Madame Eulalie’s Rare Plums
The Story Thus Far:
The debonair Godfrey, Lord Biskerton (known to his intimates as “Biscuit”), is confronted with a serious problem. He is totally devoid of assets. How can he evade a small, but most active, army of bailiffs and creditors who are hot on his trail?
Ha! An inspiration! Why not try a disguise? No sooner thought than done. His lordship pastes on a huge beard and sallies forth to test its efficacy. If it works—if no one recognizes him—he is safe: soon he will marry the charming Ann Moon, an American girl who is visiting her uncle, T. Paterson Frisby, in London: and Miss Moon is rich!
The Biscuit goes to the Berkeley, where Ann and his father—the impecunious Earl of Hoddesdon, whose equally impecunious sister, Lady Vera Mace, is chaperoning Miss Moon—are lunching together. “Berry” Conway is there, alone.
A few words, ere we proceed, anent Mr. Conway, close friend of the Biscuit and secretary of T. Paterson Frisby. A charming fellow, Berry. But poor. Sadly in need of funds, he is advised by the estimable Mr. Frisby to sell “The Dream Come True,” a derelict copper mine which he owns and believes to be worthless, but which Mr. Frisby knows to be valuable. He prepares to act on the advice. Inasmuch as the buyer is to be one J. B. Hoke (secretly in the employ of Mr. Frisby) and the price to be small, the astute Mr. Frisby is much pleased at the prospect. . . .
At the Berkeley, Berry observes a strange and most villainous-looking Russian. Then he sees Ann. His heart does a flip-flop. “There,” he muses, “is a girl I'd like to know!” . . . The bearded villain departs—and enters his car. Ann enters her car. Berry follows, steps in beside the girl, and—”Follow that car—the one with the bearded ruffian in it!” he whispers. “I’m a member of the Secret Service.”
Ann steps on the gas. They follow the bearded one. At a country inn Berry finds his quarry—minus his shrubbery. Ann disappears, and the Biscuit explains his actions. After which, as “Mr. Smith,” his lordship takes a house next to Berry’s, in the country.
Enter the lovely “Kitchie” Valentine, friend of Ann, young, beautiful, engaged. The Biscuit meets her. What a girl! . . . The Biscuit begins to wonder if—
V
IT WAS hardly to be expected that Lord Biskerton’s disappearance from his customary haunts should have gone unnoticed and unmourned by the inhabitants of his little world. Hawes and Dawes felt it deeply. So did Dykes, Dykes and Pinweed and the rest of his creditors. They or their representatives called daily at the empty nest, only to be informed by Venner, the Biscuit’s trusted manservant, that his lordship had left town and that it was impossible to say when he would return. Upon which they took their departure droopingly, feeling, as so many poets have felt, that there is no tragedy like the tragedy of the vanished face.
The Earl of Hoddesdon was another of those whom the young man’s flight distressed. He went round to see his sister about it.
“Er—Vera.”
Lady Vera Mace raised a shapely hand.
“No, George,” she said, “not another penny!”
Lord Hoddesdon’s aristocratic calm was shaken by a spasm of justifiable irritation.
“Don’t sit there making Stop and Go signals at me,” he snapped. “You aren’t a traffic policeman.”
“Nor am I a money lender.”
“I didn’t come to borrow money,” cried his lordship passionately. “I came to discuss this lunacy of Godfrey’s.”
“It is annoying that Godfrey should have got mumps,” said Lady Vera, who was a fair-minded woman, “but I fail to see . . .”
Lord Hoddesdon ground the teeth behind his gray mustache. In their nursery days he would have found vent for his emotion by hitting his sister on the side of the head or pulling her pigtail. Deprived of this means of solace by the spirit of noblesse oblige and the fact that the well-coiffured woman does not wear a pigtail, he kicked a chair. The leg came off, and he felt better.
“NEVER mind the dashed chair,” he said, as Lady Vera fell to lamentation over the wreck. “This business is much more important than chairs. I’ve been round to Godfrey’s flat and I’ve got the truth out of that man of his, that fellow Venner. The boy hasn’t got mumps. He’s living down in the suburbs.”
“Living down in the suburbs?”
“Living down in the suburbs. Under the name of Smith. At Peacehaven, Mulberry Grove, Valley Fields. Venner told me so. He’s forwarding letters there.”
Lady Vera forgot the chair.
