It just shows you how mental exhilaration can destroy a man’s clear, cool judgment. When this idea of meeting under the clock at Charing Cross had been mooted, Bingo, all above himself at the idea of becoming editor of a powerful organ for the chicks, had forgotten prudence and right-hoed without a second thought. It was only now that he realized what madness it had been to allow himself to be lured within a mile of Charing Cross. The locality was literally stiff with shops where in his bachelor days he had run up little accounts, and you never knew when the proprietors of these shops were not going to take it into their heads, as B. B. Tucker had plainly done, to step round to the station refreshment-room for a quick one.
He was appalled. He knew how lacking in tact and savoir-faire men like B. B. Tucker are. When they see an old patron chatting with a friend, they do not just nod and smile and pass by. They come right up and start talking about how a settlement would oblige, and all that sort of rot. And if Purkiss was the sort of person who shrank in horror from nephews who got county-courted by their tailors, two minutes of B. B. Tucker, Bingo felt, would undo the whole effect of the topper.
And the next moment, just as Bingo had anticipated, up he came.
“Oh, Mr. Little,” he began.
It was a moment for the swiftest action. There was a porter’s truck behind Bingo, and most people would have resigned themselves to the fact that retreat was cut off. But Bingo was made of sterner stuff.
“Well, good-bye, Purkiss,” he said, and, springing lightly over the truck, was gone with the wind. Setting a course for the main entrance, he passed out of the station at a good rate of speed and was presently in the Embankment gardens. There he remained until he considered that B. B. Tucker had had time to blow over, after which he returned to the old spot under the clock, in order to resume his conference with Purkiss at the point where it had been broken off.
Well, in one respect, everything was fine, because B. B. Tucker had disappeared. But in another respect the posish was not so good. Purkiss also had legged it. He had vanished like snow off a mountain-top, and after pacing up and down for half an hour Bingo was forced to the conclusion that he wasn’t coming back. Purkiss had called it a day. And in what frame of mind, Bingo asked himself, had he called it a day? Now that he had leisure to think, he remembered that as he had hurdled the truck he had seen the man shoot an odd glance at him, and it occurred to him that Purkiss might have gone off thinking him a bit eccentric. He feared the worst. An aspirant to an editorial chair, he knew, does not win to success by jumping over trucks in the presence of his prospective proprietor.
Moodily, he went off and had a spot of lunch, and he was just getting outside his coffee when the result of the two o’clock came through on the tape. Pimpled Charlie had failed to finish in the first three. Providence, in other words, when urging him to put his chemise on the animal, had been pulling his leg. It was not the first time that this had happened.
And by the afternoon post next day there arrived a letter from Purkiss which proved that his intuition had not deceived him. He read it, and tore it into a hundred pieces. Or so he says. Eight, more likely. For it was the raspberry. Purkiss, wrote Purkiss, had given the matter his consideration and had decided to make other arrangements with regard to the editorship of Wee Tots.
To say that Bingo was distrait as he dined that night would not be to overstate the facts. There was, he could see, a lot which he was going to find it difficult to explain to Mrs. Bingo on her return, and it was not, moreover, going to be any too dashed good when he had explained it. She would not be pleased about the ten quid. That alone would cast a cloud upon the home. Add the revelation that he had mucked up his chance of becoming Ye Ed., and you might say that the home would be more or less in the melting-pot.
And so, as I say, he was distrait. The six Pekes accompanied him into the library and sat waiting for their coffee-sugar, but he was too preoccupied to do the square thing by the dumb chums. His whole intellect was riveted on the problem of how to act for the best.
And then—gradually—he didn’t know what first put the idea into his head—it began to steal over Bingo that there was something peculiar about these six Pekes.
It was not their appearance or behaviour. They looked the same as usual, and they behaved the same as usual. It was something subtler than that. And then, suddenly, like a wallop on the base of the skull, it came to him.
There were only five of them.
