CHAPTER SIXTEEN
ASTONISHING STATEMENT OF HASH TODHUNTER
THE dinner to which Sam had been bidden that night was at the house of his old friend, Mr. Willoughby Braddock, in John Street, Mayfair, and at ten minutes to eight Mr. Braddock was fidgeting about the morning-room, interviewing his housekeeper, Mrs. Martha Lippett. His guests would be arriving at any moment, and for the last quarter of an hour, a-twitter with the nervousness of an anxious host, he had been popping about the place on a series of tours of inspection, as jumpy, to quote the words of Sleddon, his butler—whom, by leaping suddenly out from the dimly lit dining-room, he had caused to bite his tongue and nearly drop a tray of glasses—as an old hen. The general consensus of opinion below stairs was that Willoughby Braddock, in his capacity of master of the revels, was making a thorough pest of himself.
“You are absolutely certain that everything is all right, Mrs. Lippett?”
“Everything is quite all right, Master Willie,” replied the housekeeper equably.
This redoubtable woman differed from her daughter Claire in being tall and thin and beaked like an eagle. One of the well-known Bromage family of Marshott-in-the-Dale, she had watched with complacent pride the Bromage nose developing in her sons and daughters, and it had always been a secret grief to her that Claire, her favourite, who inherited so much of her forceful and determined character, should have been the only one of her children to take nasally after the inferior, or Lippett, side of the house. Mr. Lippett had been an undistinguished man, hardly fit to mate with a Bromage and certainly not worthy to be resembled in appearance by the best of his daughters.
“You’re sure there will be enough to eat?”
“There will be ample to eat.”
“How about drinks?” said Mr. Braddock, and was reminded by the word of a grievance which had been rankling within his bosom ever since his last expedition to the dining room. He pulled down the corners of his white waistcoat and ran his finger round the inside of his collar. “Mrs. Lippett,” he said, “I—er—I was outside the dining room just now——”
“Were you, Master Willie? You must not fuss so. Everything will be quite all right.”
“——and I overheard you telling Sleddon not to let me have any champagne to-night,” said Mr. Braddock, reddening at the outrageous recollection.
The housekeeper stiffened.
“Yes, I did, Master Willie. And your dear mother, if she were still with us, would have given the very same instructions—after what my daughter Claire told me of what occurred the other night and the disgraceful condition you were in. What your dear mother would have said, I don’t know!”
Mrs. Lippett’s conversation during the last twenty years of Willoughby Braddock’s life had dealt largely with speculations as to what his dear mother would have said of various ventures undertaken or contemplated by him.
“You must fight against the craving, Master Willie. Remember your Uncle George!”
Mr. Braddock groaned in spirit. One of the things that make these old retainers so hard to bear is that they are so often walking editions of the chroniques scandaleuses of the family. It sometimes seemed to Mr. Braddock that he could not move a step in any direction without having the awful example of some erring ancestor flung up against him.
“Well, look here,” he said, with weak defiance, “I want champagne to-night.”
“You will have cider, Master Willie.”
“But I hate cider.”
“Cider is good for you, Master Willie,” said Mrs. Lippett firmly.
The argument was interrupted by the ringing of the doorbell. The housekeeper left the room, and presently Sleddon, the butler, entered, escorting Lord Tilbury.
“Ha, my dear fellow,” said Lord Tilbury, bustling in.
He beamed upon his host as genially as the Napoleonic cast of his countenance would permit. He rather liked Willoughby Braddock, as he rather liked all very rich young men.
“How are you?” said Mr. Braddock. “Awfully good of you to come at such short notice.”
He spoke heartily, but he had, as a matter of fact, been a little piqued at being invited to dinner on the morning of the feast. He considered that his eminence entitled him to more formal and reverential treatment. And though he had accepted, having had previous experience of the excellence of Mr. Braddock’s cook, he felt that something in the nature of an apology was due to him and was glad that it had been made.
“I asked you at the last moment,” explained Mr. Braddock, “because I wasn’t sure till this morning that Sam Shotter would be able to come. I thought it would be jolly for him, meeting you out of the office, don’t you know.”
Lord Tilbury inclined his head. He quite saw the force of the argument that it would be jolly for anyone, meeting him.
“So you know young Shotter?”
“Oh, yes. We were at school together.”
“A peculiar young fellow.”
“A great lad.”
“But—er—a little eccentric, don’t you think?”
