Lord Uffenham came to life in that sudden way of his, like a male Galatea.
"Got any money?" he asked.
The abrupt question startled Jeff, but he prepared to do his bit. It occurred to him that in the peculiar circumstances he would presumably have to tip Lord Uffenham at the conclusion of his visit. He could only suppose that the other preferred to collect in advance.
"How much do you want?"
"To marry on, I mean."
"Oh?" said Jeff, enlightened. "Well, I'm not rich. Just a few hundred a year, left me by a godfather. And I make a bit by writing."
"What d'yer write?"
"What are usually called thrillers. I shall be starting a new book any day now. Do you read thrillers?"
"Oh, yerss."
"Then you will enjoy this one. It has an absolutely original central idea."
"Is that so?"
"A good many authors of goose-fleshers, you may have noticed, in order to chill the spinal chord, have given their Master Criminal a twisted ear. I am breaking fresh ground and striking an entirely new note by allotting mine two. You see the extraordinary cleverness of this? We shudder at a fiend in human shape, even one of whose aural appendages looks as if it had been chewed by a wild cat. Let him have a couple, covering both p4rt and starboard sides, and our blood turns to ice."
Lord Uffenham seemed only mildly impressed.
"Sounds pretty dashed silly," he said. "Don't suppose there's much money in writing, anyway. Mrs. Cork wrote a book about her adventures in Africa, called A Woman In The Wilds, and I expect it sold about a dozen copies. She can't even give the thing away without exerting the full strength of her personality. I've seen her force copies on visitors, regardless of their age or sex, like a nurse making a child swallow liquorice powder. No, you'll have to find those diamonds."
"I mean to."
"It's an odd thing," said Lord Uffenham. "Just now, turning out some old papers, I came on a diary I'd lost, and there was an entry against April the fourth—the word 'Bank.' I couldn't understand it. That was the way I sometimes used to jot down a reminder of where I'd put those dashed diamonds, when I happened to think of a particularly out-of-the-way place. There was another entry, for instance, which said 'Rover.' That was when I hid 'em at the bottom of the dog's bag of biscuits. But what the devil 'Bank' can have signified, I can't tell you. I would never have dreamed of putting the things in any bank. I don't believe in banks, except for keeping a little small change in. Yet there it was, dated April the fourth, and it was on April the fifth that I had my motor accident."
"Curious."
"Very curious. I can only suppose the note must have referred to something else. Probably my bank manager had asked me to call. No, if you find the things, it'll be in some dashed ingenious place, where no one would ever have thought of looking. But don't you worry. I never forget anything, not permanently. I can remember the exact tone of voice in which a certain gal used to say 'Don't!' as far back as the year '09."
"I suppose girls often used to say 'Don't!' to you in '09?"
"Pretty often. Yerss, fairly frequently. And that brings me back to Anne. She'll say 'Don't!' But pay no attention. Grab her. What yer looking like that for?"
Jeff hastily erased from his features the look of revolted austerity which he had injudiciously allowed to appear there, and substituted for it the smile of good-fellowship
"I was only thinking," he said, putting the suggestion forward with a diffidence which robbed it of offence, "that while the method which you advocate might be admirable—how shall I put it?—well, might be admirable with a certain type of—subject, isn't there the danger in this particular case that it might have unfortunate results? "
"Don't see your point."
"Miss Benedick is so spiritual."
"Nothing of the kind. Healthy, normal girl, with a normal liking for romance."
"That's exactly what I mean. Is there anything really romantic in the course of action which you suggest? I should have said not. I can see such methods as invaluable in helping to win a bar-room scrap, but ... Well, what I really mean is that I should have thought Miss Benedick would have preferred the troubadour to the stevedore type of wooer."
"Troubadour? What d'yer mean?"
"The Troubadours were minstrels of the Middle Ages, who used to get their results—and it was universally admitted that they did get results—by means of the honeyed word rather than the quick smash-and-grab. I confess that I was thinking of relying on the honeyed word."
"You'll be a fool, if you do."
