A Few Quick Ones (11 page)

And discovery, unless he could somehow balance the budget, was of course inevitable. Sooner or later Mrs. Bingo would be taking a look at the infant's wee little passbook, and when she did would immediately spot something wrong with the wee little figures. "Hoy!" she would cry. "Where's that ten-spot you said you were depositing?" and from this to the bleak show-down would be but a short step.

It was a situation in which many fellows would just have turned their faces to the wall and waited for the end. But there is good stuff in Bingo. A sudden inspiration showed him the way out. He sat right down and wrote a story about a little girl called Gwendoline and her cat Tibby. The idea of course being to publish it in
Wee Tots
and clean up.

It was no easy task. Until he started on it he had had no notion what blood, sweat and tears are demanded from the poor sap who takes a pop at the life literary, and a new admiration for Mrs. Bingo awoke in him. Mrs. Bingo, he knew, did her three thousand words a day without ricking a muscle, and to complete this Tibby number, though it ran only to about fifteen hundred, took him over a week, during which period he on several occasions as near as a toucher went off his onion.

However, he finished it at last, copied it out neatly, submitted it to himself, read it with considerable interest and accepted it, putting it down on the charge sheet for ten of the best. And when pay day arrived and no tenner, he sought audience of Purkiss.

"Oh, Mr. Purkiss," he said. "Sorry to come butting in at a moment when you were probably meditating, but it's about that story."

Purkiss looked at him fishily. Nature having made it impossible for him to look at anyone otherwise, he being a man with a face like a halibut.

"Story?"

Bingo explained the circumstances. He said that he was the author of "Tibby's Wonderful Adventure" in the current issue, and Purkiss Oh-yes-ed and said he had read it with considerable interest, and Bingo oh-thanks-ed and simpered coyly, and then there was a rather long silence.

"Well, how about the emolument?" said Bingo at length, getting down to the
res.

Purkiss started. The fishy glitter in his eye became intensified. He looked like a halibut which has just been asked by another halibut to lend it a couple of quid till next Wednesday.

"There should be a tenner coming to me," said Bingo.

"Oh, no, no, no," said Purkiss. "Oh, no, no, no, no, no. All contributions which you may make to the paper are of course covered by your salary."

"What!" cried Bingo. "You mean I don't touch?"

Purkiss assured him that he did not, and Bingo tottered from the room and went off to the club to pull himself together with a couple of quick ones. And he was just finishing the second when Oofy Prosser came in. One glance at him told Bingo that here was the fountainhead to which he must go. He needed someone to lend him a tenner, and Oofy, he felt, was the People's Choice.

Now I need scarcely tell you that a fellow who is going to lend you a tenner must have two prime qualifications. He must be good for the amount and he must be willing to part with it. Oofy unquestionably filled the bill in the first particular, but experience had taught Bingo that he was apt to fall down on the second. Nevertheless it was in optimistic mood that he beetled over to his old friend. Oofy, he reminded himself, was Algernon Aubrey's godfather, and it was only natural to suppose that he could be delighted to come through with a birthday present for the little chap. Well, not delighted, perhaps. Still, a bit of persevering excavating work would probably dig up the needful.

"Oh, hullo, Oofy, old man," he said. "Oofy, old man, do you know what? It's Algy's birthday very shortly."

"Algy who?"

"Algy A. Little. The good old baby. Your godson."

A quick shudder ran through Oofy. He was thinking of the occasion when he had had a severe morning head and Bingo had brought the stripling to his flat and introduced them.

"Oh, my Aunt!" he said. "That frightful little gumboil!"

His tone was not encouraging, but Bingo carried on.

"Presents are now pouring in, and I knew you would be hurt if you were not given the opportunity of contributing some little trifle. Ten quid was what suggested itself to me. The simplest thing," said Bingo, "would be if you were to slip me the money now. Then it would be off your mind."

Oofy flushed darkly beneath his pimples.

"Now listen," he said, and there was no mistaking the ring of determination in his voice. "When you talked me - against my better judgment - into becoming godfather to a child who looks like a ventriloquist's dummy, I expressly stipulated that a silver mug was to be accepted in full settlement, and we had a gentleman's agreement to that effect. It still holds good."

