Luck of the Bodkins (17 page)

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 char
nel 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.

It was not merely the fact that his heart was broken that caused Ambrose Tennyson to look like this. Other circumstances had contributed to his moroseness. It irked him to be used by Mr Llewellyn as a messenger boy: he resented having been compelled for even a few moments to breathe air tainted by the presence of his brother Reginald: and he thought the idea of Monty acting on the films the most idiotic he had ever heard.

His manner, accordingly, as he delivered his message, was curt, even abrupt. He came to the point without preamble, wishing to get the thing over and done with, so that he might return to the promenade deck and resume his day-dreams about taking a running jump over the vessel's side - a policy which he considered, and perhaps rightly, would make Miss Blossom feel pretty silly.

'You know Llewellyn?' he said.

Monty admitted to knowing Mr Llewellyn, though only slightly. Just, he explained, in the way of asking him to spell things, if Ambrose knew what he meant. The impression he conveyed was that if he happened not to have his pocket dictionary handy, he used Ivor Llewellyn.

'He wants you to go into the pictures,' said Ambrose scowling heavily.

A slight confusion occurred here. Monty interpreted the announcement as an invitation from the president of the Superba-Llewellyn to accompany him to some motion-picture performance which was to be held on board the ship, and he spoke for a while in appreciative vein of the marvels of modern ocean travel - all these liners, he meant to say, with their ballrooms and swimming-baths and cinema palaces and what not.

Lavish, said Monty, not mincing his words, absolutely lavish. He predicted a not distant future when vessels plying between Southampton and New York would offer their patrons
a
polo field,
a
full-size golf course and a few hundred acres of rough shooting.

This caused Ambrose to grind his teeth
a
little. The panegyric had cut into his valuable time. Every minute spent in this state-room meant a minute when he was not on the promenade deck contemplating suicide.

'Not "to" the pictures,' he said, wishing that when Monty had fallen into the fountain that bump-supper night at Oxford he had not been idiot enough to pull him out.' "Into" the pictures. He wants you to act for him.'

Monty could make nothing of this. He stared, perplexed,

‘
Act?
’

‘
Act.
’

‘What-act?' ‘
Yes, act.'

'You don't mean,' said Monty, clutching at the word which seemed to provide a sort of shadowy clue to what his companion was driving at,
'act!'

Ambrose Tennyson clenched his fists and groaned
a
silent groan. Better balanced men than he had found Monty Bodkin in what might be called his goggling mood a little trying.

'Oh, for heaven's sake! You have the most infernal habit,' he said, 'when anyone says the simplest thing to you, of letting your lower jaw drop and looking like a half-witted sheep staring over a fence. Don't do it. I'm not quite myself just now, and it makes me want to hit you with something. Listen. Ivor Llewellyn, in his capacity of president of the Superba-Llewellyn Motion Picture Corporation of Llewellyn City, Southern California, produces motion pictures. In order to produce these motion pictures he requires actors to act in them. He wants to know if you will be one of those actors.'

Monty brightened. He had seen daylight.

'He wants me to act?'

‘
That's right - act. He sent me to a?k if you would accept
a
contract. What shall I tell him?'
‘I
see. Oh, ah, yes. Yes,' said Monty coyly.
‘
H'm. Ha.'

'And what the devil, precisely,
’
inquired Ambrose, 'does
that
mean?'

He was saying to himself that he must be strong, that he must have self-control and ride himself on the curb. Juries, he knew, looked askance at men who strangled even the half-witted in their beds.

Monty's coyness was now positively painful to the eye. 'But I've never acted in my life. Except once at my old kindergarten.'

'Well, do you propose to begin now? Or not? For goodness sake let me have something definite. He is waiting for me to report.'

'I don't see how
‘I
can.'

‘
Right. That's all I wanted to know.'

'I can't understand why he wants me to.'

'Nor can I. B
ut apparently he does. Well, I’ll
go and tell him you thank him for the offer but have other views.'

'Yes. I like that. Other views. That's good.'

'Right.'

The door slammed. Monty, finding himself alone, left his bed without delay and, hurrying to the mirror, stood peering into it with a questioning, what-is-it-master-likes-so-much expression on his face. He was consumed with curiosity as to what there could be about his personal appearance that had caused Ivor Llewellyn, presumably a hard man to please in the matter of faces, to single him out from the crowd and make him so extraordinarily flattering an offer.

He sifted the evidence thoroughly - examining his reflection full face, side face, three-quarter face and over the left shoulder, smiling genially, tenderly, cynically, and bitterly; and finally frowning, first with menace and then with reproach. He also registered surprise, dismay, joy, horror, loathing, and renunciation.

