Nothing Serious (10 page)

Agnes
was staring like a child at a saucer of ice cream. She had revised her
intention of telling this man what she thought of him. His eyes, his clean-cut
face, his perfect figure and his clothes had made a profound and instantaneous
impression on her, giving her the sort of sensation which she had experienced
on the occasion when she had done the short third at Squashy Hollow in one, a
sort of dizzy feeling that life had nothing more to offer.

“Sharks
get in the way and hamper a man. The time I saved the Princess della Raviogli
in the Indian Ocean there were half a dozen of them, horsing about and behaving
as if the place belonged to them. I had to teach one or two of them a sharp
lesson with my Boy Scout pocket knife. The curse of the average shark is that
if you give it the slightest encouragement it gets above itself and starts
putting on airs.”

Agnes
felt that she must speak, but there seemed so little that she could say.

“You’re
English, aren’t you?” she asked.

He
raised a deprecating hand.

“Call
me rather a cosmopolite, dear lady. I was born in the old country and have
resided there from time to time and even served my sovereigns in various
positions of trust such as Deputy Master of the Royal Buckhounds, but all my
life I have been a rover. I flit. I move to and fro. They say of me: ‘Last week
he was in Pernambuco, but goodness knows where he is now. China, possibly, or
Africa or the North Pole.’ Until recently I was in Hollywood. They were doing a
film of life in the jungle, where might is right and the strong man comes into
his own, and they roped me in as adviser. By the way, introduce myself, what?
Fosdyke is the name. Captain Jack Fosdyke.”

Agnes’s
emotion was now such that she was unable for a moment to recall hers. Then it
came back to her.

“Mine
is Flack,” she said, and the statement seemed to interest her companion.

“No,
really? I’ve just been spending the week-end with an old boy named Flack, down
at Sands Point.”

“Josiah
Flack?”

“That’s
right. Amazing place he has. Absolute palace. They tell me he’s one of the
richest men in America. Rather pathetic. This lonely old man, rolling in the
stuff, but with no chick or child.”

“He is
my uncle. How was he?”

“Very
frail. Very, very frail. Not long for this world, it seemed to me.” A sharp
tremor ran through Captain Jack Fosdyke. It was as if for the first time her words
had penetrated to his consciousness. “Your
uncle,
did you say?”

“Yes.”

“Are
you his only niece?”

“Yes.”

“God
bless my soul!” cried Captain Jack Fosdyke with extraordinary animation. “Here,
come and have a cocktail. Come and have some dinner. Well, well, well, well,
well!”

At the
dinner table the spell which her companion was casting on Agnes Flack deepened
in intensity. There seemed no limits to the powers of this wonder man. He met
the head waiter’s eye and made him wilt. He spoke with polished knowledge of
food and wine, comparing the hospitality of princes of his acquaintance with
that of African chiefs he had known. Between the courses he danced like
something dark and slithery from the Argentine. Little wonder that ere long he
had Agnes Flack fanning herself with her napkin.

A girl
who could, had she seen good reason to do so, have felled an ox with a single
blow, in the presence of Captain Jack Fosdyke she felt timid and fluttering. He
was turning on the charm as if through the nozzle of a hose-pipe, and it was
going all over her and she liked it. She was conscious of a dreamlike
sensation, as if she were floating on a pink cloud over an ocean of joy. For
the first time in weeks the image of Sidney McMurdo had passed completely from
her mind. There was still, presumably, a McMurdo, Sidney, in the telephone
book, but in the thoughts of Agnes Flack, no.

The
conversation turned to sports and athleticism.

“You
swim wonderfully,” she said, for that salt water had long since ceased to
rankle.

“Yes, I’ve
always been a pretty decent swimmer. I learned in the lake at Wapshott.”

“Wapshott?”

“Wapshott
Castle, Wapshott-on-the-Wap, Hants., the family seat. I don’t go there often
nowadays—too busy—but when I do I have a good time. Plenty of ridin’, shootin’,
fishin’ and all that.”