Now, to the lay mind, the fact that in a house containing six Pekes only five had rolled up at coffee-sugar-time would not have seemed so frightfully sinister. The other one is off somewhere about its domestic duties, the lay mind would have said—burying a bone, taking a refreshing nap, or something of the sort. But Bingo knew Pekes. Their psychology was an open book to him. And he was aware that if only five of them had clustered round when there was coffee-sugar going, there could be only five on the strength. The sixth must be A.W.O.L.
He had been stirring his coffee when he made the discovery, and the spoon fell from his nerveless fingers. He gazed at the Shape Of Things To Come, all of a doodah.
This was the top. He could see that. Everything else was by comparison trifling, even the trousering of Boddington and Biggs’s ten quid. Mrs. Bingo loved these Pekes. She had left them with him as a sacred charge. And at the thought of what would ensue when the time came for him to give an account of his stewardship and he had to confess that he was in the red, imagination boggled. There would be tears … reproaches … oh-how-could-you’s … Why, dash it, felt Bingo, with a sudden start that nearly jerked his eyeballs out of their sockets, it was quite possible that, taking a line through that unfortunate ten quid business, she might even go so far as to suppose that he had snitched the missing animal and sold it for gold.
Shuddering strongly, he leaped from his chair and rang the bell. He wished to confer with Bagshaw and learn if by any chance the absentee was down in the kitchen. But Bagshaw was out for the evening. A parlourmaid answered the bell, and when she had informed him that the downstairs premises were entirely free from Pekes, Bingo uttered a hollow groan, grabbed his hat and started out for a walk on Wimbledon Common. There was just a faint chance—call it a hundred to eight—that the little blighter might have heard the call of the wild and was fooling about somewhere out in the great open spaces.
How long he wandered, peering about him and uttering chirruping noises, he could not have said, but it was a goodish time, and his rambles took him far afield. He had halted for a moment in quite unfamiliar territory to light a cigarette, and was about to give up the search, and totter home, when suddenly he stiffened in every limb and stood goggling, the cigarette frozen on his lips.
For there, just ahead of him in the gathering dusk, he had perceived a bloke of butlerine aspect. And this butler, if butler he was, was leading on a leash a Peke so identical with Mrs. Bingo’s gang that it could have been signed up with the troupe without exciting any suspicions whatever. Pekes, as you are probably aware, are either beige and hairy or chestnut and hairy. Mrs. Bingo’s were chestnut and hairy.
The sight brought new life to Bingo. His razor-like intelligence had been telling him for some time that the only possible solution f the impasse was to acquire another Peke and add it to the strength, and the snag about that was, of course, that Pekes cost money—and of money at the moment he possessed but six shillings and a little bronze.
His first impulse was to leap upon this butler and choke the animal out of him with his bare hands. Wiser counsels, however, prevailed, and he contented himself with trailing the man like one of those fellows you read about who do not let a single twig snap beneath their feet. And presently the chap left the Common and turned into a quiet sort of road and finished up by going through a gate into the garden of a sizable house. And Bingo, humming nonchalantly, walked on past till he came to some shops. He was looking for a grocer’s and eventually he found one and, going in, invested a portion of his little capital in a piece of cheese, i
nstructing the man behind the counter to give him the ripest and breeziest he had in stock.
For Bingo, as I said before, knew Pekes, and he was aware that, while they like chicken, are fond of suet pudding and seldom pass a piece of milk chocolate if it comes their way, what they will follow to the ends of the earth and sell their souls for is cheese. And it was his intention to conceal himself in the garden till the moment of the animal’s nightly airing, and then come out and make a dicker with it by means of the slab which he had just purchased.
Ten minutes later, accordingly, he was squatting in a bush, waiting for zero hour.
It is not a vigil to which he cares to look back. The experience of sitting in a bush in a strange garden, unable to smoke and with no company but your thoughts and a niffy piece of cheese, is a testing one. Ants crawled up his legs, beetles tried to muscle in between his collar and his neck, and others of God’s creatures, taking advantage of the fact that he had lost his hat, got in his hair. But eventually his resolution was rewarded. A french window was thrown open, and the Peke came trotting out into the pool of light from the lamps within, followed by a stout, elderly man. And conceive Bingo’s emotion when he recognized in this stout, elderly exhibit none other than old Pop Purkiss.