"You don't think that if the word were really honeyed
"No, I don't. I know Anne. Known her ever since she was so high."
"Tell me about her when she was so high."
"Haven't time. Just remembered I've got to give that feller Molloy a telegram. Came half an hour ago. I was on my way to his room, when I stopped in here. Well, you be thinking over what I've said. I'm an older man than you, an older, wiser man, and I know a thing or two. Troubadours, indeed! Of all the dashed nonsense."
And with these withering words, Lord Uffenham heaved himself to his feet and plodded ponderously from the room.
He left behind him a young man unconvinced and still more than a little revolted. Despite his proficiency as a buzzer, Jeff was at heart modest and diffident. He was inclined to idealise the other sex. Anne, in particular, filled him with a deep and worshipping humility. This would not prevent him, should he find himself alone with her, talking easily and well—the love behind the humility would, indeed, stimulate him to new heights of eloquence—but it acted as a definite bar to any idea of behaving towards her with the physical abandon of a greyhound pouncing on an electric hare.
He lit another cigarette, and fell to musing on the apparently wilful eccentricity which had led a girl like her to plight her troth to so outstanding a human gumboil as Lionel Green.
Lord Uffenham, meanwhile, had presented himself at the door of the Molloy apartment, had delivered the belated telegram and departed. Soapy opened it, and uttered an exclamation.
"From Chimp," he said, his eyes widening. "Wants to see me to-morrow. Reply paid, and the address he gives is 'Halsey Buildings, Halsey Court, Mayfair.'"
He passed the communication to his wife, and she, too, read it with widening eyes.
"Then he's still there!"
"Still there."
"He hasn't sold out."
"No."
"I knew all along," said Mrs. Molloy, her teeth corning together with a little click, "that it was oompus-boompus."
CHAPTER XII
The fine weather was still holding up on the following morning, but no ray of sunshine penetrated into the murky interior of Halsey Court when Mr. and Mrs. Molloy entered it. It looked dingier than ever, and the number of people cooking cabbage in the immediate neighbourhood seemed to have increased.
In Chimp Twist's manner, as he received his visitors, there was an impressiveness befitting the sensational nature of the tale he was about to tell.
"Sit down, Dolly. Park the carcass, Soapy, So you both came along. I was only expecting Soapy."
Mr. Molloy's fine face expressed surprise, and Dolly interpreted.
"I was telling Chimp yesterday about you and the Cork dame, sweetie, and he prob'ly got the idea that we were pfft. We got Soapy all wrong, Chimp. He's explained everything. It seems he was just trying to sell her oil stock."
"Oh?" said Mr. Twist. "Is that so?"
He eyed Mr. Molloy with such open admiration for his ready resource that Dolly felt obliged to comment on it.
"You think he was stringing the beads, do you? Well, he wasn't. You tell him, Soapy."
"I sold the Corko a block of Silver River yesterday afternoon," said Mr. Molloy proudly. "She's giving me her cheque to-day."
"For a thousand pounds."
"For a thousand pounds," said Mr. Molloy, rolling the words round his tongue.
Chimp Twist winced. The thought of somebody else, especi
ally somebody he disliked as much as he did Soapy Molloy, securing such a sum affected him like an aching tooth. Only the reflection that he had something on the fire which would make a thousand pounds look like chicken feed enabled him to regain his composure.
"Wei!," he said, dismissing the other's petty triumphs with a wave of the hand and coming to the thing that really mattered, "I guess you two got kind of a surprise yesterday."
"You mean the guy with the hay-coloured hair? Surprise," said Mrs. Molloy feelingly, "is right. When we found him doing a song and dance around the garden, claiming that he was J. Sheringham Adair, you could have knocked the both of us cold with a coupla feathers. Who is the bimbo?"
"Search me. All I know about him," said Chimp, giving a little shiver as that fearful scene of the previous afternoon rose before his mind's eye, "is that he's someone who doesn't like me."
"Can't you get closer than that?" asked Dolly. She seemed to be feeling that this rendered the field of identification too wide.
Chimp shook his head.