“Is he mad?” she cried.
“No,” Lord Hoddesdon was forced to admit. “He’s doing it to keep from being county-courted by, as far as I can make out, about a hundred tradesmen. As far as that goes, his conduct is sensible. At any rate, it’s a lot better than going about London in a false beard, which was what he wanted to do. What is the behavior of a lunatic is this telling the girl he’s got mumps.”
“I don’t understand what you mean.”
“Why, use your intelligence, dash it. She must have accepted him from some sort of passing whim, and it was vital that he refrain from doing anything to make her think it over and regret. And he goes and tells her he’s got mumps. Mumps! Of all infernal, loathsome things. How long do you think that girl is going to cherish her dream of a knightly lover, when every time she thinks of him it is to picture a hideous object with a face like a football, probably with flannel wrapped round it? I shouldn’t wonder if she isn’t weakening already.”
“George!”
“It’s maddening. When there are a dozen things he could have told her. That’s what makes my blood boil. If he had consulted me, I could have suggested a hundred alternatives. He could have said that he thought of going into Parliament and that he had to go and live in this beastly suburb to nurse the constituency. She would never have seen through that. Or he could have invented a dying relative in Ireland or Mentone or Madeira. But, no! He has to go and say that he’s swelling horribly in bed at his flat. I shouldn’t wonder if the girl hasn’t changed her mind already. You’ve been seeing her every day. How is she? Thoughtful? Have you caught her musing lately? Meditating? Like a girl who’s been turning things over in her mind and has come to the conclusion that she made a grave mistake?”
Lady Vera started.
“It’s odd that you should say that, George!”
“IT isn’t at all odd,” retorted Lord Hoddesdon. “It’s what any sensible, farseeing man would say. What makes you call it odd?”
“She has been very thoughtful lately.”
“Good God!”
“Yes. I have noticed it. Several times lately, when we have been dining quietly at home, I have seen a curious, pensive expression come into her face. I’ve seen just the same look in my dear Sham-Poo’s eyes when he has heard the coffee cups rattle outside. He is so devoted to coffee sugar, the darling.”
“Don’t talk to me about Sham-Poo,” said Lord Hoddesdon vehemently. He was not an admirer of his sister’s Pekingese. “If you have anything to say about Sham-Poo, tell it to the vet. For the moment oblige me by concentrating upon this girl Ann Moon.”
“I am simply telling you,” replied his sister with spirit, “that there was the same look in her eyes as there is in Sham-Poo’s when he thinks of coffee sugar. As if she were dreaming some beautiful dream.”
“But, dash it, that’s all right, then. I mean, if all she is doing is dreaming beautiful dreams. . . .”
Lady Vera crushed his rising hopes. Her face was very grave.
“But, George, consider. Would a girl who was thinking of Godfrey look as if she were dreaming a beautiful dream?”
“Good Lord, no. That’s right. You mean—?” exclaimed his lordship, quivering from head to foot as the frightful significance of his sister’s words came home to him. “You don’t mean?”
Lady Vera nodded somberly.
“Yes, I do. I think Ann has met somebody else.”
“Don’t say such awful things, Vera!”
“Well, I really do believe that is what has happened. She gave me the impression of a girl who was wondering about something. And what would she have to wonder about except whether she had made a mistake in accepting Godfrey and wouldn’t be doing better to break the engagement and leave herself free to marry this new man?”
Lord Hoddesdon fought stoutly against a sea of fears.
“Don’t talk of ‘this new man’ as if he really existed. You can’t know. You’re only guessing.”
“I have a woman’s intuition, George. Besides—”
“BUT who could it be? Where would she have met him? I know she goes out to lunches and dinners and dances every day, and meets a thousand men, but they’re all exactly like Godfrey. I can’t tell these modern young fellows apart. Nobody can. They all look alike and think alike and talk alike. It’s absurd to suppose that any one of them could suddenly exercise an overwhelming spell over her. If she had been to a prize-fight or something and had conceived a sudden passion for some truck horse of a chap just because his muscles bulged, I could understand it. But why should a girl want to change one Biskerton for another Biskerton? When I said just now that she might be thinking of breaking the engagement, it never occurred to me that she could be planning to marry anybody else. I simply feared that she might give Godfrey his congé and go back to America.”
“Well, let me tell you a very curious thing, George. You remember the day you took Ann to lunch at the Berkeley?”