The sight of him was like a tonic. Until this moment Bingo had not been altogether free from those things of Conscience … not psalms … yes, qualms. He had had qualms about the lay-out. From time to time there crept over him a certain commiseration for the bloke whose household pet he was about to swipe. A bit tough on the poor bounder, he had felt. These qualms now vanished. After the way he had let him down, Purkiss had forfeited all claim to pity. He was a man who deserved to be stripped of every Peke in his possession.
The question, however, that exercised Bingo a bit at this juncture was how was this stripping to be done. If it was the man’s intention to follow hard on the animal’s heels till closing time, it was difficult to see how he was to be de-Peked without detection.
But his luck was in. Purkiss had apparently been entertaining himself with a spot of music on the radio, for when he emerged it was playing a gay rumba. And now, as radios do, it suddenly broke off in the middle, gave a sort of squawk and began to talk German. And Purkiss turned back to fiddle with it.
It gave Bingo just the time he needed. He was out of the bush in a jiffy, like a leopard bounding from its lair. There was one anxious moment when the Peke drew back with raised eyebrows and a good deal of that To-what-am-I-indebted-for-this-visit stuff, but fortunately the scent of the cheese floated to its nostrils before it could utter more than a sotto voce whoofle, and from then on everything went with a swing. Half a minute later, Bingo was tooling along the road with the Peke in his arms. And eventually he reached the Common, struck a spot which he recognized and pushed home.
Mrs. Bingo’s Pekes were all in bed when he got there, and when he went and sprang the little stranger on them he was delighted with the ready affability with which they made him one of themselves. Too often, when you introduce a ringer into a gaggle of Pekes, there ensues a scrap like New Year’s Eve in Madrid; but to-night, after a certain amount of tentative sniffing, the home team issued their O.K., and he left them all curled up in their baskets like so many members of the Athenaeum. He then went off to the library, and rang the bell. He wished, if Bagshaw had returned, to take up with him the matter of a stiff whisky and soda.
Bagshaw had returned, all right. He appeared, looking much refreshed from his evening out, and biffed off and fetched the fixings. And it was as he was preparing to depart that he said:
“Oh, about the little dog, sir.”
Bingo gave a jump that nearly upset his snifter.
“Dog?” he said, in his emotion putting in about five d’s at the beginning of the word. “What dog?” he said, inserting about seven w’s in the “what”.
“Little Wing-Fu, sir. I was unable to inform you earlier, as you were not in the house when Mrs. Little’s message arrived. Mrs. Little telephoned shortly after luncheon, instructing me to send Wing-Fu by rail to Bognor Regis Station. It appears that there is m artist gentleman residing in the vicinity who paints animals’ portraits, and Mrs. Little wished to have Wing-Fu’s likeness done. I dispatched the little fellow in a hamper, and on my return to the house found a telegram announcing his safe arrival. It occurred to me that I had better mention the matter to you, as it might have caused you some anxiety, had you chanced to notice that one of the dogs was missing. Good night, sir,” said Bagshaw, and popped off.
He left Bingo, as you may well suppose, chafing quite a goodish deal. Thanks to Mrs. Bingo’s lack of a sense of what was fitting having led her to conduct these operations through an underling instead of approaching him, Bingo, in her absence the head of the house, he had imperilled his social standing by becoming a dog-stealer. And all for nothing.
Remembering the agonies he had gone through in that bush—not only spiritual because of the qualms of conscience, but physical because of the ants, the beetles and the unidentified fauna which had got in his hair, you can’t blame him for being pretty sick about the whole thing. He had a sense of grievance. Why, he asked, had he not been informed of what was going on? Was he a cipher? And, anyway, where was the sense of pandering to Wing-Fu’s vanity by having his portrait painted? He was quite sidey enough already.
And the worst of it was that though he could see that everything now pointed to some swift, statesmanlike move on his part, he was dashed if he could think of one. It was in a pretty dark mood that he swallowed a second snort and trudged up to bed.