“Are
you fond of riding?”

“I like
steeplechasin’. The spice of danger, don’t you know, what? Ever seen the Grand
National?”

“Not
yet.”

“I won
it a couple of times. I remember on the second occasion Lady Astor saying to me
that I ought to saw off a leg and give the other fellows a chance. Lord
Beaverbrook, who overheard the remark, was much amused.”

“You
seem to be marvellous at everything.”

“I am.”

“Do you
play golf?”

“Oh,
rather. Scratch.”

“We
might have a game tomorrow.”

“Not
tomorrow. Lunching in Washington. A bore, but I can’t get out of it. Harry
insisted.”

“Harry?”

“Truman.
We’ll have a game when I get back. I may be able to give you a pointer or two.
Bobby Jones said to me once that he would never have won the British and
American Amateur and Open, if he had’t studied my swing.”

Agnes
gasped.

“You
don’t know Bobby Jones?”

“We’re
like brothers.”

“I once
got his autograph.”

“Say
the word, dear lady, and I’ll get you a signed photograph.” Agnes clutched at
the table. She had thought for a moment that she was going to faint. And so the
long evening wore on.

Mark
you, I do not altogether blame Agnes Flack. Hers had been a sheltered life, and
nothing like Captain Jack Fosdyke had ever happened to her before. Here was a
man who, while looking like something out of a full page coloured advertisement
in a slick paper magazine, seemed to have been everywhere and to know
everybody.

When he
took her out in the moonlight and spoke nonchalantly of Lady Astor, Lord
Beaverbrook, Borneo head hunters, Mervyn Leroy and the brothers Schubert one
can appreciate her attitude and understand how inevitable it was that Sidney
McMurdo should have gone right back in the betting. In accepting the addresses
of Sidney McMurdo, she realized that she had fallen into the error of making
her selection before walking the length of the counter.

In
short, to hurry on this painful part of my story, when Sidney McMurdo
eventually arrived with his suitcase and bag of clubs and was about to clasp
Agnes Flack to his forty-four-inch bosom, he was surprised and distressed to
observe her step back and raise a deprecating hand. A moment later she was
informing him that she had made a mistake and that the photograph on her
dressing-table at even date was not his but that of Captain Jack Fosdyke, to
whom she was now betrothed.

This,
of course, was a nice bit of news for a devoted
fiancé
to get after a
four-hour journey on a hot day in a train without a dining-car, and it is not
too much to say that for an instant Sidney McMurdo tottered beneath it like a
preliminary bout heavyweight who has been incautious enough to place his jaw
en
rapport
with the fist of a fellow member of the Truck Drivers’ Union. Dimly
he heard Agnes Flack saying that she would be a sister to him, and this threat,
for he was a man already loaded up with sisters almost beyond capacity, brought
him out of what had promised to be a lasting coma.

His
eyes flashed, his torso swelled, the muscles leaped about all over him under
his pullover, and with a muttered “Is zat so?” he turned on his heel and left
her, but not before he had asked for and obtained his supplanter’s address. It
was his intention to visit the latter and begin by picking him up by the scruff
of the neck and shaking him like a rat. After that he would carry on as the
inspiration of the moment dictated.

My
efforts up to the present having been directed towards liming the personalities
of Agnes Flack and Captain Jack Fosdyke, I have not as yet given you anything
in the nature of a comprehensive character study of Sidney McMurdo. I should
now reveal that he was as fiercely jealous a man as ever swung an aluminium
putter. Othello might have had a slight edge on him in that respect, but it
would have been a very near thing. Rob him of the girl he loved, and you roused
the lion in Sidney McMurdo.

He was
flexing his muscles and snorting ominously when he reached the cosy bungalow
which Captain Jack Fosdyke had rented for the summer season. The Captain, who
was humming one of the song hits from last year’s war dance of the ‘Mgubo Mgompis
and cleaning an elephant gun, looked up inquiringly as he entered, and Sidney
glowered down at him, his muscles still doing the shimmy.