"I've been trying to place him, but I'm darned if I can remember where we ran across each other. Still and all, if a bird throws things at you, and then comes charging up the stairs to finish you off, you can pretty well label him as somebody that isn't too fond of you."
Mr. Molloy raised his eyebrows.
"Throws things … What things?"
"Well, I've been having a look at them, and they seem to me like flints of some kind. I tell you, when I saw him coming up those stairs, I was into the closet quicker than forked lightning. And it was on account I was in the closet that I come to hear the story this girl Benedick told him."
"What story?"
"About these diamonds."
"What diamonds?"
"Ah!" said Chimp. "That's just what I'm going to put you wise about. Start listening."
His visitors did so, with the alacrity which is always the result of mentioning diamonds to a certain type of auditor. When he had finished his narrative, Dolly's eyes were shining like stars, and Mr. Molloy's breathing had become so stertorous that he resembled a Senator suffering from a troublesome attack of asthma. The news that they were residing in a sort of Tom Tiddler's Ground or Cave of Ali Baba, where parcels of valuable diamonds might leap to the eye at any moment, had affected both of them profoundly.
"Fancy old Cakebread being a Lord!" said Dolly, breaking an ecstatic silence. "I'll tell you sump'n, Soapy. From now on, I'm going to give that lobster a rush, in a big way. When that memory of his starts hitting mid-season form again, I want to be the little playmate from whom he can conceal nothing."
"Ah," said Mr. Molloy, still having trouble with his bronchial cords.
"And meantime you be hunting around."
"I will."
"The stuff must be somewheres."
"Sure, it must be somewheres."
"And maybe you'll find it."
"You betcher it won't be for want of trying. Diamonds are my dish."
"I've nothing against 'em myself."
"And now," said Mr. Molloy, his old, easy-breathing self once more, "about terms."
Mrs. Molloy seemed perplexed. "Terms?"
"The divvying up," explained Mr. Molloy. "Don't forget, honey, that it's only fair to give Chimp his cut."
"Oh, yay," said Dolly, enlightened. She had overlooked this side-issue. "You mean, he ought to get a little sump'n for putting us on to this?"
"I think so," said Mr. Molloy. "Yes, I certainly think so. Chimp has been of considerable assistance. Of considerable assistance," he repeated: and if in his manner, as he beamed benevolently at his old friend, there was something a little patronising, it is always hard for a man who is doing a kindly act to avoid a certain complacency. "I feel that Chimp should have his share."
"Maybe you're right," agreed Dolly. She seemed to be thinking her husband's attitude a shade quixotic, but was prepared to yield a point. "What ought we to give him? Twenty-five per cent?"
"I would suggest thirty. You've got to take the big, broad view, sugar. Come right down to it, if it hadn't of been for good old Chimpie, we might never have gotten on to this."
"Just as you say, sweetness. Then we pencil Chimp in for thirty per."
"That's how I see it."
"It's a lot of money."
"Quite a good deal."
"Still, he's an old friend."
"A very old friend."
"I've always liked him."
"Me, too. I don't know a man," said Mr. Molloy, again with that slight suspicion of the patronising in his manner, "whom I esteem more highly than I do good old Chimpie."
A sharp, unpleasant, rasping sound broke the pause which followed these eulogies. It was good old Chimpie clearing his throat.
"Jussa minute!" he said. "Juss a minute, juss a minute!"
The atmosphere up to this point had been one of such jolly friendliness and good will that his words struck a discordant note. His two admirers could not conceal it from themselves that his tone had been acid. Furthermore, he was looking like a monkey which observes a couple of other monkeys trying to chisel it out of a banana.
"Something wrong, Chimpie?" enquired Mr. Molloy solicitously.
Mr. Twist's waxed moustache seemed to have been infected by its proprietor's emotion. It had the air of bristling at the ends.
"Yep," he replied briefly. "Your figures."
For one who had openly confessed her affection for this man, Dolly Molloy was not looking very loving. Her delicate brows had come together in a frown.