But there’s nothing like sleeping on a thing. He got the solution in his bath next morning. He saw that it was all really quite simple. All he had to do was to take Purkiss’s Peke back to the Purkiss shack, slip it in through the garden gate, and there he would be, quit of the whole unpleasant affair.
And it was only when towelling himself after the tub that he suddenly realized that he didn’t know the name of Purkiss’s house—not even the name of the road it was in—and that he had tacked to and fro so assiduously on his return journey that he couldn’t possibly find his way back to it.
And, what was worse, for it dished the idea of looking him up in the telephone book, he couldn’t remember Purkiss’s name.
Oh, yes, he knows it now, all right. It is graven on his heart. If you stopped him on the street to-day and said, “Oh, by the way, Bingo, what is the name of the old blister who owns Wee Tots?” he would reply like a flash: “Henry Cuthbert Purkiss.” But at that moment it had clean gone. You know how it is with names. Well, when I tell you that during breakfast he was convinced that it was Winterbottom and that by lunch-time he had switched to Benjafield, you will see how far the evil had spread.
And, as you will recall, his only documentary evidence no longer existed. With a peevishness which he now regretted, he had torn the fellow’s letter into a hundred pieces. Or at least eight.
At this juncture, Bingo Little was a broken man.
Stripping the thing starkly down to its bare bones, he saw that the scenario was as follows. Mrs. Bingo was a woman with six Pekes. When she returned from Bognor Regis, she would be a woman with seven Pekes. And his knowledge of human nature told him that the first thing a six-Peke woman does, on discovering that she has suddenly become a seven-Peke woman, is to ask questions. And to these questions what would be his answer?
It would, he was convinced, be perfectly useless for him to try to pretend that the extra incumbent was one which he had bought her as a surprise during her absence. Mrs. Bingo was no fool. She knew that he was not a man who frittered away his slender means buying people Pekes. She would consider the story thin. She would institute inquiries. And those inquiries must in the end lead her infallibly to this Winterbottom, or Benjafield, or whatever his name was.
It seemed to Bingo that there was only one course open to him. He must find the stowaway a comfortable home elsewhere, completely out of the Benjafield-Winterbottom zone, and he
must do it immediately.
So now you understand why the poor old bird called upon you that day with the animal. And, as I said, you will probably agree hat he was more to be p. than c. In this connection, he has authorized me to say that he is prepared to foot all bills for ticking-plaster, arnica, the Pasteur treatment and what not.
After your refusal to hold the baby, he appears to have lost heart. I gather that the scene was a painful one, and he did not feel like repeating it. Returning home, he decided that there was nothing to be done but somehow to dig up that name. So shortly after lunch he summoned Bagshaw to his presence.
“Bagshaw,” he said, “mention some names.”
“Names, sir?”
“Yes. You know. Like people have. I am trying to remember a man’s name, and it eludes me. I have an idea,” said Bingo, who had now begun to veer towards Jellaby, “that it begins with a J.”
Bagshaw mused.
“J, sir?”
“Yes.”
“Smith?” said the ass.
“Not Smith,” said Bingo. “And if you mean Jones, it’s not as common as that. Rather a bit on the exotic side it struck me as, when I heard it. As it might be Jerningham or Jorkins. However, in supposing that it begins with a J, I may quite easily be mistaken. Try the A’s.”
“Adams, sir? Allen? Ackworth? Anderson? Arkwright? Aarons? Abercrombie?”
“Switch to the B’s.”
“Bates? Bulstrode? Burgess? Bellinger? Biggs? Bultitude?” “Now do me a few C’s.”
“Collins? Clegg? Clutterbuck? Carthew? Curley? Cabot? Cade? Cackett? Cahill? Caffrey? Cahn? Cain? Caird? Cannon? Carter? Casey? Cooley? Cuthbertson? Cope? Cork? Crowe? Cramp? Croft? Crewe? …”
A throbbing about the temples told Bingo that in his enfeebled
state he had had about enough of this. He was just waving a hand to
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