“Captain
Fosdyke?”

“The
same.”

“Pleased
to meet you.”

“Naturally.”

“Could
I have a word with you?”

“A
thousand.”

“It is
with reference to your sneaking my girl.”

“Oh,
that? Are you this McMurdo bird of whom I have heard Agnes speak?”

“I am.”

“You
were engaged, I understand, till I came along?”

“We
were.”

“Too
bad. Well, that’s how it goes. Will you be seeing her shortly?”

“I may
decide to confront her again.”

“Then
you might tell her I’ve found that elephant gun I mentioned to her. She was
anxious to see the notches on it.”

Sidney,
who had been about to call his companion a sneaking, slinking serpent and bid
him rise and put his hands up, decided that later on would do. He did not at
all like this talk of notches and elephant guns.

“Are
there notches on your elephant gun?”

“There
are notches on all my guns. I use them in rotation. This is the one I shot the
chief of the ‘Mgopo-Mgumpis with.”

The
chill which had begun to creep over Sidney McMurdo from the feet upwards became
more marked. His clenched fists relaxed, and his muscles paused in their
rhythmic dance.

“You
shot him?”

“Quite.”

“Er—do
you often do that sort of thing?”

“Invariably,
when chaps smirch the honour of the Fosdykes. If a bally bounder smirches the
honour of the Fosdykes, I shoot him like a dog.”

“Like a
dog?”

“Like a
dog.”

“What
sort of dog?”

“Any
sort of dog.”

“I see.”

There
was a pause.

“Would
you consider that being plugged in the eye, smirched the honour of the Fosdykes?”

“Unquestionably.
I was once plugged in the eye by the chief of the ‘Mgeebo-Mgoopies. And when
they buried him the little port had seldom seen a costlier funeral.”

‘I see,”
said Sidney McMurdo thoughtfully. “I see. Well, goodbye. It’s been nice meeting
you.”

“It
always is,” said Captain Jack Fosdyke. “Drop in again. I’ll show you my tommy
gun.”

Sidney
McMurdo had not much forehead, being one of those rugged men whose front hair
finishes a scant inch or so above the eyebrows, but there was just room on it
for a ruminative frown, and he was wearing this as he left the bungalow and set
out for a walk along the shore. He was fully alive to the fact that in the
recent interview he had cut a poorish figure, failing entirely to express
himself and fulfil himself.

But how
else, he asked himself, could he have acted? His was a simple nature, easily
baffled by the unusual, and he frankly did not see how he could have coped with
a rival who appeared to be a combination of mass murderer and United States
Armoury. His customary routine of picking rivals up by the scruff of the neck
and shaking them like rats plainly would not have answered here.

He
walked on, brooding, and so distrait was he that anyone watching him would have
given attractive odds that before long he would bump into something. This
occurred after he had proceeded some hundred yards, the object into which he
bumped being a slender, streamlined, serpentine female who looked like one of
those intense young women who used to wreck good men’s lives in the silent
films but seem rather to have died out since the talkies came in. She was dark
and subtle and exotic, and she appeared to be weeping.

Sidney,
however, who was a close observer, saw that the trouble was that she had got a
fly in her eye, and to whip out his pocket handkerchief and tilt her head back
and apply first aid was with him the work of an instant. She thanked him
brokenly, blinking as she did so. Then, for the first time seeming to see him
steadily and see him whole, she gave a little gasp, and said:

“You!”

Her
eyes, which were large and dark and lustrous, like those of some inscrutable
priestess of a strange old religion, focused themselves on him, as she spoke,
and seemed to go through him in much the same way as a couple of red hot
bullets would go through a pound of butter. He rocked back on his heels,
feeling as if someone had stirred up his interior organs with an egg beater.