“Oh, Sam always was a bit of nib,” said Mr. Braddock. “At school there used to be some iron bars across the passage outside our dormitory, the idea being to coop us up during the night, don’t you know. Sam used to shin over these and go downstairs to the house master’s study.”
“With what purpose?”
“Oh, just to sit.”
Lord Tilbury was regarding his host blankly. Not a day passed, he was ruefully reflecting, but he received some further evidence of the light and unstable character of this young man of whom he had so rashly taken charge.
“It sounds a perfectly imbecile proceeding to me,” he said.
“Oh, I don’t know, you know,” said Mr. Braddock, for the defence. “You see, occasionally there would be a cigar or a plate of biscuits or something left out, and then Sam would scoop them. So it wasn’t altogether a waste of time.”
Sleddon was entering with a tray.
“Cocktail?” said Mr. Braddock, taking one himself with a defiant glare at his faithful servant, who was trying to keep the tray out of his reach.
“No, I thank you,” said Lord Tilbury. “My doctor has temporarily forbidden me the use of alcoholic beverages. I have been troubled of late with a suspicion of gout.”
“Tough luck.”
“No doubt I am better without them. I find cider an excellent substitute.... Are you expecting many people here to-night?”
“A fairish number. I don’t think you know any of them—except, of course, old Wrenn.”
“Wrenn? You mean the editor of my Home Companion?”
“Yes. He and his niece are coming. She lives with him, you know.”
Lord Tilbury started as if a bradawl had been thrust through the cushions of his chair; and for an instant, so powerfully did these words affect him, he had half a mind to bound at the receding Sleddon and, regardless of medical warnings, snatch from him that rejected cocktail. A restorative of some kind seemed to him imperative.
The statement by Mr. Wrenn, delivered in his office on the morning of Sam’s arrival, that he possessed no daughter had had the effect of relieving Lord Tilbury’s mind completely. Francie, generally so unerring in these matters, had, he decided, wronged Sam in attributing his occupancy of Mon Repos to a desire to be next door to some designing girl. And now it appeared that she had been right all the time.
He was still staring with dismay at his unconscious host when the rest of the dinner guests began to arrive. They made no impression on his dazed mind. Through a sort of mist, he was aware of a young man with a face like a rabbit, another young man with a face like another rabbit; two small, shingled creatures, one blonde, the other dark, who seemed to be either wives or sisters of these young men; and an unattached female whom Mr. Braddock addressed as Aunt Julia. His Lordship remained aloof, buried in his thoughts and fraternising with none of them.
Then Sam appeared, and a few moments later Sleddon announced Mr. Wrenn and Miss Derrick; and Lord Tilbury, who had been examining a picture by the window, swung round with a jerk.
In a less prejudiced frame of mind he might have approved of Kay; for, like so many other great men, he had a nice eye for feminine beauty, and she was looking particularly attractive in a gold dress which had survived the wreck of Midways. But now that very beauty merely increased his disapproval and alarm. He looked at her with horror. He glared as the good old father in a film glares at the adventuress from whose clutches he is trying to save his only son.
At this moment, however, something happened that sent hope and comfort stealing through his heart. Sam, who had been seized upon by Aunt Julia and had been talking restively to her for some minutes, now contrived by an adroit piece of side-stepping to remove himself from her sphere of influence. He slid swiftly up to Kay, and Lord Tilbury, who was watching her closely, saw her face freeze. She said a perfunctory word or two, and then, turning away, began to talk with great animation to one of the rabbit-faced young men. And Sam, with rather the manner of one who has bumped into a brick wall in the dark, drifted off and was immediately gathered in again by Aunt Julia.
A delightful sensation of relief poured over Lord Tilbury. In the days of his youth when he had attended subscription dances at the Empress Rooms, West Kensington, he had sometimes seen that look on the faces of his partners when he had happened to tread on their dresses. He knew its significance. Such a look could mean but one thing—that Kay, though living next door to Sam, did not regard him as one of the pleasant features of the neighbourhood. In short, felt Lord Tilbury, if there was anything between these two young people, it was something extremely one-sided; and he went in to dinner with a light heart, prepared to enjoy the cooking of Mr. Braddock’s admirable chef as it should be enjoyed.
When, on sitting at the table, he found that Kay was on his right, he was pleased, for he had now come to entertain a feeling of warm esteem for this excellent and sensible girl. It was his practice never to talk while he ate caviare; but when that had been consumed in a holy silence he turned to her, beaming genially.