"Oh, Gawd!" she exclaimed, and it would be idle to pretend that she did not speak peevishly. "Here he is, acting up again! Every time we have one of these business discussions, he always opens his mouth so wide, it's a wonder he don't swallow himself. What's your beef about taking thirty per"
"Yes, Chimpie," said Mr. Molloy, dignified and reproachful. "What's eating you? Thirty per is nice money."
"Not so nice as ninety per."
"Ninety?" cried Mr. Molloy, with a start of pain, as if he had been bitten in the leg by a brother.
"Ni-yun-ty?" echoed Mrs. Molloy. She, too, seemed to have felt a loved one's teeth closing on a lower limb.
Chimp Twist fondled his moustache, as if soothing it and assuring it that all would come right in the future.
"That's what I said. I'm the promoter of this scheme. If it hadn't of been for me, there wouldn't be any scheme. Naturally, I expect you to do the simple, rough work for the customary agent's fee often per cent."
There was a silence.
"This would happen just the day when I've gone and gotten a cracked lip," said Mrs. Molloy, at length. "All the same, I guess I'll risk a slight guffaw."
She did so, and Chimp eyed her bleakly. "So you think it's funny?"
Dolly replied that that was the impression which she had intended to convey, and her husband's quizzical smile showed that he, too, was not blind to the humourous aspect of the proposition.
"You can't say it's not enough to hand us a laugh, Chimpie," he protested. "The point you're missing, if you'll excuse me mentioning it, is that the madam and I are inside the joint and that you're outside, looking in."
"Yes, that's the point you're missing, you poor dumb brick," assented Mrs. Molloy. "It's only purely and simply our kind hearts that makes us slip you a cut at all."
"And here's the point you're missing," said Mr. Twist. "A phone call from me to the Cork dame, putting her wise about the sort of oil stock you've been selling her, and you'd be out of the place in half an hour. Less, maybe. Depends on whether she let you stay and pack. Chew on that."
Mr. Molloy was shocked.
"You wouldn't do that?"
"I would."
"But it's low. It's not gentlemanly. I wouldn't have thought you'd have been able to stoop to such an act, Chimpie."
"I've been doing bending and stretching exercises lately," explained Mr. Twist. "I can stoop to anything now."
Mrs. Molloy, finding speech, of which this
revelation of what was possible in the way of human baseness had momentarily deprived her, gave utterance to a remark so packed with thought and meaning that, although running to only about ten words or so, it provided a complete critique of Mr. Twist's appearance, manners, morals, moustache and parentage. A sensitive man would have been wounded by it, but Chimp Twist had heard too much of this sort of thing in his time to pay attention to it nowadays.
"That stuff won't get you nowhere," he said reprovingly.
"No," Mr. Molloy was forced to agree, "there's no percentage in cracks, honey."
"But you aren't going to let him get away with this customary agent's fee boloney, are you?" demanded Dolly, quivering.
Mr. Molloy, never a very sturdy fighter, looked unhappy.
"I don't see what else we can do, sweetness."
" Well, that's where you're different from me."
"But, pettie, he's right. If he spills the dirt to the Corko, it's outside for you and me. I've found her a nice, smooth-working sucker, always ready to listen to a spiel, but she's got a certain amount of sense, about enough to make a duck fly crooked, and she'll start asking questions. And I can't afford to have her asking questions. Don't forget I haven't gotten her cheque yet."
"That's the way to talk," said Chimp. "I like to listen."
"Then listen to this," shrilled Dolly. "This ice you're talking about—how do you reckon you're going to get it, except through I and Soapy?"
Chimp Twist gave his moustache a final twirl.
"Easy. Simple as pie. You told me yourself about this Yogi joint this dame is running, and when I was in the closet the girl was giving that guy the lowdown on it. So I understand the workings. All I got to do is simply drive up to the front door and say I'm a rich millionaire from the other side, who's heard about the place and wants to sit in, and they'll lay down the red carpet for me, same as they seem to have done for Soapy. How's that?"
"Not so good."
"No?"
"No. You'd never get to first base."
"What's to stop me?"
Mr. Molloy had been asking himself the same question.
Money in the Bank Page 9