“What about it?”
“I happened to meet Lady Venables that night, and she asked me who the young man was that she saw driving along Piccadilly with Ann in her car. She said it was nobody she knew, and she knows every young man in London.”
“What!”
“A very good-looking man, she said, with a strong, handsome face. She was certain he wasn’t anybody she had ever met. And, as I say, Lady Venables gives so many parties, trying to get Harriet off, poor dear, that by this time in the season there isn’t a single young man anywhere in Mayfair that she doesn’t at least know by sight. She takes a regular census and works through it. So, if she really did see Ann with anyone, it must have been somebody no one knows anything about—this prize-fighter of yours, for instance.”
Lord Hoddesdon had been pacing the floor. He sat down abruptly.
“You’re making my flesh creep, Vera!”
“I’m sorry. I’m simply telling you.”
“And Godfrey supposed to be in bed with mumps. What are we to do?”
“The first thing is obviously to see Godfrey and tell him of the risk he is running, by staying away, of losing Ann altogether. I think that, tradesmen or no tradesmen, he ought to come back.”
“How can he come back? The girl thinks he’s ill in bed.”
“He could say that the doctor found he had made a mistake. Lots of things look like mumps at first. Toothache makes your face swell.”
“A chill in the facial muscles,” said Lord Hoddesdon, inspired.
“Yes, that would do.”
“But what about all these fellows who want to county-court him?”
“Something could be arranged about that. Surely, now that they know that he is engaged to the daughter of a millionaire. . . .”
“Yes, that’s true.”
“Well, he must at least get in touch with Ann again, and immediately. So that he can at any rate write to her. Perhaps if she kept getting letters from him it would help. I think he ought to tell her that he has had to go to Paris. Perhaps he might really go to Paris, and then she could go to Paris, too.”
“Where’s the money to come from?”
“I could manage that.”
“You could?” said Lord Hoddesdon, eagerly. “Then, while we are on the subject . . .”
“NO,” said Lady Vera firmly. “I said I could manage enough to send Godfrey to Paris, but I refuse to subsidize you, George.”
“I only want twenty pounds.”
“When you leave this flat, you will still be wanting it.”
“It isn’t much,” said Lord Hoddesdon wistfully. “Twenty pounds.”
“It is twenty pounds more than you are going to get out of me,” replied his sister.
“All right,” said his lordship. “All right. No harm in asking, was there?”
“I am always delighted to have you ask, George,” said Lady Vera. “At any time. Whenever you want money, I hope you will always ask me. You won’t get it, of course.”
Lord Hoddesdon took a pull at his mustache.
“Then, shelving that for the moment,” he said, “you think I ought to go and see Godfrey?”
“I consider it essential. Ann is a very impulsive girl, and even now it may be too late.”
“I wish you wouldn’t talk like that, Vera,” said Lord Hoddesdon irritably. “You seem to take a joy in looking on the dark side. Very well, then. I will go down to this infernal suburb. Or shall I write him a letter?”
“No. You express yourself so badly in letters. He would never understand how vital the thing was. Go down to Valley Fields at once and see him personally.”
“And the money for the taxi?”
“What taxi?” said Lady Vera.
She found a railway time-table and began to turn its pages briskly. Lord Hoddesdon watched her with a growing dislike. He had his own rigid, old-fashioned ideas of how a sister should behave to a brother and Lady Vera outraged them. He was just letting his mind drift off into a reverie in which there figured a wonderful dream-sister whose leading qualities were a big bank balance, a check book, an intense fondness for her brother and scribbling-itch, when he was called back to the sternly practical by the sound of her voice.
“ ‘Frequent trains from Victoria,’ ” read Lady Vera. “So you had better start at once. And do contrive, if you can possibly manage it, not to bungle the thing. The fare, first class, is one and a penny.”
“Oh? You’re sure,” said Lord Hoddesdon bitterly, “you wouldn’t rather I went third class?”
“You must please yourself entirely, George,” said Lady Vera equably. “You will be paying for the ticket.”
The manifold beauties of Valley Fields which had so impressed his son and heir on his first introduction to them made a weaker appeal to the sixth Earl of Hoddesdon. Lord Hoddesdon’s outlook on life, from the very start of his expedition, had been a jaundiced one, and Valley Fields did nothing to change it. Indeed, his first move on alighting from the train was to give Valley Fields an extremely nasty look. Then, having inquired of the porter at the station the way to Mulberry Grove, he set out thither, thinking dark thoughts.