“I understand you live at Valley Fields, Miss Derrick.”
“Yes.”
“A charming spot.”
“Very.”
“The college grounds are very attractive.”
“Oh, yes.”
“Have you visited the picture gallery?”
“Yes, several times.”
Fish arrived—sole meunière. It was Lord Tilbury’s custom never to talk during the fish course.
“My young friend Shotter is, I believe, a near neighbour of yours,” he said, when the sole meunière was no more.
“He lives next door.”
“Indeed? Then you see a great deal of him, no doubt?”
“I never see him.”
“A most delightful young fellow,” said Lord Tilbury, sipping cider.
Kay looked at him stonily.
“Do you think so?” she said.
Lord Tilbury’s last doubts were removed. He felt that all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Like some joyous reveller out of Rabelais, he raised his glass with a light-hearted flourish. He looked as if he were about to start a drinking chorus.
“Excellent cider, this, Braddock,” he boomed genially. “Most excellent.”
Willoughby Braddock, who had been eying his own supply of that wholesome beverage with sullen dislike, looked at him in pained silence; and Sam, who had been sitting glumly, listening without interest to the prattle of one of the shingled girls, took it upon himself to reply. He was feeling sad and ill used. That incident before dinner had distressed him. Moreover, only a moment ago he had caught Kay’s eye for an instant across the table, and it had been cold and disdainful. He welcomed the opportunity of spoiling somebody’s life, and particularly that of an old ass like Lord Tilbury, who should have been thinking about the hereafter instead of being so infernally hearty.
“I read a very interesting thing about cider the other day,” he said in a loud, compelling voice that stopped one of the rabbit-faced young men in mid-anecdote as if he had been smitten with an axe. “It appears that the farmers down in Devonshire put a dead rat in every barrel——”
“My dear Shotter!”
“——to give it body,” went on Sam doggedly. “And the curious thing is that when the barrels are opened, the rats are always found to have completely disappeared—showing the power of the juice.”
A wordless exclamation proceeded from Lord Tilbury. He lowered his glass. Mr. Braddock was looking like one filled with a sudden great resolution.
“I read it in Pyke’s Home Companion,” said Sam. “So it must be true.”
“A little water, please,” said Lord Tilbury stiffly.
“Sleddon,” said Mr. Braddock in a voice of thunder, “give me some champagne.”
“Sir?” quavered the butler. He cast a swift look over his shoulder, as if seeking the moral support of Mrs. Lippett. But Mrs. Lippett was in the housekeeper’s room.
“Sleddon!”
“Yes, sir,” said the butler meekly.
Sam was feeling completely restored to his usual sunny self.
“Talking of Pyke’s Home Companion,” he said, “did you take my advice and read that serial of Cordelia Blair’s, Lord Tilbury?”
“I did not,” replied His Lordship shortly.
“You should. Miss Blair is a very remarkable woman.”
Kay raised her eyes.
“A great friend of yours, isn’t she?” she said.
“I would hardly say that. I’ve only met her once.”
“But you got on very well with her, I heard.”
“I think I endeared myself to her pretty considerably.”
“So I understood.”
“I gave her a plot for a story,” said Sam.
One of the rabbit-faced young men said that he could never understand how fellows—or women, for that matter—thought up ideas for stories—or plays, for the matter of that—or, as a matter of fact, any sort of ideas, for that matter.
“This,” Sam explained, “was something that actually happened—to a friend of mine.”
The other rabbit-faced young man said that something extremely rummy had once happened to a pal of his. He had forgotten what it was, but it had struck him at the time as distinctly rummy.
“This fellow,” said Sam, “was fishing up in Canada. He lived in a sort of shack.”
“A what?” asked the blonde shingled girl.
“A hut. And tacked up on the wall of the shack was a photograph of a girl, torn out of an illustrated weekly paper.”
“Pretty?” asked the dark shingled girl.
“You bet she was pretty,” said Sam devoutly. “Well, this man spent weeks in absolute solitude, with not a soul to talk to—nothing, in fact, to distract his mind from the photograph. The consequence was that he came to look on this girl as—well, you might say an old friend.”
“Sleddon,” said Mr. Braddock, “more champagne.”
“Some months later,” proceeded Sam, “the man came over to England. He met the girl. And still looking on her as an old friend, you understand, he lost his head and, two minutes after they had met, he kissed her.”
