Bachelors Anonymous (10 page)

Seeing
Mr Trout, he halted.

‘Oh,
sorry, I.L.,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know you were in conference.’

‘Just
chewing the fat,’ said Mr Llewellyn. ‘This is my old friend Trout.’

In his
present mood any old friend of Mr Llewellyn was an old friend of Joe’s. Nothing
could have been more cordial than his manner.

‘How do
you do?’ he said. ‘How do you do, Mr Trout? What a beautiful world it is, is it
not?’

Mr
Trout gave a short dry cough, as if to indicate that he had seen better in his
time, but Joe was not to be discouraged.

‘Full
of love and joy and laughter,’ he proceeded, flashing on the lawyer as sunny a
smile as had ever been seen in the S.W.7 postal division of London. ‘It makes
one want to sing and dance and turn hand-springs, doesn’t it?’

Another
short cough seemed to suggest that Mr Trout was conscious of no urge in this
direction.

‘I’m
off to get my hair trimmed. Can’t take a girl to dinner looking like an English
sheepdog,’ said Joe, and with another smile as dazzling as its predecessor he
floated from the room.

A
weighty silence followed his departure. Mr Llewellyn broke it.

‘See
what I mean?’

Mr
Trout said he did indeed. His face was very grave.

‘Got it
right up his nose,’ said Mr Llewellyn.

‘I have
seldom seen a case where the symptoms were more clearly marked,’ said Mr Trout.
‘He is taking her to dinner.’

‘That’s
what he’s doing.’

‘And
getting his hair trimmed into the bargain.’

‘You
consider that bad?’

‘Don’t
you?’

‘I must
say it struck me as sinister.’

‘Nothing
could be more so. The first thing one notices about these young fellows when
they go down with the ailment is that they are always getting their hair
trimmed. That and having a shampoo and manicure are the infallible signs that
the case is serious. A man who has his hair trimmed and his hands manicured
before taking a girl to dinner means business. But it’s the dinner that does
it, of course.’

‘I
proposed to Grayce at dinner,’ said Mr Llewellyn, wincing at the recollection.
‘It’s the low lighting.‘

‘That
and the music.’

‘And the
champagne. Pickering is sure to order champagne.’

‘He
must be stopped. I must call the boys together for an emergency meeting.’

‘But
aren’t they all in California?’

‘That’s
right, so they are. I was forgetting.’

‘You
could reason with him by yourself.’

‘Hardly
ever effective. It’s the weight of mass argument that gets results. If only
Fred Basset and Johnny Runcible and G. J. Flannery were here.’

‘But
they aren’t, dammit, and he’s taking the girl to Barribault’s.’

‘Why do
you say that as if it were significant?’

‘Because
they have a blasted fiddler there who comes to your table and plays gooey love
songs, the sort of stuff that makes a girl all sentimental and feeling that she
wants to marry the nearest thing in sight. Let that guy get going around them, and
there isn’t a hope that she’ll turn Pickering down.’

A look
of resolution had come into Mr Trout’s face. He was plainly a man who had
reached a decision.

‘That
settles it,’ he said.

‘Settles
what?’

‘There
is nothing to do but use Method B.’

‘Method
B?’

‘It is
not a course of action I am fond of, and we never use it except in particularly
obstinate cases where verbal argument has failed and the subject is standing
firm on his resolve to get his hair trimmed and take the girl to dinner. Should
that happen, we fall back on Method B. We give him a Mickey Finn.’

It was
plain from the quick lighting-up of Mr Llewellyn’s face that Method B had his
full approval. He was a man prone to sudden enthusiasms, and while they lasted
he was entirely under their influence. Mr Trout had convinced him that the only
life that held out any hope of happiness was that of the bachelor, and Joe’s
open partiality for Sally had appalled him. If ever a man needed to be saved
from himself, he felt, it was Joseph Pickering.

‘That
would fix him,’ he said, ‘fix him good. When I first came to America, a man I
met in a bar slipped a Mickey Finn into my drink, and I was out for hours. And
when I came to, you could have paraded all the beautiful girls in New York in
front of me and I wouldn’t have given them a glance. I seemed to have lost the
taste.’

The
brightness of his face vanished. He spoke despondently.

‘But we
haven’t got a Mickey Finn.’

‘I
have,’ said Mr Trout, producing a white pellet from his vest pocket. ‘I always
carry a small supply. So do Fred Basset, Johnny Runcible and G. J. Flannery.
The subjects, especially when young, so often refuse to listen to reason and
become violent. It was only by employing Method B that we were able to dissuade
Otis Bewstridge from taking his show girl to dinner. Drastic, you may say, but
we of Bachelors Anonymous stop at nothing when duty calls. We regard ours as a
holy cause.’

It was
some time before Joe returned. His delay had been occasioned, he said, by the
fact that in addition to the hair trim he had had a shampoo and a manicure. He
took up the conversation where he had left off.

‘I was
speaking, if you remember, Mr Trout, of what a beautiful world this is. With
your permission I would like to go deeper into this matter. What makes it so
beautiful is that there are so many delightful people in it. Everywhere I went
after I had left you I met a series of the most absolute corkers. Take the
fellow who trimmed my hair. Many men are standoffish with strangers, but this
chap was affability itself. He never stopped talking. _He told me the entire
plot of a picture he has seen on his night off, and he held me spellbound. I
wonder if it was one of yours, I.L. It was about—’

‘Have a
drink,’ said Mr Llewellyn. ‘Not a bad idea.’

‘I’ll
fix it for you,’ said Mr Trout.

