The
last time he had been in this room, you see, the set-up had been a bit
embarrassing. He had been bending over a chair, while the Rev. Aubrey Upjohn,
strongly posted in his rear, stood measuring the distance with half-closed
eyes, preparatory to bringing the old malacca down on his upturned trousers
seat. And memories like this bring with them a touch of sadness.
Outside
the French window the sun was shining, and it seemed to Freddie that what was
needed to dissipate the feeling of depression from which he had begun to suffer
was a stroll in the garden with a cigarette. He sauntered out, accordingly, and
had paced the length of the grounds and was gazing idly over the fence at the
end of them, when he perceived that beyond this fence a certain liveliness was
in progress.
He was
looking into a small garden, at the back of which was a house. And at an upper
window of this house was a girl. She was waving her arms at him.
It is
never easy to convey every shade of your meaning by waving your arms at a
distance of forty yards, and Freddie not unnaturally missed quite a good deal
of the gist. Actually, what the girl was trying to tell him was that she had
recently met at the bandstand on the pier a man called George Perkins, employed
in a London firm of bookmakers doing business under the trade name of Joe
Sprockett; that a mutual fondness for the Overture to
Zampa
had drawn
them together; that she had become deeply enamoured of him; that her tender
sentiments had been fully reciprocated; that her father, who belonged to a
religious sect which disapproved of bookmakers, had refused to sanction the
match or even to be introduced to the above Perkins; that he— her father—had
intercepted a note from the devout lover, arranging for a meeting at the latter’s
boarding-house (10, Marina Crescent) and a quick wedding at the local registrar’s;
and that he —she was still alluding to her father—had now locked her in her
room until, in his phrase, she should come to her senses. And what she wanted
Freddie to do was let her out. Because good old George was waiting at 10,
Marina Crescent with the licence, and if she could only link up with him they
could put the thing through promptly.
Freddie,
as I say, did not get quite all of this, but he got enough of it to show him
that here was a damsel in distress, and he was stirred to his foundations. He
had not thought that this sort of thing happened outside the thrillers, and
even there he had supposed it to be confined to moated castles. And this wasn’t
a moated castle by any means. It was a two-story desirable residence with a
slate roof, standing in park-like grounds extending to upwards of a quarter of
an acre. It looked the sort of place that might belong to a retired sea captain
or possibly a drysalter.
Full of
the old knight-errant spirit, for he has always been a pushover for damsels in
distress, he leaped the fence with sparkling eyes. And it was only when he was
standing beneath the window that he recognized in the girl who was goggling at
him through the glass like some rare fish in an aquarium his old acquaintance,
the substantial blonde.
The
sight cooled him off considerably. He is rather a superstitious sort of chap,
and he had begun to feel that this billowy curver wasn’t lucky for him. He
remembered now that a gipsy had once warned him to beware of a fair woman, and
for a moment it was touch and go whether he wouldn’t turn away and ignore the
whole unpleasant affair. However, the old knight-errant spirit was doing its
stuff, and he decided to carry on as planned. Gathering from a quick twist of
her eyebrows that the key was in the outside of the door, he nipped in through
the sitting-room window, raced upstairs and did the needful. And a moment later
she was emerging like a cork out of a bottle and shooting down the stairs. She
whizzed into the sitting-room and whizzed through the window, and he whizzed
after her. And the first thing he saw as he came skimming over the sill was her
galloping round the lawn, closely attended by the whiskered bloke who had
scooped her out of the car in Marina Crescent. He had a three-pronged fork in
his possession and was whacking at her with the handle, getting a bull’s-eye at
about every second shot.
It came
as a great surprise to Freddie, for he had distinctly understood from the way
the girl had twiddled her fingers that her father was at the croquet club, and
for a moment he paused, uncertain what to do.
He
decided to withdraw. No chivalrous man likes to see a woman in receipt of a
series of juicy ones with a fork handle, but the thing seemed to him one of
those purely family disputes which can only be threshed out between father and
daughter. He had started to edge away, accordingly, when the whiskered bloke
observed him and came charging in his direction, shouting the old drysalters’
battle cry. One can follow his train of thought, of course. He supposed Freddie
to be George Perkins, the lovelorn bookie, and wished to see the colour of his
insides. With a good deal of emotion, Freddie saw that he was now holding the
fork by the handle.
Exactly
what the harvest would have been, had nothing occurred to interfere with the
old gentleman’s plans, it is hard to say. But by great good fortune he tripped
over a flower-pot while he was still out of jabbing distance and came an
impressive purler. And before he could get right side up again, Freddie had
seized the girl, hurled her over the fence, leaped the fence himself and
started lugging her across the grounds of St. Asaph’s to his car, which he had
left at the front door.
The
going had been so good, and the substantial blonde was in such indifferent
condition, that even when they were in the car and bowling off little came
through in the way of conversation. The substantial blonde, having gasped out a
request that he drive her to 10, Marina Crescent, lay back panting, and was
still panting when they reached journey’s end. He decanted her and drove off.
And it was as he drove off that he became aware of something missing. Something
he should have had on his person was not on his person.
He
mused.
His
cigarette case?
No, he
had his cigarette case.
His
hat?
No, he
had his hat.
His
small change?…
And
then he remembered. Bingo’s baby. He had left it chewing a bit of indiarubber
in the Rev. Aubrey Upjohn’s study.
Well,
with his nervous system still all churned up by his recent experiences, an
interview with his old preceptor was not a thing to which he looked forward
with anything in the nature of ecstasy, but he’s a pretty clear-thinking chap,
and he realized that you can’t go strewing babies all over the place and just
leave them. So he went back to St. Asaph’s and trotted round to the study
window. And there inside was the Rev. Aubrey, pacing the floor in a manner
which the most vapid and irreflective observer would have recognized as
distraught.
