Nothing Serious

  Nothing Serious

  P.G. WODEHOUSE

  CHAPTER I

  The Shadow Passes

  A CRUSTY roll, whizzing like a meteor out of the unknown, shot past the Crumpet and the elderly relative whom he was entertaining to luncheon at the Drones Club and shattered itself against the wall. Noting that his guest had risen some eighteen inches into the air, the Crumpet begged him not to give the thing another thought.

  “Just someone being civil,” he explained. “Meant for me, of course. Where did it come from?”

  “I think it must have been thrown by one of those two young men at the table over there.”

  The Crumpet gazed in the direction indicated.

  “It can’t have been the tall one with the tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles,” he said. “That’s Horace Pendlebury-Davenport, the club Darts champion. If he had aimed at me, he would have hit me, for his skill is uncanny. It was Bingo Little. More cheese?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Then shall we go and have our coffee in the smoking-room?”

  “It might be safer.”

  “You must make allowances for Bingo,” said the Crumpet as they took their seats, observing that his companion’s expression was still austere. “Until a few days ago a dark shadow brooded over his life, threatening the stability of the home. This has now passed away, and he is consequently a bit above himself. The shadow to which I allude was his baby’s Nannie.”

  “Is that young man a father?”

  “Oh, rather.”

  “Good heavens.”

  “Bingo married Rosie M. Banks, the celebrated female novelist, and came a day when he had this baby. Well, Mrs Bingo did most of the heavy work, of course, but you know what I mean. And naturally the baby, on being added to the strength, had to have a Nannie. They fired her last week.”

  “But why should the dispensing with her services give rise to such an ebullition of animal spirits?”

  “Because she had once been Bingo’s Nannie, too, That is the point to keep the mind fixed on. Mrs Bingo, like so many female ink-slingers, is dripping with sentiment, and this ingrowing sentiment of hers led her to feel how sweet it would be if the same old geezer who had steered Bingo through the diaper and early sailor suit phases could also direct the private life of the younger generation. So when a photograph in a woman’s paper of Miss Rosie M. Banks, author of our new serial (Mrs Richard Little), brought Sarah Byles round on the run to ascertain whether this was the Richard Little she had groomed, it was not long before she was persuaded to emerge from her retirement and once more set her hand to the plough.”

  “And your friend disliked the arrangement?”

  “You bet he disliked the arrangement.”

  The news, broken to Bingo on his return from the office—he is ye ed. of a weekly organ called Wee Tots (P. P. Purkiss, proprietor) devoted to the interests of our better-class babes and sucklings—got (said the Crumpet) right in amongst him. Sarah Byles had always lived in his memory as a stalwart figure about eight feet high and the same across, with many of the less engaging personal attributes of the bucko mate of an old-time hell-ship, and he feared for the well-being of his son and heir. He felt that the latter would be giving away too much weight.

  “Golly, queen of my soul,” he ejaculated, “that’s a bit tough on the issue, isn’t it? When I served under Nannie Byles, she was a human fiend at the mention of whose name strong children shook like aspens.”

  “Oh, no, sweetie-pie,” protested Mrs Bingo. “She’s an old dear. So kind and gentle.”

  “Well, I’ll take your word for it,” said Bingo dubiously. “Of course, age may have softened her.”

  But before dressing for dinner he looked in on young Algernon Aubrey, shook him sympathetically by the hand and gave him a bar of nut chocolate. He felt like a kind-hearted manager of prize-fighters who is sending a novice up against the champion.

  Conceive his relief, therefore, when he found that Mrs Bingo had not been astray in her judgment of form. Arriving on the morrow, La Byles proved, as stated, to be an old dear. In the interval since they had last met she had shrunk to about four feet ten, the steely glitter which he had always associated with her eyes had disappeared, and she had lost the rather unpleasant suggestion she had conveyed in his formative years of being on the point of enforcing discipline with a belaying pin. Her aspect was mild and her manner cooing, and when she flung her arms about him and kissed him and asked him how his stomach was, he flung his arms about her and kissed her and said his stomach was fine. The scene was one of cordial good will.

  The new régime set in smoothly, conditions appearing to be hunky-dory. Mrs Bingo and Nannie Byles hit it off together like a couple of members of a barber-shop quartette. Bingo himself felt distantly benevolent towards the old dug-out. And as Algernon Aubrey took to her and seemed at his ease in her society, it would not be too much to say that for a day or two everything in the home was gas and gaiters.

  For a day or two, I repeat. It was on the evening of the third day, as Bingo and Mrs Bingo sat in the drawing-room after dinner all happy and peaceful, Bingo reading a mystery thriller and Mrs Bingo playing solitaire in the offing, that the former heard the latter emit a sudden giggle, and always being in the market for a good laugh inquired the reason for her mirth.

  “I was only thinking,” said Mrs Bingo, now guffawing heartily, “of the story Nannie told me when we were bathing Algy.”

