Thinking quick, he saw the policy to pursue. Immediately upon arrived he touched the bell and desired the parlourmaid to inform La Byles that he would be glad of a word with her. And when the latter hove alongside, she found him lying on the sofa, a limp, interesting figure.
“Oh, Nannie,” he said, speaking faintly, “I think I had better not come and hobnob with Algernon Aubrey to-night. I have a strange all-overish feeling, accompanied by floating spots before the eyes, and it may be catching. Explain the circumstances to him, give him my best and say I shall hope to see him to-morrow.
I, meanwhile, will be popping straight up to bed and turning in.” Well, of course, the Byles wanted to ‘phone Mrs Bingo and summon medical aid and all that, but he managed to head her off and they eventually settled for a basin of gruel and a hot-water bottle. When these had been delivered at the bedside, Bingo said, still speaking faintly, that he didn’t want to be disturbed again as his aim was to get a refreshing sleep.
After that everything was pretty smooth. At about ten-thirty he got up, hopped out of the window, eased himself down the water-pipe, was fortunate enough after waiting a short while at the garden gate to grab a passing taxi, and precisely at eleven-fifteen he alighted at the door of Mario’s. And a few minutes later along blew Valerie Twistleton looking charming in some soft, clinging substance which revealed the slender lines of her figure, and the show was on.
Since the days when he had kissed her under the mistletoe at the Wilkinson’s Christmas party there had come to exist between Bingo and this girl one of those calm, platonic friendships which so often occur when the blood has cooled and passion waned. Their relations now were such that he would be able to talk to her like a kindly elder brother. And as soon as he had headed her off from ordering champagne by persuading her that this wine is better avoided, causing as it does acidity and often culminating in spots, it was like a kindly elder brother that he jolly well intended to talk to her.
On his way to the restaurant he had debated whether to lead up to the subject of Horace by easy stages, but when they were seated at their table with a bottle of sound and inexpensive hock between them he decided to skip preliminaries and snap straight into the agenda.
“Well, I met your future bread-winner at the Drones this morning,” he said. “We might drink a toast to him, what, with a hey nonny nonny and a hot cha-cha. Horace Davenport,” said Bingo, raising his glass.
A quick frown disfigured Valerie Twistleton’s delicate brow. The state of Bingo’s finances had precluded the serving of oysters, but had these been on the bill of fare you would have supposed from her expression and manner that the girl had bitten into a bad one.
“Don’t mention that sub-human gargoyle’s name in my presence,” she replied with considerable evidence of feeling.
“And don’t allude to him as my future bread-winner. The wedding is off. I am through with Horace Pendlebury-by-golly-Davenport, and if he trips on a banana skin and breaks his bally neck, it will be all right with me.”
Bingo nodded. With subtle skill he had got the conversation just where he wanted it.
“Yes, he rather gave me to understand that there had been a certain modicum of rift-within-the-lute-ing, but he did not go into details. What seemed to be the trouble?”
A brooding look came into Valerie Twistleton’s eyes. She gnashed her teeth slightly.
“I’ll tell you,” she said. “He had come round to our house and we were in the drawing-room chatting of this and that, and I happened to ask him to lie down on the floor and let Cyril, my cocker spaniel, nibble his nose, which the little angel loves. He said he wouldn’t, and I said, ‘Oh, come on. Be a sport’, and he said ‘No, he was blowed if he was going to be a stooge for a cocker spaniel’. It ended with my digging out his letters and presents and handing them to him, together with the ring and his hat.”
Bingo t’ck-t’ck-t’ck-ed, and the girl asked him what he was t’ck-t’ck-t’ck-ing about.
“Wasn’t I right?” she demanded passionately. “Wasn’t I ethically justified?”
Bingo started to be the kindly elder brother.
