket bearing his name would once more be worth
thirty-three quid of the best and brightest.
And it
ought not, he felt, to be so dashed difficult to get that love light resuming
work at the old stand. What Horace had said about Valerie having given him the
air because she loved another he regarded as the purest apple-sauce. Honoured
from time to time with the girl’s confidence, he knew that she looked on the
Darts wizard as a king among men. Obviously what had occurred was what is
technically known as a lovers’
tiff,
and this he was convinced could be
set right by a few well-chosen words from a polished man of the world.