"Ten quid isn't much."

"It's ten quid more than you're going to get out of me."

Bingo was reluctantly compelled to come clean.

"As a matter of fact, Oofy, old man, it's not the baby who wants the stuff, it's me - your old friend, the fellow you've known since he was so high. Unless I get a tenner immediately, disaster stares me in the eyeball. So give of your plenty, Oofy, like the splendid chap you are."

"No!" cried Oofy. "No, no, a thousand times---”

The words died on his lips. It was as though a thought had come, flushing his brow.

"Listen," he said. "Are you doing anything this evening?"

"No. Unless I decide to end it all in the river.''

"Can you slip away from home?"

"Yes, I could do that all right. As it happens, I'm all alone at the moment. My wife and Mrs. Purkiss, the moon of my boss's delight, have legged it to Brighton to attend some sort of Old Girls binge at their late school, and won't be back till tomorrow."

"Good. I want you to dine at the Ritz."

"Fine. Nothing I should like better. I meet you there, do I?"

"You do not. I'm leaving for Paris this afternoon. What you meet is a girl named Mabel Murgatroyd with red hair, a vivacious manner and a dimple on the left side of the chin. You give her dinner."

Bingo drew himself up. He was deeply shocked at the other's loose ideas of how married men behave when their wives are away.

"Do this, and you get your tenner."

Bingo lowered himself.

"Listen," said Oofy. "I will tell you all."

It was a dubious and discreditable story that he related. For some time past, it appeared, he had been flitting round this girl like a pimpled butterfly, and it had suddenly come to him with a sickening shock that his emotional nature had brought him to the very verge of matrimony. Another step and he would be over the precipice. It was the dimple that did it principally, he said. Confronted with it at short range, he tended to say things which in sober retrospect he regretted.

"I asked her to dine with me tonight," he concluded, "and if I go, I'm sunk. Only instant flight can save me. But that's not all. I want you not only to give her dinner, but finally and definitely to choke her off me. You must roast me roundly. Pretend you think I'm the world's leading louse."

The verb "pretend" did not seem to Bingo very happily chosen, but he nodded intelligently.

"Here's your tenner," said Oofy, "and here's the money for the dinner. Don't get carried away by that dimple and forget to roast me."

"I won't."

"Pitch it strong. I'll tell you some things to say."

"No, no, don't bother," said Bingo. "I'll think of them."

Bingo had not been waiting long in the lobby of the Ritz that night when a girl appeared, so vermilion in the upper storey and so dimpled on the left side of the chin that he had no hesitation in ambling up and establishing contact.

"Miss Murgatroyd?"

"You never spoke a truer word."

"My name is Little, R. P. Oofy Prosser, having been unexpectedly called away to the Continent, asked me to roll up and deputise for him."

"Well, I must say it's a bit thick, asking a girl to dinner and then buzzing off to Continents."

"Not for Oofy," said Bingo, starting the treatment. "His work is generally infinitely thicker than that. I don't know how well you know him?"

"Fairly well."

"When you know him really well you will realize that you are up against something quite exceptional Take a wart hog, add a few slugs and some of those things you see under flat stones, sprinkle liberally with pimples, and you will have something which, while of course less loathsome than Alexander Prosser, will give you the general idea."

And so saying, he led her into the dining salon and the meal started.

It went with a swing from start to finish. The girl's views on Oofy proved to be as sound as his own. She told him that she had gone around with this Prosser because he had made such a point of it, but, left to herself, she would not have touched him with a ten-foot pole. And as Bingo would not willingly have touched Oofy with an eleven-foot pole, a perfect harmony prevailed.

It was some two hours later that the girl rose.

"Oh, don't go yet," pleaded Bingo, for it seemed to him that they had not nearly exhausted the topic of Oofy, but she was firm.

"I must," she said. "I promised to meet a man I know at one of these private gambling places."