“We must always strive,” he urged, “to look at these things from the other chap’s point of view. Horace’s, you must remember, is a sensitive, high strung nature. Many sensitive, high strung natures dislike being the supporting cast for cocker spaniels. Consider for a moment what his position would have been had he agreed to your proposal. The spaniel would have hogged all the comedy, leaving him to all intents and purposes painted on the back drop. Not a pleasant situation for a proud man.”
If Valerie Twistleton had been a shade less pretty, one would say that she snorted.
“As if that was the trouble! Do you think I can’t read between the lines? He just grabbed at that spaniel sequence as a pretext for severing diplomatic relations. Obviously what has happened is that he has gone and fallen in love with another girl and has been dying for an excuse to get rid of me. I wish you wouldn’t laugh like a pie-eyed hyæna.”
Bingo explained that his reason for laughing like a pie-eyed hyæna was that he had been tickled by an amusing coincidence. Horace Davenport, he said, had made precisely the same charge against her.
“His view is that your affections are engaged elsewhere and that your giving him the bum’s rush on account of his civil disobedience in re the cocker spaniel was simply a subterfuge. I happened to jot down his words, if you would care to hear them. ‘I maintain,’ said Horace, ‘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’.”
The girl stared, wide-eyed.
“He must be crazy. ‘Decided to hitch on elsewhere’, forsooth. If I live a million years, I shall never love anyone but Horace. From the very moment we met I knew he was what the doctor had ordered. I don’t chop and change. When I give my heart, it stays given. But he’s not like me. He is a flitting butterfly and a two-timing Casanova. I’m sure there’s another girl.”
“Your view, then, is that he is tickled pink to be freed from his obligations?”
“Yes, it is.”
“Then why,” said Bingo, whipping the ace of trumps from his sleeve, “was he looking this morning when I met him at the Drones like a living corpse out of Edgar Allan Poe?”
Valerie Twistleton started.
“Was he?”
“You bet he was. And talking about his heart being broken. Have you ever seen those ‘before taking’ pictures in the patent medicine advertisements?”
“Yes.”
“Horace,” said Bingo. “He looked like a stretcher case in the last stages of lumbago, leprosy, galloping consumption and the botts.”
He paused, and noted that a misty film had dimmed the incandescence of his companion’s eyes. Valerie Twistleton’s lips were trembling, and the bit of chicken which she had been raising to her mouth fell from her listless fork.
“The poor old slob,” she murmured.
Bingo saw that the moment had come to sew up the contract. Striking while the iron is hot is, I believe, the expression.
“Then you will forgive him?”
“Of course.”
“All will be as it was before?”
“If anything, more so.”
“Fine,” said Bingo. “I’ll go and call him up and tell him. No doubt he will be round here with his foot in his hand within ten minutes of getting the glad news.”
He had sprung to his feet and was about to dash to the telephone but the girl stopped him.
“No,” she said.
Bingo goggled.
“No?” he repeated. “How do you mean, no?”
She explained.
“He must have at least a couple of days in which to brood and yearn. So that the lesson can sink in, if you see what I mean. What one aims at is to get it firmly into his nut that he can’t go chucking his weight about whenever he feels like it. I love him more than words
can tell, but we must have discipline.”
Bingo was now stepping around like a cat on hot bricks. His agony was, as you may imagine, considerable.
“But the Darts tournament is to-morrow morning.”
“What Darts tournament?”
“The Drones Club’s annual fixture. For a Horace with his mind at rest it is a sitter, but for a heartbroken Horace not a hope. If you don’t believe me, let me quote his own words. ‘You can’t aim darts when your heart is broken,’ he said, and I wish you could have heard the pain and anguish in his voice. ‘My eyes will be so dim with unshed tears’, he said, ‘that I doubt if I’ll be able to get a single double’.”
“Well, what does a potty Darts tournament matter?”
And Bingo was just drawing a deep breath before starting into explain to her in moving words just how much this Darts tournament mattered to him, when the top of his head suddenly came off and shot up to the ceiling.
