The Luck of the Bodkins

by P. G. Wodehouse

  'How do you mean - the right Mr Tennyson?'

  The great Mr Tennyson, miss. I don't know if you are familiar with the works of the great Mr Tennyson? He wrote "The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck".'

  Lottie Blossom's eyes widened.

  'You don't mean Ikey thought Ambrose was that guy?’ 'Yes, miss. Misled, it seems, by his brother-in-law George.’ 'Well, of all the saps! That must have handed Ambrose a laugh.'

  'Yes, miss; I heard him laugh.' 'Where were you during all this?’

  "Well, I happened to be passing -;

  'I get you. So Ambrose laughed, did he?'

  ‘Yes, miss, very hearty, and Mr Llewellyn didn't like it Very upset, he sounded. He said it made Mr Tennyson laugh, did it? Ho, well, Mr Tennyson could laugh at this one, he said, and with that he said that Mr Tennyson wasn't going to come to Llewellyn City and enjoy himself on his money. "You're fired," he said.'

  ‘What!'

  ‘Yes, miss. Those were his very words. "You're fired," he said. A heated imbrolligo then ensued, with a lot of back-chat and people shouting "Ikey!" and then the door flew open, precipitating me...'

  Albert Peasemarch ceased. He found that he was playing to empty benches. Something prismatic had shot past him, and he was alone in the state-room. Ruefully reflecting that there never was a woman yet who knew how to listen, he gathered up the breakfast-tray, ate the slice of cold bacon which lay on it, and departed.

  Lottie Blossom came out on to the promenade deck, to find it in the state of mixed torpor and activity which always prevails ©n promenade decks on fine mornings. There was a long line of semi-conscious figures in chairs, swathed in rugs and looking like fish laid out on a slab, and before their glassy gaze the athletes paraded up and down, rejoicing in their virility, shouting to one another 'What a morning 1' and pointing out that twice more round would make a mile.

  Here and there were groups which fell into neither division. A little too active for the fish brigade and a little too limp for the athletes, they leaned on the rail and stared at the sea or just stood about and looked at their watches, to ascertain how soon they might expect soup.

  Ambrose was not to be seen, but presently Lottie's keen eye detected Reggie. He was brooding apart; between his lips one of the cigarettes with which he had filled his case before leaving Mr Llewellyn's state-room. Grim though the recent proceedings had been, they had had one bright spot in them. They had enabled Reggie to stock up with cigarettes.

  'Listen,' said Lottie, wasting no words on formal greetings, "what's all this about Ambrose and Ikey?'

  Reggie removed the cigarette from his lips, contriving to lend to that simple action a solemn sadness which set the seal on Lottie's apprehensions. She abandoned the faint hope which she had been trying to cherish that Albert Peasemarch in order to make a good story might have exaggerated the facts.

  'A pretty sticky situation,' said Reggie gravely. 'Did he tell you?'

  'No, I had it from the Boy Orator - that steward guy. He seems to have been in a ringside seat. Is it true what he says about Ikey firing Ambrose?'

  'Quite.’

  'But he can't go back on a contract.’ There isn't any contract' ‘What!'

  'No. Apparently it had to be signed at the New York office.'

  'Well, there must have been a letter or something?’ ‘I gathered not'

  ‘You mean Ambrose hadn't a line in writing?' ‘Not a syllable.'

  Amazement held Lottie Blossom dumb for an instant. Then she raged desperately.

  'What chumps men are! Why couldn't the poor fish have consulted me? I could have told him. Fancy selling up the farm and starting off for Hollywood on the strength of Ikey Llewellyn's word! Ikey's word! What a laugh that is. Why, if Ikey had an only child and he promised her a doll on her birthday, the first thing she would do, if she was a sensible kid, would be to go to her lawyer and have a contract drawn up and signed, with penalty clauses. Oh hell, oh hell, oh hell!' said Miss Blossom, for she was much stirred. 'Do you know what this means, Reggie?'

  ‘Means?’

  To me. Ambrose and I can't get married now.'

  'Oh, come,' said Reggie, for his meditations on the deck had shown him that the situation, though sticky, was not so sticky as he had at first supposed. 'He may be broke, having given up his job at the Admiralty and all that, but you've enough for two, what?'