Berry Conway, when at the peak of his form, could do the distance from Mulberry Grove to Valley Fields station in about eighty-three seconds. Lord Hoddesdon, a slower mover, took longer. However, pausing at frequent intervals to remove his gray top hat and dab his forehead with a handkerchief, for the day was warm, he eventually reached Benjafield Road, at the corner of which stands the public house which had exercised so powerful an attraction for Lord Biskerton on the day of his arrival. Here, having by now completely forgotten the instructions given to him at the station, he came to a halt, feeling lost.
FROM the spot where Lord Hoddesdon was standing to the gates of Peacehaven was, as it happened, a matter of a few dozen yards. Unaware of this, he looked about him for guidance and observed, his powerful shoulders shoring up the wall of the public house, a man in a cloth cap. He was sucking thoughtfully at an empty pipe, and he regarded Lord Hoddesdon, as he approached, with a rather unpleasant expression. The fact was, he had taken an instant dislike to his social superior’s gray top hat.
Nothing in the life of a great city is more complex than the rules that govern the selection of the correct headgear for use in the various divisions of that city. In Bond Street, or Piccadilly, a gray top hat is chic, de rigueur, and le dernier cri. In Valley Fields, less than seven miles distant, it is outré and, one might almost say, farouche. The Royal Enclosure at Ascot would have admired Lord Hoddesdon’s hat. The cloth-capped man, in a muzzy, beery sort of way, took it almost as a personal affront. It was as if he felt that his manhood and self-respect had been outraged by this gray topper.
Between Lord Hoddesdon and the cloth-capped man, therefore, there may be said to have existed an imperfect sympathy from the very start.
“I want to go to Mulberry Grove,” said Lord Hoddesdon.
The man, without shifting his position, rolled an inflamed eye at him. He stared in silence for a while. Then he gave a curt nod.
“Awright,” he said. “Don’t be long.”
Lord Hoddesdon endeavored to make himself clearer.
“Can you—ah—direct me to Mulberry Grove?”
The eye rolled round once more. It traveled over Lord Hoddesdon’s person searchingly, from head to foot and back again. Reaching the head, it paused.
“What sort of a hat do you call that you’ve got on?” asked the man coldly. “A nice sort of hat, I don’t think.”
Lord Hoddesdon was in no mood to chat of hats.
“Never mind my hat!” he said austerely.
The man, however, continued to toy with the theme. Indeed, he harped on it.
“The way you city clurks get yourselves up nowadays,” he said with evident disapproval, “ ’s enough to make a man sick. They wouldn’t ’ave none of that in Moscow. No, nor in Leningrad. The Burjoicy, that’s what you are, for all your top ’ats. Do you know what would happen to you in Moscow? Somebody—as it might be Stayling—would come along and ’e’d look at that ’at and ’e’d say, ‘What are you doing, you Burjoice, swanking round in a ’at like that?’ and ’e’d . . .”
Lord Hoddesdon moved away. He lost thereby some probably very valuable and interesting information about the manners and customs of Moscow, but he gained release from the society of one on whom he could never look as a friend. There was a small boy standing by the horse trough in front of the public house, and to him he now addressed his questioning.
“Which is the way to Mulberry Grove, my little fellow?” he asked, quite amiably for a man with murder in his heart and a blood pressure well above the normal. “I should be much obliged if you would inform me.”
Civility met with civility. His little fellow stopped dabbling his fingers in the water and pointed.
“Dahn there, sir, and first to the left,” he said politely.
“Thank you,” said Lord Hoddesdon. “Thank you. Thank you.”
He moved off in the direction indicated, casting at the cloth-capped man as he went a look of censure. It is not easy to express very much in a look, but what Lord Hoddesdon wished to convey was that he hoped the cloth-capped man had been listening in on this scene and had been properly impressed by the exemplary attitude of one who, though so many years his junior, might well be taken by him as a model of deportment. A vague idea of returning and giving the suave lad a penny passed through his mind, to be abandoned immediately in favor of the far more sensible and businesslike step of going on and doing nothing of the kind. However, he had almost decided to look back and smile at the little fellow, when something exceptionally hard struck him suddenly between the shoulder blades. It was a stone. And, spinning round, he perceived the youthful Chesterfield in full flight up the road.