That is to say, he felt as if it had done so. For at this moment there came to his ears, speaking loudly and authoritatively from the direction of the door, a voice.
“Don’t talk to me, young man,” it was saying. “I keep telling you that Master Richard is in here somewhere, and I insist on seeing him. He has a nasty feverish cold and I have brought him his woolly muffler.”
And there on the threshold stood Nannie Byles. She was holding in her hand a woolly muffler bearing the colours of the Drones Club and looking in an unfriendly way at some sort of assistant head waiter who was endeavouring to bar her progress into the restaurant.
I don’t know if you ever came across a play of Shakespeare’s called Macbeth? If you did, you may remember that this bird Macbeth bumps off another bird named Banquo and gives a big dinner to celebrate, and picture his embarrassment when about the first of the gay throng to show up is Banquo’s ghost, all merry and bright, covered in blood. It gave him a pretty nasty start, Shakespeare does not attempt to conceal.
But it was nothing to the start Bingo got on observing Nannie Byles in his midst. He felt as if he had been lolling in the electric chair at Sing-Sing and some practical joker had suddenly turned on the juice. How the dickens she had tracked him here he was at a loss to imagine. It could scarcely have been by the sense of smell, and yet there didn’t seem any other explanation.
However, he didn’t waste much time musing on that. This, he perceived, was a moment for rapid action. There was a door just behind where he had been sitting, which from the fact that waiters had been going in and out he took to be the entrance to the service quarters. To press a couple of quid into Valerie Twistleton’s hand to pay the bill with and leave her flat and do a swan dive backwards and shoot through this emergency exit and slip a friendly native half a crown to show him the way to the street was with him the work of an instant.
Five minutes later he was in a taxi, bowling off to The Nook, Wimbledon Common. Forty minutes later he was shinning up the water-pipe. Ten minutes later, clad in pyjamas and a dressing-gown, he was at the telephone trying to get Horace.
But Horace’s number was the silent tomb. The girl at the exchange said she had rung and rung and rung, and Bingo said well, ring and ring and ring again. So she rang and rang and rang again, but there was still no answer, and eventually Bingo had to give it up and go to bed.
But it was by no means immediately that he fell into a dreamless sleep. The irony of the thing was like ants in the pants, causing him to toss restlessly on the pillow.
I mean to say, he had so nearly clicked. That was the bitter thought. He had achieved the object which he had set out to achieve—viz, the bringing together of the sundered hearts of V. Twistleton and H. Davenport, but unless he could get Horace on the ‘phone in the morning and put him abreast before the Darts tourney began, all would be lost. It was a fat lot of consolation to feel that a couple of days from now Horace Davenport would be going about with his hat on the side of his head, slapping people on the back and standing them drinks. What was of the essence was to have him in that condition to-morrow morning.
He brooded on what might have been. If only he had been able to give Valerie Twistleton the heart-melting talk he had been planning. If only Nannie Byles had postponed her appearance for another quarter of an hour. Bingo is a pretty chivalrous chap and one who, wind and weather permitting, would never lay a hand upon a woman save in the way of kindness, but if somebody at that moment had given him a blunt knife and asked him to skin Nannie Byles with it and drop her into a vat of boiling oil, he would have sprung to the task with his hair in a braid.
The vital thing, he was feeling, as he at last dozed off, was to be up bright and early next day, so as to connect with Horace in good time.
Which being so, you as a man who knows life will not be surprised to hear that what happened was that he overslept himself. When he finally came out of the ether and hared to the telephone, it was the same old story. The girl at the exchange rang and rang and rang, but there was no answer. Bingo tried the Drones, but was informed that Horace had not yet arrived. There seemed nothing for it but to get dressed and go to the club.
By the time he got there the Darts tourney would, of course, be in full swing, and he could picture the sort of Horace Davenport that would be competing. A limp, listless Horace Davenport, looking like a filleted sole.