I
suppose practically the last thing an unmarried schoolmaster wants to find in his
sanctum is an unexplained baby, apparently come for an extended visit; and the
Rev. Aubrey Upjohn, on entering the study shortly after Freddie had left it and
noting contents, had sustained a shock of no slight order. He viewed the
situation with frank concern.
And he
was turning to pace the floor again, when he got another shock. He had hoped to
be alone, to think this thing over from every angle, and there was a young man
watching him from the window. On this young man’s face there was what seemed to
him a sneering grin. It was really an ingratiating smile, of course, but you
couldn’t expect a man in the Rev. Aubrey’s frame of mind to know that.
“Oh,
hullo,” said Freddie. “You remember me, don’t you?”
“No, I
do not remember you,” cried the Rev. Aubrey. “Go away.”
Freddie
broadened the ingratiating smile an inch or two.
“Former
pupil. Name of Widgeon.”
The
Rev. Aubrey passed a weary hand over his brow. One can understand how he must
have felt. First this frightful blow, I mean to say, and on top of that the
re-entry into his life of a chap he hoped he’d seen the last of years and years
ago.
“Yes,”
he said, in a low, toneless voice. “Yes, I remember you. Widgeon.”
“F. F.”
“F., as
you say, F. What do you want?”
“I came
back for my baby,” said Freddie, like an apologetic plumber.
The
Rev. Aubrey started.
“Is
this your baby?”
“Well,
technically, no. On loan, merely. Some time ago, my pal Bingo Little married
Rosie M. Banks, the well-known female novelist. This is what you might call the
upshot.”
The
Rev. Aubrey seemed to be struggling with some powerful emotion.
“Then
it was you who left this baby in my study?”
“Yes.
You see—’
“Ha!”
said the Rev. Aubrey, and went off with a pop, as if suffering from spontaneous
combustion.
Freddie
tells me that few things have impressed him more than the address to which he
now listened. He didn’t like it, but it extorted a grudging admiration. Here
was this man, he meant to say, unable as a clerk in Holy Orders to use any of
the words which would have been at the disposal of a layman, and yet by sheer
force of character rising triumphantly over the handicap. Without saying a
thing that couldn’t have been said in the strictest drawing-room, the Rev.
Aubrey Upjohn contrived to produce in Freddie the illusion that he had had a
falling out with the bucko mate of a tramp steamer. And every word he uttered
made it more difficult to work the conversation round to the subject of
half-holidays.
Long
before he had reached his “thirdly,” Freddie was feeling as if he had been
chewed up by powerful machinery, and when he was at length permitted to back
out, he felt that he had had a merciful escape. For quite a while it had seemed
more than likely that he was going to be requested to bend over that chair
again. And such was the Rev. Aubrey’s magnetic personality that he would have
done it, he tells me, like a shot.
Much
shaken, he drove back to the Bingo residence, and the first thing he saw on
arriving there was Bingo standing on the steps, looking bereaved to the gills.
“Freddie,”
yipped Bingo, “have you seen Algernon?”
Freddie’s
mind was not at its clearest.
“No,”
he said. “I don’t think I’ve run across him. Algernon who? Pal of yours? Nice
chap?”
Bingo
hopped like the high hills.
“My
baby, you ass.”
“Oh,
the good old baby? Yes, I’ve got him.”
“Six
hundred and fifty-seven curses!” said Bingo. “What the devil did you want to go
dashing off with him for? Do you realize we’ve been hunting for him all the
morning?”
“You
wanted him for something special?”
“I was
just going to notify the police and have dragnets spread.” Freddie could see
that an apology was in order.
“I’m
sorry,” he said. “Still, all’s well that ends well. Here he is. Oh no, he isn’t,”
he added, having made a quick inspection of the interior of the car. “I say,
this is most unfortunate. I seem
to
have left him again.”
“Left
him?”
“What
with all the talk that was going on, he slipped my mind. But I can give you his
address. Care of the Rev. Aubrey Upjohn, St. Asaph’s, Mafeking Road,
Bramley-on-Sea. All you have to do is step round at your leisure and collect
him. I say, is lunch ready?”
“Lunch?”
Bingo laughed a hideous, mirthless laugh. At least, that’s what Freddie thinks
it was. It sounded like a bursting tire. “A fat lot of lunch you’re going to
get. The cook’s got hysterics, the kitchen-maid’s got hysterics, and so have
the parlourmaid and the housemaid. Rosie started having hysterics as early as
eleven-thirty, and is now in bed with an ice pack. When she finds out about
this, I wouldn’t be in your shoes for a million quid. Two million,” added
Bingo. “Or, rather, three.”
This
was an aspect of the matter which had not occurred to Freddie. He saw that
there was a good deal in it.
“Do you
know, Bingo,” he said, “I believe I ought to be getting back to London to-day.”
“I
would.”
“Several
things I’ve got to do there, several most important things. I dare say, if I
whipped back to town, you could send my luggage after me?”
“A
pleasure.”
“Thanks,”
said Freddie. “You won’t forget the address, will you? St. Asaph’s, Mafeking
Road. Mention my name, and say you’ve come for the baby I inadvertently left in
the study. And now, I think, I ought to be getting round to see Mavis. She’ll
be wondering what has become of me.”
He
tooled off, and a few minutes later was entering the lobby of the Hotel Magnifique.
The first thing he saw was Mavis and her father standing by a potted palm.
“Hullo,
hullo,” he said, toddling up.
“Ah,
Frederick,” said old Bodsham.
I don’t
know if you remember, when I was telling you about that time in New York, my
mentioning that at a rather sticky point in the proceedings Freddie had noticed
that old Bodsham was looking like a codfish with something on its mind. The
same conditions prevailed now.