Lord Hoddesdon was dumfounded. What had occurred seemed to him for an instant incredible. If he had been aware that the polite stripling and the man in the cloth cap were son and father he would have divined that the same hatred of gray top hats which animated the father ran also in the blood of the son. It was a simple case of hereditary instinct. But he did not know this. All he thought about the blood of the son was that he wanted to have it, and with this end in view he got smartly off the mark and, though he had not run for years, was soon pelting up the road at an excellent pace—a pace far too grueling for the little fellow, whom he overtook in the first ten yards.
THERE are two schools of thought concerning the correct method of dealing with small boys who throw stones at their elders and betters in the public street. Some say they should be kicked, others that they should be smacked on the head. Lord Hoddesdon, no bigot, did both. And for a man who had not smacked head or kicked trouser seat since his early days at Eton he acquitted himself remarkably well. For the space of about half a minute he worked vigorously; then, turning, somewhat out of breath, he retraced his steps and resumed the trek to Mulberry Grove.
He felt strangely elated. It was as if some healing balm had been applied to his bruised soul. For the first time that afternoon he was conscious of being quietly happy. As the result of this burst of exercise, venom had gone out of him. An urge came upon him to whistle, and he was just pursing his lips to do so, when a voice spoke at his side.
“ ’Oy!” said the voice.
It was the cloth-capped man. He had put his pipe away, and was walking by Lord Hoddesdon’s side, smelling strongly of mixed ales.
“What did you want to hit the nipper for?” asked the cloth-capped man.
Lord Hoddesdon made no reply. It was not that the conundrum baffled him, for he had an excellent answer. But he disliked the idea of making this person a confidant. He walked on in silence.
“What did you want to hit my young ’Erbert for?”
Lord Hoddesdon started a little uneasily. My young ’Erbert? This was the first intimation he had received that ties of relationship linked these two. What had seemed at first merely the inquisitiveness of a stranger took on a more sinister significance when it became the muttered outpourings of a father’s heart. From the corner of his eye he flashed a glance at his companion, and wished that it had not been so easy to see him. There was, he perceived, a great deal of this man.
He quickened his steps. He had become now uneasily aware of the deserted nature of the ground he was covering. There was not a policeman in sight. In a place like this, he reflected bitterly, there would probably be only one policeman and he would probably be asleep somewhere instead of doing his duty and busying himself in the interests of the public weal. For a moment, in his shrinking mind, Lord Hoddesdon became rather mordant about the police force of the suburbs.
But he was not able to think long about anything except this unpleasant-looking man who continued to walk step by step with him. Incoherent mutterings had now begun to proceed from this person. His lordship caught the words “city clurk” and “Burjoicy,” repeated far too often for his peace of mind.
IT WAS at the point where the other, struck with a new idea, had begun to waver between stamping him into the mud and impaling him on the railings which decorated the farther side of the pavement that Lord Hoddesdon, who for some little time had been covering the ground in a style which would certainly have led to his disqualification in a walking race, definitely and undisguisedly broke into a run. They had turned the corner now and had come in sight of houses, and it seemed to him that inside one of those houses sanctuary might be obtained.
With a sudden, swift movement Lord Hoddesdon’s rapid walk turned into a gallop.
It is curious to reflect how often in life Fate chooses the same object as a means toward two quite opposite ends. It was Lord Hoddesdon’s gray top hat which had placed him in this very delicate situation, and it was this same top hat which now for the moment extricated him from it. For, even as he started to run, it leaped from his head and rolled across the road, and his companion, sternly set though his mind was on the holy war before him, was humanly frail enough not to be able to resist the lure. The hat went bouncing away, and the cloth-capped man, after but a second’s hesitation, charged in pursuit.
He cornered the hat in the gutter and kicked it. He followed it to where it lay and kicked it again. Finally, he jumped upon it with both feet and then kicked it for the third time. This done, he looked round and was aware of its owner’s coat-tails vanishing at a considerable speed through the gate of the last house down the road. Following swiftly, he passed through the gate, which bore upon it the word “Castlewood,” and, finding nothing of interest in the front garden, hastened round to the back.
Here, too, he found only empty space. He paused a while in thought.