It was hardly worth going in, he felt, when he reached the club, but something seemed to force him through the doorway: and he was approaching the smoking-room on leaden feet, when the door opened and out came Barmy Fotheringay-Phipps and Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright.
“A walkover,” Barmy was saying.
A sudden irrational hope stirred in Bingo’s bosom like a jumping bean. It was silly, of course, to think that Barmy had been speaking about Horace, but the level of form at the Drones, except for that pre-eminent expert, is so steady that he could not picture any of the other competitors having a walkover. He clutched Barmy’s coat sleeve in a feverish grip.
“Who for?” he gasped.
“Oh, hullo, Bingo,” said Barmy. “The very chap we wanted to see. Catsmeat and I have collaborated in an article for that paper of yours entitled ‘Some Little-Known Cocktails.’ We were just going round to the office to give it to you.”
Bingo accepted the typewritten sheets absently. In his editorial capacity he was always glad to consider unsolicited contributions (though these, he was careful to point out, must be submitted at their authors’ risk), and a thesis on such a subject by two such acknowledged authorities could scarcely fail to be fraught with interest, but at the moment his mind was far removed from the conduct of Wee Tots.
“Who’s it a walkover for?” he said hoarsely.
“Horace Davenport, of course,” said Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright. “He has been playing inspired Darts. If you go in quick, you may be able to catch a glimpse of his artistry.”
But Bingo was too late. When he entered the smoking-room, the contest was over and Horace Davenport, the centre of an eager group of friends and admirers, was receiving congratulations, a popular winner—except with Oofy Prosser, who was sitting in a corner pale and haggard beneath his pimples. Seeing Bingo, the champion detached himself and came over to him.
“Oh, hullo, Bingo,” said Horace, “I was hoping you would look in. I wanted a word with you. You remember that broken heart of mine? Well, it’s all right. Not broken, after all. A complete reconciliation was effected shortly before midnight last night at Mario’s.”
Bingo was amazed.
“You came to Mario’s?”
“Thanks to you,” said Horace Davenport, massaging his arm gratefully. “I must mention, Bingo, that after I had told you about my broken heart yesterday, I suddenly remembered that there were one or two things about it which I had forgotten to touch on. So I came back. They said you had been seen going to the ‘phone booth, so I pushed along there. You had left the door ajar, and picture my horror on hearing you talking to Valerie and making an assignation with her at Mario’s.”
&
nbsp; “I simply wanted—” began Bingo, but Horace continued.
“I reeled away blindly. I was distraught. I had been telling myself that Valerie was being false to me with another, but I had never for an instant suspected that this snake in the grass was my old friend Richard Little, a chap with whom when at school I had frequently shared my last acid drop.”
“But listen. I simply wanted—”
“Well, I said to myself ‘I’ll give them about half an hour, and then I’ll go to Mario’s and stride in and confront them. This,’ I said to myself, ‘will make them feel pretty silly.’ So I did. But when I got there, you had legged it and were not there to be confronted. So I confronted Valerie.”
“Listen, Horace, old egg,” said Bingo, insisting on being heard, “I simply wanted to shoot a bit of nourishment into her for mellowing purposes and then plead your cause.”
“I know. She told me. She said you had talked to her like a kindly elder brother. What arguments you used I cannot say, but they dragged home the gravy plenteously. I found her in melting mood. We came together with a click, and the wedding is fixed for the twenty-third prox. And now, Bingo,” said Horace, looking at his watch, “I shall have to be leaving you. I promised Valerie I would drop in directly the Darts contest was over and let her cocker spaniel nibble my nose. The animal seems to wish it, and I think we all ought to do our best to spread sweetness and light, even at some slight personal inconvenience. Good-bye, Bingo, and a thousand thanks. I can give you a lift, if you are coming my way.”
“Thanks,” said Bingo, “but I must collect that thirty-three pound ten. After that I have one or two little things to do, and then I must be nipping home.”
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