“Must have been rather a soppy kind of a silly sort of idiot,” observed the blonde shingled girl critically.
“Perhaps you’re right,” agreed Sam. “Still, that’s what happened.”
“I don’t see where the story comes in,” said one of the rabbit-faced young men.
“Well, naturally, you see, not realising the true state of affairs, the girl was very sore,” said Sam.
The rabbit-faced young men looked at each other and shook their heads. The shingled young women raised their eyebrows pityingly.
“No good,” said the blonde shingled girl.
“Dud,” said the dark shingled girl. “Who’s going to believe nowadays that a girl is such a chump as to mind a man kissing her?”
“Everybody kisses everybody nowadays,” said one of the rabbit-faced young men profoundly.
“Girl was making a fuss about nothing,” said the other rabbit-faced young man.
“And how does the story end?” asked Aunt Julia.
“It hasn’t ended,” said Sam. “Not yet.”
“Sleddon!” said Mr. Braddock, in a quiet, dangerous voice.
It is possible, if you are young and active and in an exhilarated frame of mind, to walk from John Street, Mayfair, to Burberry Road, Valley Fields. Sam did so. His frame of mind was extraordinarily exhilarated. It seemed to him, reviewing recent events, that he had detected in Kay’s eyes for an instant a look that resembled the first dawning of spring after a hard winter; and, though not in the costume for athletic feats, he covered the seven miles that separated him from home at a pace which drew derisive comment from the proletariat all along the route. The Surrey-side Londoner is always intrigued by the spectacle of anyone hurrying, and when that person is in dress clothes and a tall hat he expresses himself without reserve.
Sam heard nothing of this ribaldry. Unconscious of the world, he strode along, brushing through Brixton, hurrying through Herne Hill, and presently arrived, warm and happy, at the door of Mon Repos.
He let himself in; and, entering, was aware of a note lying on the hall table.
He opened it absently. The handwriting was strange to him, and feminine:
“DEAR MR. SHOTTER: I should be much obliged if you would ask your manservant not to chirrup at me out of trees.
“Yours truly,
“KAY DERRICK.”
He had to read this curt communication twice before he was able fully to grasp its meaning. When he did so a flood of self-pity poured over Sam. He quivered with commiseration for the hardness of his lot. Here was he, doing all that a man could to establish pleasant neighbourly relations with the house next door, and all the while Hash foiling his every effort by chirruping out of trees from morning till night. It was bitter, bitter.
He was standing there, feeding his surging wrath by a third perusal of the letter, when from the direction of the kitchen there suddenly sounded a long, loud, agonised cry. It was like the wail of a soul in torment; and without stopping to pick up his hat, which he had dropped in the sheer shock of this dreadful sound, he raced down the stairs.
“’Ullo,” said Hash, looking up from an evening paper. “Back?”
His placidity amazed Sam. If his ears were any guide, murder had been done in this room only a few seconds before, and here was this iron man reading the racing news without having turned a hair.
“What on earth was that?”
“What was what?”
“That noise.”
“Oh, that was Amy,” said Hash.
Sam’s eye was diverted by movement in progress in the shadows behind the table. A vast shape was rising from the floor, revealing itself as an enormous dog. It finished rising; and having placed its chin upon the table, stood looking at him with dreamy eyes and a wrinkled forehead, like a shortsighted person trying to recall a face.
“Oh, yes,” said Sam, remembering. “So you got him?”
“Her.”
“What is he—she?”
“Gawd knows,” said Hash simply. It was a problem which he himself had endeavoured idly to solve earlier in the evening. “I’ve named her after an old aunt of mine. Looks a bit like her.”
“She must be an attractive woman.”
“She’s dead.”
“Perhaps it’s all for the best,” said Sam. He leaned forward and pulled the animal’s ears in friendly fashion. Amy simpered in a ladylike way, well pleased. “Would you say she was a bloodhound, Hash?”
“I wouldn’t say she was anything, not to swear to.”
“A kind of canine cocktail,” said Sam. “The sort of thing a Cruft’s Show judge dreams about when he has a nightmare.”
He observed something lying on the floor; and stooping, found that his overtures to the animal had caused Kay’s note to slip from his fingers. He picked it up and eyed Hash sternly. Amy, charmed by his recent attentions, snuffled like water going down the waste pipe of a bath.