In moments of extreme peril the mind moves rapidly. In the beginning, Lord Hoddesdon had planned to walk with as great a dignity as he could achieve to one of these front doors, to ring the bell, to ask to see the master of the house, to inform the master of the house that he was being followed in a threatening manner by a ruffian who appeared to be worse for drink, to be invited into the drawing-room, and to remain there in a comfortable chair while his host telephoned for aid to the police station. And the entire program had had to be scrapped at a moment’s notice.
Obviously, there was no time for leisurely ringing of bells. An alternative scheme had to be planned out. This alternative scheme Lord Hoddesdon had not been able to shape at the moment of his entry into the garden of Castlewood, but it came to him as he rounded the angle of the house and perceived on the ground floor an open window. Through this window he dived with an adroitness which would have given a rabbit an idea or two for the brushing-up of its technique; and when his pursuer also entered the garden Lord Hoddesdon was lurking on all fours inside the room.
And there for a moment the matter rested.
How long it would have gone on resting it is difficult to say. The cloth-capped man was a slow thinker, and it might have been some little while before he would have been able to observe and deduce. As it happened, however, an irresistible urge came over Lord Hoddesdon at this moment to raise his head and peer out of the window, to see what was happening in the great world outside. The first thing he saw was his pursuer, and his pursuer most unfortunately chanced to be looking in that very direction.
THE next instant the peaceful stillness of Mulberry Grove was shattered by a stern view halloo, and the instant after that Lord Hoddesdon had banged the window down and bolted it. And then for a space these two representatives of Labor and the Old Régime stood staring at each other through the glass, like rare fishes in adjoining compartments of an aquarium.
Lord Hoddesdon was the first to weary of the spectacle. He had seen a good deal of the cloth-capped man in the last quarter of an hour, and he was feeling surfeited. Even observed through glass, the other’s inflamed eyes had so hideous a menace that he wished to be as far away from them as possible. Hastily withdrawing, therefore, he backed out of the room and found himself in a passage. At the end of this passage was the front door, and beside the front door a hat-stand, from which protruded, like heads of the Burjoicy neatly skewered on pikes after the social revolution, divers hats. And at the sight of these his lordship’s mind began working along new lines.
The loss of his gray topper had not until now affected Lord Hoddesdon very deeply. Subconsciously, no doubt, he had been aware of it, but it was only at this moment that the full shock of bereavement really smote him. Seeing these hats, he realized for the first time his own lidless condition, and for the first time appreciated the vital necessity of remedying it. It was his ambition, if he ever got out of this ghastly suburb alive, to return to London. And at the thought of accomplishing that return bare-headed every blue drop of Hoddesdon blood in his veins froze. To go through London’s streets without a hat was unthinkable.
Nevertheless, as he stood scanning the hat-stand with the eyes of a shipwrecked mariner sighting a sail, his heart distinctly sank. Whoever owned this house appeared to have a perfectly astonishing taste in hats. On the three pegs were a cap with purple checks (a thing of pure nightmare), an almost unbelievable something constructed of black straw, and a bowler. It was at the bowler that his lordship directed his gaze. The other two, he saw at a glance, were out of the question.
Even the bowler was not ideal. It was of a type not often met with nowadays, being almost square in shape and flattened down at the top. But it was so distinctly better than the cap and the straw that Lord Hoddesdon did not hesitate. Bounding swiftly forward he snatched it from its peg. And as he did so there came from behind him a roar like that of a more than usually irritable lioness witnessing the theft of one of her cubs.
“Hi!”
Lord Hoddesdon turned as if the word had been a red-hot poker pressed against his form-fitting trousers. He beheld, hurrying swiftly down the stairs, a little man with a mauve face and a monocle.
It was the practice of Major Flood-Smith, of Castlewood, to take a siesta in his bedroom on these warm afternoons. Today, he had been looking forward to uninterrupted repose. His niece Katherine had gone off with that young fellow, Smith, from next door, to a matinée performance at the Brixton Astoria, and he had the house to himself. Well content, he was just dozing off when that view halloo from the garden had jerked him off the bed like a hooked minnow, and a glance out of the window had shown him a revolting-looking individual in a cloth cap, standing with his nose glued against the window of the morning-room. Pausing only to snatch his service revolver out of its drawer, Major Flood-Smith had charged downstairs, and he would be damned if here wasn’t another blasted fellow strolling about the hall pinching his hats.
All the householder in Major Flood-Smith was roused.