  'I've enough for twenty. But what good is that? Ambrose won't live on my money. He wouldn't marry me on a bet now.' 'But, dash it, it's no different than marrying an heiress.’ ‘He wouldn't marry an heiress.'

  'What!' cried Reggie, who would have married a dozen, had the law permitted it. 'Why not?'

  'Because he's a darned ivory-domed, pig-headed son of an army mule,' cried Miss Blossom, the hot blood of the Ho-boken Murphys boiling in her veins. 'Because he isn't human. Because he's like some actor in a play, doing the noble thing with one eye counting the house and the other on the gallery. No, he isn't,' she went on, with one of those swift transitions which made her character so interesting and which on the Superba-Llewellyn lot had so often sent overwrought directors groping blindly for the canteen to pull themselves together with frosted malted milk. 'He isn't anything of the kind. I admire his high principles. I think they're swell. It's a pity there aren't more men with his wonderful sense of honour and self-respect. I'm not going to have you saying a word against Ambrose. He's the finest man in the world, so if you want to sneer and jeer at him for refusing to live on my money, shoot ahead. Only remember that a cauliflower ear goes with it.'

  'Quite,' said Reggie, somewhat dazed. 'Oh, definitely.'

  A pause followed, during which a girl with a sniff and no chin came up and asked Miss Blossom to write her name and some little sentiment in her autograph album. With the air of a female member of the Committee of Public Safety signing a death warrant during the Reign of Terror, she did so. The interruption served to break the thread of her thoughts. Alone with Reggie once more, she looked at him in a bewildered way, like an awakened somnambulist

  'Where were we?'

  Reggie coughed.

  'We were talking about Ambrose. And I was saying that I thought it simply magnificent, this stand he was taking about refusing to marry you and live on your money.’

  'Were you?'

  'I was.' Reggie spoke with a good deal of emphasis. He wanted no misapprehensions on this point. 'It's terrific. Great. Splendid. One feels a thrill of pride.'

  'Yes,' said Lottie doubtfully. 'He's right, I suppose. Only where do I get off?'

  There's that, of course.'

  'It seems kind of tough on me.’

  ‘It does.'

  'We'd have been so happy.' 'Yes. Still, there it is.'

  'If you ask me,' said Lottie, suddenly coming out of a brooding silence, 'I think the man's crazy. He ought to have his head examined. Why would he be living on my money? He could be writing his books.'

  Reggie, though still nervous about his personal safety, felt compelled to put her straight on the matter of Ambrose's books.

  'My dear old shipmate,' he said, 'Ambrose - splendid fellow though he is - high-principled, crammed to the gills with honour and self-respect - isn't a frightfully hot writer. I don't suppose he makes enough out of a novel to keep a midget in doughnuts for a week. Not a really healthy midget.'

  'What! Is he a bust?'

  'With the pen, yes. But,' added Reggie carefully, 'full of honour and self-respect. His principles, too, are very high. Very high indeed. I've always said so.'

  Lottie Blossom stared disconsolately at the ocean.

  'Well, then?' she said bleakly.

  'Seems a bit of a mix-up,' agreed Reggie. The only word of good cheer that I can drop -’ 'What?'

  'Well, you know Llewellyn better than I do. Is he, perhaps, one of those fellows who say things in the heat of the moment which they subsequently regret? How does his bark compare with his bite? What, in other words, would you quote as the odds against a sudden gush of remorse? Do you suppose
there's a chance that when he thinks all this over quietly in his bath - he was about to take a bath when I left him - his heart will melt -'

  'He hasn't a heart.'

  ‘I see.'

  'I'd like to wring his neck.' 'But he hasn't a neck, either.'

  They fell into a moody silence again, musing on Ivor Llewellyn. The man seemed armed at all points.

  'Well, then,' said Reggie, 'there's just one thing. An outside chance, as you might say ...'

  'What? What?'

  'I'm not saying it's going to lead to anything, mind you...' 'Go on. What?'

  'Well, brooding just now, I suddenly remembered something - to wit, that this Llewellyn, for some distorted reason known only to himself, is extraordinarily anxious to induce Monty Bodkin to come and act for him.'