The words stirred Bingo like a bugle. He had heard much of these establishments, but had never had the opportunity of visiting one, and the tenner Oofy had given him seemed to leap in his pocket. Technically, of course, it belonged to Algernon Aubrey, but he knew no son of his would object to him borrowing it for the evening for such a worthy purpose.

"Gosh!" he said. "You couldn't take me along, could you?"

"Why, of course, if you want to come. It's out in the wilds of St. John's Wood somewhere."

"Really? Then it's on my way home. I live in St. John's Wood."

"I've got the address written down. Forty-three Magnolia Road."

Bingo, always on the lookout for omens and portents, leaped in his seat. Any lingering doubts he may have entertained as to the advisability of arranging that loan with Algernon Aubrey vanished. Obviously this was going to be his lucky night, and he would be vastly surprised if on the morrow he would not be able to pay twenty or thirty pounds into the other's wee little deposit account.

"Of all the coincidences!" he exclaimed. "That's next door but one to my little nest." The girl said Well, fancy that, adding that it was a small world, and Bingo agreed that he had seldom met a smaller.

The police raid on Number Forty-Three Magnolia Road took place, oddly enough, just as Bingo was preparing to leave. He had lost the last of his borrowed capital at the roulette board owing to a mistaken supposition that Red was going to turn up, and was standing at an open window, trying by means of some breaths of fresh air to alleviate that Death-where-is-thy-sting feeling that comes to gamesters at such times, when suddenly bells began to ring all over the place and a number of those present, jostling him to one side, proceeded to pour out of the window in a foaming stream.

Always a quick thinker, it took him but an instant to appreciate that the minds of these persons were working along the right lines. He knew what happened to those who dallied and loitered on occasions like this. They appeared next day before the awful majesty of the Law, charged with being found on enclosed premises, entered by virtue of a warrant in writing signed by the Commissioner of Police and alleged to be a common gaming house, contrary to Section 6 of the Gaming Act of 1845,
the last thing a young husband, whose wife disapproved of gaming-houses, would wish to occur.

With the utmost promptitude he added himself to the torrent. A quick dash, and he was in the garden of the house next door to his own, hiding in a convenient water barrel that stood against the potting shed, where some moments later he was joined by Mabel Murgatroyd, who seemed in petulant mood.

"This is the fourth or fifth time this has happened to me," she said peevishly, as she slid into the barrel's interior. "Why can't these rozzers have a heart and not be forever interfering with private enterprise? Do you know what? I had a quid on sixteen, and sixteen came up, but before I could collect the bells began to ring and it was Ho for the open spaces. Thirty-seven pounds sterling gone with the wind. Shift over a bit, will you." Bingo shifted over a bit.

"These water barrels are always rather cramped," he said. "Still, this one hasn't any water in it," he added, pointing out the bright side.

"No, there's that, of course. But last time I hid in a cucumber frame. Solid comfort, that was. Ease away, you're crowding me. I wish you wouldn't suddenly expand like that."

"I was only breathing."

"Well, don't breathe. Is this your water barrel, by the way?"

"No, I'm just a lodger. What gave you that idea?"

"I thought you told me you lived next door to the recent Casino."

"Next door but one. We are at the moment enjoying the hospitality of an artist of the name of Quintin."

"Nice fellow?"

"Not particularly."

"Ah, well, who is? Hullo, am I wrong, or have things quieted down somewhat? I believe the All Clear's been blown."

And so it proved. They emerged, paused for a moment on the lawn to take a cordial farewell, and then she went her way and he his. With something of the emotions of one who has been tried in the furnace, he hopped over the fence, sneaked into the house and so to bed.

He slept late next morning, and was about to set out for the office of
Wee Tots,
though feeling ill attuned to the task of providing wholesome reading matter for the juvenile public, when Mrs. Bingo came in, back from Brighton.

"Oh, hullo, my precious dream-rabbit," said Bingo with as much animation as he could dig up. "Welcome to Meadowsweet Hall. I've missed you, Angel."

"Me, too, you, sweetie-pie. And I seem to have missed all sorts of excitement. Mrs. Simmons across the way was telling me about it. Apparently those people at Number Forty-Three have been running one of those gambling places, and last night it was raided by the police."