“You!” he thundered. “What the devil are you doing?”
THE whole trend of Lord Hoddesdon’s education and upbringing had gone, from his earliest years, towards the instillment in him of a deep love of good form. There were things, he had been taught at Eton, at Oxford, and subsequently during his brief career as a member of His Majesty’s Household Brigade, which were not done. And one of these things, he felt instinctively, was the stealing of square-topped bowler hats from men to whom he had never been introduced.
It was not unnatural, therefore, that the suave calm with which he usually met life’s happenings should now have deserted him. Unable to speak, he remained standing where he was, holding the bowler.
“Who are you? How did you get in? What are you doing with that hat?” proceeded the major, decorating the bald questions with a few of the rich expletives which a soldier inevitably picks up in his years of service. Major Flood-Smith had spent seven years with the Loyal Royal Worcestershires, who are celebrated for their plain speech.
Lord Hoddesdon was still unable to utter, but he was capable of the graceful gesture. With something of Old World courtesy he replaced the bowler on its peg.
The major, however, appeared dissatisfied.
“Breaking and entering! In broad daylight! Stealing my hats under my very nose! Well, I’ll be . . .”
He mentioned some of the things he would be. Most of them were spiritual, a few merely physical.
Lord Hoddesdon at last found words. But, when they came, it would have been better if he had remained silent.
“It’s quite all right,” he said.
He could scarcely have selected a more unfortunate remark. Major Flood-Smith’s ripe complexion deepened to a still more impressive purple. He jumped about.
“Quite all right?” he cried. “Quite all right? Quite all right? Quite all right? I catch you in my hall, sneaking my ensanguined hats, and you have the hæmorrhagic insolence to stand there and tell me it’s quite all right. I’ll show you how all right it is. I’ll . . .”
HE STOPPED abruptly. This was not because he had finished his observations, for he had not. If ever there was a retired major of the line who had all his music still within him, he was that major.
But at this moment there came from the rear of the house the dreadful sound of splintering glass. It rang out like an explosion, and it spoke straight to the deeps in Major Flood-Smith’s soul.
He quivered from head to foot, and said something sharply in one of the lesser known dialects of the Hindu Kush.
Lord Hoddesdon, though he was not feeling himself, was capable of understanding what had happened. There is a certain point past which you cannot push the freemen of Valley Fields. That point, he now realized, had been reached when he had closed the morning-room window, leaving the cloth-capped man standing outside like a Peri at the gates of Paradise. It is ever the instinct of the proletariat, when excluded from any goal by a sheet of glass, to throw bricks. This the cloth-capped man had now done, and it surprised Lord Hoddesdon that he had not done it sooner. No doubt what had occasioned the delay was the selection of a suitable brick.
Major Flood-Smith was torn between two conflicting desires. On the one hand, he yearned to remain and thresh out with his present companion the whole question of hats. On the other, his windows were being broken.
The good man loves his hat. But he also loves his windows.
Another crash swayed the balance. The windows had it. Barking like a seal, Major Flood-Smith disappeared down the passage, and Lord Hoddesdon, saved at the eleventh hour, snatched at the hat-stand, wrenched the front door open, banged it behind him, leaped into the street, and raced madly out of Mulberry Grove in the direction of the railway station.
It was only when he had come in sight of it that he discovered that what he had taken from the stand was the cap with the purple checks.
“I knew you would bungle it,” said Lady Vera.
BERRY CONWAY came round the corner into Mulberry Grove and paused outside the gate of the Nook to fumble in his pocket for his latchkey. He eyed Mulberry Grove with dislike. He frowned at the trim little house. At the two swans, Egbert and Percy, he glowered. And when from the premises of the Valley Fields Lawn Tennis Club there was borne to his ears the happy yapping of eager flappers, he groaned slightly and winced, like Prometheus watching his vulture dropping in for lunch.
The inexplicable removal from his life of the only girl he had ever loved or could love had made existence a weary affair for Berry these days.
Having found his key, he entered the house and went to his bedroom. There he removed his clothes and, putting on a dressing-gown, proceeded to the bathroom.
He splashed about in cold water for a while, then, returning to the bedroom, began to don the costume of the English gentleman about to dine. For tonight was the night of the annual banquet of the old boys of his school: and, though since his entry into the ranks of the wage slaves he had preferred to lead a hermit existence and avoid, as far as was possible, the companions of his opulent days, some lingering sentimentality still caused him to turn out for these functions.