3

Sally was sitting in the
lobby at Barribault’s, feeling sick. The Texas millionaires and Indian
maharajahs grouped at the little tables around her noticed nothing untoward in
her appearance, for her emotions did not show on the outside, but it was as
though she had swallowed some nauseous draught and was finding it hard to bear
up under the effects of it. She was seeing Joseph Pickering as he really was,
and the revelation of his true nature was enough to appal any girl who had
allowed herself to become fond of him.

Exactly
when she had begun to be uneasy she could not have said, but it was probably
when she had looked at her watch and seen that the hands pointed to ten minutes
to eight. Arriving punctually at seven-thirty, she had been a little surprised
not to find Joe already there, but she had taken a seat without any misgivings,
for with traffic conditions what they were a man might well be a minute or two
behind time. But twenty minutes behind time was another matter.

Her
first thought was that he must have had an accident. It was only much later
that some evil imp seemed to whisper in her ear the revolting truth. He was not
coming. He had never intended to come. This was his way of repaying her for her
failure to keep their luncheon appointment.

It
seemed incredible that he could have been so petty, yet what other explanation
could there be? If he had had an accident, he would have telephoned. Even if
the accident had been a serious one and he had been taken to hospital, a doctor
or someone would have telephoned. No, he was deliberately standing her up, as
Mr Llewellyn would have said, and it was not long before the sensation of
nausea gave way to a boiling fury, and it was as Joseph Pickering Ordinaries,
once quoted so high, had experienced a sharp drop and were down in the cellar
with no takers, that she heard her name spoken and looking up saw Jaklyn
Warner.

Jaklyn,
though never fortunate enough to penetrate to the ornate grill room, was a
frequent visitor to Barribault’s lobby, for it seldom lacked the presence of
one or two of his wealthier acquaintances who might be good for a small loan if
approached with the right wistfulness. And he had never quite lost the hope
that one of these nights some bighearted reveller, mellowed by Barribault’s
cocktails, might invite him to come along and have a bite of dinner with him.

Tonight
he had not seen anyone who looked like a promising prospect, but he had seen
Sally, and he lost no time in joining her. His eagerness to ascertain her
reactions to that letter of his was naturally acute.

‘Why,
hullo, Sally,’ he said. ‘All alone?’

Sally’s
voice as she replied was bleak.

‘Hullo,
Jaklyn. Yes, I’m all alone.’

‘I wish
I could ask you to have dinner with me, but unfortunately I’ve come out without
my money and they don’t know me here, so I can’t sign the bill.’

‘I
don’t want any dinner. You can see me home, if you like. Not Laburnam Road. Fountain
Court, Park Lane.’

‘Yes,
somebody told me you had moved.’

‘I’m
living there with another girl.’

‘So
whoever it was who told me said. Was it her you were waiting for?’

‘No,
she’s gone to a dinner. Something to do with her old school.’

Jaklyn
was relieved. He would have found a meeting with Daphne Dolby embarrassing. It
is never agreeable for a man who is engaged to one girl and has just proposed
to another to find himself in the company of both of them.

They
walked the short distance to Fountain Court in silence. Years of studying other
people’s moods had made Jaklyn an expert on when to speak and when not to, and
he could see that Sally was upset about something and not disposed for
conversation. It was only when she had opened the door of number 3A and he had
followed her into the living-room that he ventured on the question that was
occupying his mind to the exclusion of all other thoughts and said:

‘Sally.’

‘Yes?.’

‘Er,’
said Jaklyn.

He was
not sure he liked the way she was looking at him. It seemed to him a
speculative look, as if she were weighing him up, and he was a man who
preferred not to be weighed up.

And
indeed this was what Sally was doing. She had had no difficulty in interpreting
that ‘Er’. She was to be given the opportunity of putting the clock back and
establishing their relations on what might be called the old Much Middlefold
basis.

Had
this occurred before Joe Pickering had revealed himself as the impossible
character he really was, she would have had no hesitation in crushing Jaklyn’s
hopes with what Mr Trout would have called a
nolle prosequi,
but now she
found herself wavering.

What
turned the scale was that he was looking so particularly wistful. It was so
obvious that all this while he had been eating his heart out for the one girl
in his life and now could endure it no longer. Impossible not to be touched by
such fidelity, especially when the man you had mistakenly supposed loved you
as you had mistakenly supposed you loved him had turned out not so much to have
feet of clay as to be clay all the way up. It was not a subject she liked to
let her mind dwell on, but she did feel very definitely that a girl idiotic
enough to give a thought to Joseph Pickering ought to be placed under some kind
of restraint.

She
came to a decision.

‘I got
your letter, Jaklyn.’

‘And?’

‘The
answer is Yes. I’ll marry you if you really want me.’

‘Want
you!’ said Jaklyn, with fervour.

He had
concentrated all his faculties on making this fervour as convincing as
possible, but it now occurred to him that it would be judicious before going
further to render quite clear his complete ignorance of the change in Sally’s
financial condition. There must be no suspicion on her part that he was in any
way influenced by the fact of her having joined the ranks of the wealthy.

He
proceeded to do so, regretting, for it would have been a neat way of putting
it, that the popularity of the song of that tide made it impossible for him to
say that he could not give her anything but love.

‘I’m
afraid we shall be very poor, darling, but what of that? What’s wrong with
being poor if you love each other? It’s fun. Everything becomes an adventure.
The dreams, the plans, the obstacles that must be surmounted—the rich don’t
have any of that. They don’t know how happy you can be in an attic. With a
candle by the bed. When you blow out the candle, you make believe you’re in a
room in a castle with silk hangings and cupids dancing on the ceiling. Wonderful,
wonderful!’

He
thought for a moment of going on to the crust of bread for breakfast, but was
not sure that that might not be overdoing it. Even as it was, Sally showed
herself unsympathetic to his poetic flight.