But when the returns were all in, he still had to confess himself baffled. No matter how much he smiled and frowned, he was totally unable to see what Mr Llewellyn had seen. Where the president of the Superba-Llewellyn apparently beheld one of those faces that launch a thousand ships, all he could detect was just the same old regulation, workaday set of features which he had been carrying around the West End of London for years - without, it is true, exciting actual hostility or mob violence, but certainly not knocking the public in any sense cold.

He had given the thing up as one of those insoluble mysteries and was wondering whether, now that he was out of bed, he might not as well stay out and get dressed, when there was a loud cry without, a forceful bang upon the door, and Miss Lotus Blossom came sailing over the threshold in the confident manner of one on whom the freedom of some city is about to be bestowed.

Monty's absence from the life of the ship on the preceding day had not passed unnoticed by Lottie Blossom, and she had decided that as soon as she was up and about this morning it would be only neighbourly if she called and made inquiries. By this she meant that she would go and hammer on his door and shout 'Bring out your dead!' through the keyhole. She was
a
kind-hearted girl.

That she had not done so earlier was due to the fact that she was a leisurely riser when making an ocean voyage. At Hollywood she could, if her art demanded it, be on the set made up at
6
am
, but on board ship she preferred to take her breakfast in bed and linger over it. It was only now, accordingly, that she found herself able to pay the proposed visit

Having bathed, she fed her alligator - who, if she could not get a human finger, liked the yolk of a hard-boiled egg of a morning - and dressed herself in a white and green sports suit topped off with a leopard-skin cape and a coal-heaver hat in scarlet felt. Then she tied a pink ribbon round the alligator's neck, tucked it under her arm and set forth on her errand of mercy.

As she came out of her state-room Ambrose came out of Monty's.

‘
Oo, look!' she cried. 'Hello, Ambrose.'

'Good morning,' said the novelist. His voice
was cold and hard and proud an
d aloof. It had shaken him to see her there, but he did not betray his emotion by any weak simperings. He bore himself like a man who has purged all weakness from his soul. 'Good morning,' he said, and stalked off towards Mr Llewellyn's room without another word - about as dignified an exit, he flattered himself, as man had ever made. By speaking thus, and stalking in that manner, he had, he rather fancied,, made it pretty clear to Miss Blossom that there went a man in whose iron bosom regret and remorse had no existence.

As for Lottie, a tender smile played over her face, the smile of a mother who watches her child in a tantrum. She followed him with loving eyes till he had disappeared; then, turning to Monty's door, smote it a hearty buffet, issued her demand for corpses and went in.

The sight of her sent Monty leaping between the sheets again as if he had been shot out of a gun. No nymph surprised while bathing could have been quicker off the mark.

Lottie Blossom did not share his modest confusion.

'Hello, beautiful,' she said. 'Were you doing your daily dozen?'

'No
I
-er-
’

Monty was finding it difficult to play the host. A courteous ease of manner was beyond him. It seemed only too plain that his visitor was planning for the duration of the voyage to treat his state-room as a sort of annex to her own, and the prospect filled him with tremors and alarms. For though, as Albert Peasemarch had pointed out, it was not likely that a pure, sweet English girl would come wandering into his bedchamber, there was always the hideous possibility of such an occurrence. As he watched his guest seat herself with effortless grace on the foot of the bed, the thought of Gertrude was bulking very largely in his mind.

He was also wishing that if Miss Blossom found it necessary to invade his privacy, she would not bring her alligator with her.

Lottie Blossom was all cheerfulness and affability. The sombre mood which had caused her to go 'Oomph, oomph' in this state-room two days before had been a mere thing of the moment. She was now in excellent fettle - as radiant and happy as only a redhaired girl who enjoys emotional quarrelling can be after a thoroughly invigorating turn-up. Life, to be really life for her, had to consist of a series of devastating rows and terrific reconciliations. Anything milder she considered insipid. Lotus Blossom had been born a Murphy of Hoboken, and all the Hoboken Murphys were like that.

'Well, kid,' she said, 'how's tricks?' She placed the alligator lovingly on the coverlet and gazed about her like a returned exile surveying his boyhood home. 'Seems ages since I was last in here. And yet everything in the dear old place comes back to me. How's the Horror on the Bathroom Wall? Still there?'

'Still there,' Monty assured her. She struck a philosophical note.

'Funny to think that if somebody like Sinclair Lewis had written that, he'd have got about a dollar a word for it. Whereas
I
get nothing. Ah, well, that's how it goes.'

Monty, with a silent nod, expressed his agreement. That, his nod said, was how it went.

'I say,' he said, changing the subject and turning to one that was very near his heart. Ms that bally animal safe?'