“Hash!” said Sam.
“’Ullo?”
“What the devil,” demanded Sam forcefully, “do you mean by chirruping at Miss Derrick out of trees?”
“I only said oo-oo, Sam,” pleaded Mr. Todhunter.
“You said what?”
“Oo-oo!”
“What on earth did you want to say oo-oo for?”
Much voyaging on the high seas had given Hash’s cheeks the consistency of teak, but at this point something resembling a blush played about them.
“I thought it was the girl.”
“What girl?”
“The maid. Clara, ’er name is.”
“Well, why should you say oo-oo at her?”
Again that faint, fleeting blush coloured Hash’s face. Before Sam’s revolted eyes he suddenly looked coy.
“Well, it’s like this, Sam: The ’ole thing ’ere is, we’re engaged.”
“What!”
“Engaged to be married.”
“Engaged!”
“Ah!” said Mr. Todhunter. And once more that repellent smirk rendered his features hideous beyond even Nature’s liberal specifications concerning them.
Sam sat down. This extraordinary confession had shaken him deeply.
“You’re engaged?”
“Ah!”
“But I thought you disliked women.”
“So I do—most of ’em.”
Another aspect of the matter struck Sam. His astonishment deepened.
“But how did you manage it so soon?”
“Soon?”
“You can’t have seen the girl more than about half a dozen times.”
Still another mysterious point about this romance presented itself to Sam. He regarded the great lover with frank curiosity.
“And what was the attraction?” he asked. “That’s what I can’t understand.”
“She’s a nice girl,” argued Hash.
“I don’t mean in her; I mean in you. What is there about you that could make this misguided female commit such a rash act? If I were a girl, and you begged me for one little rose from my hair, I wouldn’t give it to you.”
“But——”
“No,” said Sam firmly, “it’s no use arguing; I just wouldn’t give it to you. What did she see in you?”
“Oh, well——”
“It couldn’t have been your looks—we’ll dismiss that right away, of course. It couldn’t have been your conversation or your intellect, because you haven’t any. Then what was it?”
“Oh, well, I’ve got a way with me, Sam—that’s how it is.”
“A way?”
“Ah!”
“What sort of way?”
“Oh, just a way.”
“Have you got it with you now?”
“Naturally I wouldn’t ’ave it with me now,” said Hash.
“You keep it for special occasions, eh? Well, you haven’t yet explained how it all happened.”
Mr. Todhunter coughed.
“Well, it was like this, Sam: I see ’er in the garden, and I says ‘Ullo!’ and she says ‘Ullo!’ and then she come to the fence and then I come to the fence, and she says ‘Ullo!’ and I says ‘Ullo!’ and then I kiss her.”
Sam gaped.
“Didn’t she object?”
“Object? What would she want to object for? No, indeed! It seemed to break what you might call the ice, and after that everything got kind of nice and matey. And then one thing led to another—see what I mean?”
An aching sense of the injustice of things afflicted Sam.
“Well, it’s very strange,” he said.
“What’s strange?”
“I mean, I knew a man—a fellow—who—er—kissed a girl when he had only just met her, and she was furious.”
“Ah,” said Hash, leaping instantly at a plausible solution, “but then ’e was probably a chap with a face like Gawd-’elpus and hair growing out of his ears. Naturally, no one wouldn’t like ’aving someone like that kissing ’em.”
Sam went upstairs to bed. Before retiring, he looked at himself in the mirror long and earnestly. He turned his head sideways so that the light shone upon his ears. He was conscious of a strange despondency.
Kay lay in bed, thinking. Ever and anon a little chuckle escaped her. She was feeling curiously happy to-night. The world seemed to have become all of a sudden interesting and amusing. An odd, uncontrollable impulse urged her to sing.
She would not in any case have sung for long, for she was a considerate girl, and the recollection would soon have come to her that there were people hard by who were trying to get to sleep. But, as a matter of fact, she sang only a mere bar or two, for even as she began, there came a muffled banging on the wall—a petulant banging. Hash Todhunter loved his Claire, but he was not prepared to put up with this sort of thing. Three doughty buffets he dealt the wall with the heel of a number-eleven shoe.
Kay sang no more. She turned out the light and lay in the darkness, her face set.
Silence fell upon San Rafael and Mon Repos. And then, from somewhere in the recesses of the latter, a strange, bansheelike wailing began. Amy was homesick.