  'Bodkin? The fellow next door to me?'

  'He isn't next door to you now. He's in B 36. But that's the chap.’

  Lottie Blossom rubbed her chin. She seemed perplexed.

  'Bodkin? Bodkin? Well, I thought I knew the whole muster-roll of our hams, from Baby Leroy downwards, but I never heard of him as an actor.'

  'He isn't an actor. Nevertheless, Llewellyn seems bent on making him one. I had this from Ambrose, and Mabel Spence confirms it. Any time Monty cares to say the word, Llewellyn will sign a contract. I suppose the fact of the matter is the man's got ants in the pantry.'

  Lottie saw deeper into the thing. Her perplexity vanished.

  'No, I see what's happened. Ikey gets that way sometimes. All these big bugs in Hollywood do now and then. They get the idea that they are sort of wonder-men who can just look around and find talent where nobody else would suspect it. It makes them feel good. But what about it?'

  'Well, apparently Monty turned him down. And what I was thinking was that if he could be induced to reconsider, he might make it a condition of his signing the contract that Ambrose was taken on, too, in some capacity. As far as I can figure it out, Llewellyn is so keen to get Monty that he would agree to anything. It seems to me that Monty is the bird to work on.'

  Lottie Blossom's eyes gleamed with a new hope.

  'You're dead right. Where did you say he was now?’

  ‘B 36. My cousin Gertrude, with whom he is walking out,

  apparently didn't like him being next door to you, so she shifted

  him.'

  'She suspects me of being the menace in the treatment?’ 'To some extent, I gather.'

  That's right, too. I remember. Brother Bodkin said as much last time we were having one of our get-togethers.'

  'All right, then,' said Reggie, 'I'll push along, shall I, and see Monty and try to talk him into this acting wheeze?'

  Lottie Blossom shook her head.

  'Not you. I'm the one to handle this. We're great buddies, this Bodkin and me. We've had two visits already, and got along together like a couple of Warner brothers. Would he be up yet?'

  'Not if I know him.'

  Then I'll go right along to his state-room. What you need in a thing like this,' said Miss Blossom, 'is the woman's touch.'

  The woman's touch, administered with a brisk knuckle on his door a few minutes later, found Monty, clad in a bathrobe, reading for the seventh time the note which he had received from Gertrude Butterwick shortly after Reggie had left him on his errand of mercy. State-room B 36 possessing no bathroom, he was about to go down the passage for his tub. But before doing so he could not resist the urge to read that note once more.

  His heart warmed to Reggie as he read. A true friend, he felt. To have produced such a communication from Gertrude, Reggie must have stepped on the gas without reserve. For the letter breathed in its every line of love and of remorse for suspicions which the writer now saw so clearly to have been unworthy. It ended with the statement that if Monty happened to be in the library at about twelve o'clock he would receive a warm welcome.

  It was in order to render himself fit for this encounter that he had shaved almost to the bone and laid out his grey suit with the thin blue stripes and was now preparing to make for the bathroom. The only small cloud on his happiness was the recollection that he had lent Reggie that tie with the pink roses on it. It was the one tie which in this supreme moment he would have selected to set off the grey suit.

  To say that he was glad to see Miss Blossom would be an exaggeration. But he bore her intrusion without open dismay. The reflection that at any moment he could terminate the interview by bounding past her and finding refuge in the bathroom served to fortify him. For even Lottie Blossom, he considered, specialist though she was at barging in where she was not wanted, would find it dashed difficult to come and hob-nob with a fellow who was in his bath with the door locked.

  He hullo-hullo-hulloed, therefore, with something approaching geniality. He was not glad to see her, but he knew that the strategic railways in his rear were in good working order.

  'Looking for somebody?' he asked civilly.

  'I'm looking for you,' said Miss Blossom, and was about to speak further when her eye fell on the Mickey Mouse as it beamed at her from the dressing-table: and so powerful was its spell that she broke off with a sharp, emotional gulp, her mission completely forgotten. She had never seen anything which made a more immediate appeal to all that was best and deepest in her.

  'Of all the cute ...' Words failed her. She stood staring, open-mouthed. You sometimes see people looking like that at the Winged Victory in the Louvre. 'Say, give me that!' she cried hungrily.