He had just completed his toilet when a knock sounded on the door. He had expected it sooner. He opened the door, congratulating himself, as he did so, that he had finished tying his tie. Otherwise, the faithful Old Retainer would have insisted on doing it for him.
“I didn’t hear you come in, Master Berry,” said the Old Retainer, beaming. “How nice you look. Would you like me just to straighten your tie?”
“Go ahead,” said Berry, resignedly.
“I always think a tie looks so different when you straighten it.”
“I know what you mean,” said Berry. “Straighter.”
“That’s it. Straighter. Gladys-at-Castlewood tells me,” said the Old Retainer, beginning the news bulletin, “that they had burglars there this afternoon. She says she’s never seen the major look so purple. It was her afternoon out, she says, and when she came home he was walking round and round the garden with a pistol in his hand, muttering to himself. He was very cross, Gladys tells me. Well, I mean, enough to make any gentleman cross having men break into his house and steal his caps.”
“DID somebody steal that cap of the major’s?” asked Berry, brightening. He had disliked the thing for eighteen months.
“They did, Master Berry. And somebody else broke two of the back windows with a stone.”
“Mulberry Grove is looking up.”
“But it’s all right,” said Mrs. Wisdom soothingly. “I’ve had a word with Mr. Finbow, and he's promised to keep an eye on us.”
“Who’s Mr. Finbow?”
“He’s a gentleman in the police, and though Mulberry Grove, he says, isn’t, strictly speaking, on his beat, he will make a point, he says, of looking in every now and then to see that we are all right. I thought it very civil of him and gave him a slice of cake. Isn’t it odd, it seems that Mr. Finbow comes from the very same part of the country where I used to live when I was a slip of a girl? I always say it’s a small world, after all. Well, I mean, when I say the very same part of the country, my dear father and mother had a cottage in Herefordshire and Mr. Finbow lived in Birmingham, but it does seem odd, all the same. We had a nice talk. Would you like me to get a brush and give you a good brushing, Master Berry?”
“No, thanks,” said Berry hastily. “I haven’t time. I must hurry. If I miss the six-fifty, I shall be late for my dinner.”
“Be careful not to overheat yourself, dear.”
“Don’t worry. I’m not as hungry as all that.”
“I mean to say, it’s so dangerous to sit in a drafty railway carriage with the pores open.”
“I’ll shut them,” said Berry. “Good-by.”
HE CHARGED out of the house, causing his next-door neighbor, Lord Biskerton, to utter a startled cry of admiration. The Biscuit at the moment was engaged in weeding his front garden, a pursuit which, like a good householder, he had taken up with energy.
“Golly!” said the Biscuit, eying his friend’s splendor open-mouthed. “Giving the populace a thorough treat, are you not? What is it? Meat tea at Buckingham Palace?”
“O. C. dinner,” explained Berry briefly. “And if you weren’t a slacker you would be coming, too.”
The Biscuit shook his head.
“Never again for me,” he said. “Not any more of those binges for me. I know them too well. The committee of management either stick you in among a drove of dotards who talk across you about the time they were given a half-holiday because of the Battle of Crécy, or else you get dumped down with a lot of kids whose heads you want to smack. And it is a very moot point which of the two situations is the fouler. I was with the kids last time. I’ll swear some of them had come in prams. Have you noticed, Berry, old man, how extraordinarily young everybody seems to be nowadays? That’s because we’re getting on. Silver threads among the gold, laddie. How old are you?”
“Twenty-six next birthday,” Berry replied.
“Pretty senile,” said the Biscuit, clicking his tongue and jabbing at a weed. “Pretty senile. And the year after that you’ll be twenty-seven, and then, if I have got my figures correct, twenty-eight. Just waiting for the end, you might say. It’s no use kidding ourselves, old friend, we’re aging rapidly, and our place is by the hearth.”
“You won’t come, then?”
“No. I shall remain here and stroll in my garden. Quite possibly little Kitchie Valentine will be strolling in hers, and we will exchange ideas across the fence. I maintain that in the suburbs it is a duty to cultivate one’s neighbors. There is in English life too much of this ridiculous keeping of oneself to oneself. I deprecate it.”
Printer’s error corrected above:
Magazine, p. 38b, omitted “said” before “Berry, resignedly.”