  Monty did his best not to be severe, for he was sorry for the girl. He saw that she loved the Mickey Mouse, which, ever since Gertrude's note had arrived, he had been loving himself. But he was very firm.

  ‘No.’

  'Ah, come on.'

  'I'm sorry. No. That mouse belongs to my fiancee.' 'To Gertrude - ha, ha - Butterwick?’ Monty stiffened.

  'I wish,' he said coldly, 'that in mentioning my fianceVs name you would not shove in that bally "ha, ha" before the "Butterwick". It is uncalled-for and offensive, and -’

  'How much do you want for it?'

  'Want for what?' said Monty, annoyed, for no man likes to be interrupted just as he is getting to the nub of a rather stately rebuke.

  'The mouse, chump. State your terms. What price the mouse?'

  Monty decided that all this rot must cease.

  'I have already apprized you,' he said, drawing on Albert Peasemarch for the telling verb, 'that this mouse is the property of my fiancee, Miss Gertrude Butterwick... not Miss Gertrude - ha, ha - Butterwick, but Miss Gertrude Butterwick pure and simple. A nice thing it would be if I went about the place giving away or selling her Mickey Mice - and to you of all people.'

  'Why me of all people?'

  'Because,' said Monty, feeling that the moment had arrived for absolute frankness and that now was the chance of a lifetime to warn this vermilion-haired menace to his happiness off the grass once and for all, 'I don't mind telling you that your habit of haunting my state-room like a family spectre has caused Gertrude considerable alarm and despondency. The fact that the poor child is not able to pass my door without seeing you come popping out of it is making her as sick as mud. She chafes, and I don't blame her for chafing. I have no wish to be unkind, nothing is further from my intention than to tick you off, but you must see for yourself that it is not the sort of thing a girl likes. A fat chance I should have of ever leading her to the altar if she saw you swanking about in possession of that mouse. Dismiss absolutely the idea of getting your hooks on it It can't be done.'

  Miss Blossom seemed impressed by this eloquence. She registered resignation, and while she was doing so Monty suddenly remembered the words which had been lurking at the back of his mind, waiting to be spoken, from the moment when she had made her entrance. Only the fact that she had suddenly gone off at a tangent and begun talking about this Mickey Mouse had prevented him speaking them directly he saw her.

  'To what' he said, 'am I indebted for the honour of this visit?'

  Like one waking from
a dream, Lottie Blossom removed her fascinated gaze from the mouse, and with a little shake of the shoulders seemed to dismiss it from her thoughts. She was reproaching herself for having allowed it to divert her from the main business in hand.

  'I've come for a conference,' she said.

  'A-?'

  'Conference. We're strong on those at Hollywood. All God's chillun got conferences out there. I remember once trying to get Ikey on the phone, and his secretary would have none of it "Sorry, Miss Blossom," she said. "Quate impossible. Mr Llewellyn is greatly conferencing just now." And talking of Ikey brings me nicely to the point. I've come about that business. You know.'

  ‘I don't know.’

  That business he sent Ambrose to take up with you. About your signing a contract to act for the S.-L.'

  Nothing had been further from Monty's intention than to smile at any point during this interview. He had planned to conduct it throughout with the utmost austerity, preserving from start to finish what Miss Blossom would have called a 'dead pan' and what he himself had been mentally labelling the frozen face. But at these words he was unable to check a faint, gratified simper. Or, perhaps, more a smirk. His lips involuntarily parted and for an instant he smirked.

  It was, he meant to say, beyond a question extraordinarily flattering, this persistence. He shot a sidelong glance at the mirror, but it told him nothing that it had not told him before. There was the old Bodkin face, as far as he could see, just buzzing along in the old familiar way. He was utterly unable to detect in it any hidden magic. And yet this Ivor Llewellyn, who met hundreds of people every day without giving them a second look, was not merely desirous of securing this face, but positively clamouring for it.

  A solid respect for Ivor Llewellyn's intuition began to burgeon within Monty Bodkin. It was the fashion to laugh at these motion-picture magnates - everybody was very funny and satirical about them - but you couldn't get away from it, they had a flair. They knew.