  “Of a nature you are able to repeat?” asked Bingo, for he knew that red hot stuff is sometimes pulled when the girls get together.

  “It was about you pinning the golliwog to your Uncle Wilberforce’s coat tails when he was going to the reception at the French Embassy.”

  Bingo winced a little. He recalled the episode and in particular its sequel, which had involved an association between himself, his uncle and the flat side of a slipper. The old wound had ceased to trouble him physically, but there was still a certain mental pain, and he was of the opinion that it would have been in better taste for Nannie Byles to let the dead past bury its dead.

  “Ha, ha,” he said, though dully. “Fancy her remembering that.”

  “Oh, her memory’s wonderful,” said Mrs Bingo.

  Bingo returned to his mystery thriller, and Mrs Bingo put the black ten on the red jack, and that, you would have said, was that. But Bingo, as he re-joined Inspector Keene and resumed with him the search for the murderer of Sir Rollo Murgatroyd, who had been bumped off in his library with a blunt instrument, experienced a difficulty in concentrating on the clues.

  Until this moment the signing on the dotted line of his former bottlewasher had occasioned in him, as we have seen, merely a concern for his wee tot. It had not occurred to him that he himself was in peril. But now he found himself filled with a growing uneasiness. He did not like the look of things. His had been a rather notably checkered childhood, full of incidents which it had taken him years to live down, and he trusted that it was not Nannie Byles’s intention to form an I-Knew-Him-When club and read occasional papers.

  He feared the worst, and next day he was given proof that his apprehensions had been well founded. He was starting to help himself to a second go of jam omelette at the dinner-table, when his hand was stayed by a quick intake of the breath on the part of Mrs Bingo.

  “Oh, Bingo, darling,” said Mrs Bingo, “ought you?”

  “Eh?” said Bingo, groping for the gist.

  “Your weak stomach,” explained Mrs Bingo.

  Bingo was amazed.

  “How do you mean, weak stomach? My stomach’s terrific. Ask anyone at the Drones. It’s the talk of the place.”

  “Well, you know what happened at that Christmas party at the Wilkinsons when you were six. Nannie says she will never for
get it.”

  Bingo flushed darkly.

  “Has she been telling you about that?”

  “Yes. She says your stomach was always terribly weak, and you would overeat yourself at children’s parties. She says you would stuff and stuff and stuff and go out and be sick and then come back and stuff and stuff and stuff again.”

  Bingo drew himself up rather coldly. No man likes to be depicted as a sort of infant Vitellius, particularly in the presence of a parlourmaid with flapping ears who is obviously drinking it all in with a view to going off and giving the cook something juicy to include in her memoirs.

  “No more jam omelette, thank you,” he said reservedly.

  “Now, that’s very sensible of you,” said Mrs Bingo. “And Nannie thinks it would be ever so much safer if you gave up cigarettes and cocktails.”

  Bingo sank back in his chair feeling as if he had been slapped in the eye with a wet sock.

  A couple of days later things took a turn for the worse. Returning from the office and heading for the nursery for a crack with Algernon Aubrey, Bingo met Mrs Bingo in the hail. It seemed to him that her manner during the initial embracings and pip-pippings was a little strange.

  “Bingo,” she said, “do you know a girl named Valerie Twistleton?”

  “Oh, rather. Pongo Twistleton’s sister. Known her all my life. She’s engaged to Horace Davenport.”

  “Oh, is she?” Mrs Bingo seemed relieved. “Then you don’t see much of her now?”

  “Not much. Why?”

  “Nannie was saying that you made yourself rather conspicuous with her at that Christmas party at the Wilkinsons. She says you kept kissing her under the mistletoe. She says you used to kiss all the little girls.”

  Bingo reeled. It was the last picture a husband would wish to be built up in his wife’s mind’s eye. Besides, a chivalrous man always shrinks from bandying a woman’s name, and he was wondering what would happen if this loose talk were to come to die ears of Horace Davenport, the Drones Club’s leading Othello.

  “She must be thinking of someone else,” he said hoarsely. “I was noted as a child for my aloofness and austerity. My manner towards the other sex was always scrupulously correct. Do you know what the extraordinary ramblings of this Byles suggest to me?” he went on. “They suggest that the old blister is senile and quite unequal to the testing office of ministering to Algy. Boot her out is my advice and sign on someone younger.”

  “You would prefer a young nurse?”

  Bingo is no fool.

  “Not a young nurse. A sensible, middle-aged nurse. I mean to say, Nannie Byles will never see a hundred and seven again.”

  “She was fifty last birthday, she tells me.”

  “She tells you. Ha!”

  “Well, anyway, I wouldn’t dream of letting her go. She is wonderful with Algy, and she looks after your things like a mother.”

  “Oh, very well. Only don’t blame me when it’s too late.”

  “When what’s too late?”

  “I don’t know,” said Bingo. “Something.”

  As he went on to the nursery to pass the time of day with Algernon Aubrey, his heart was leaden. No question now of his ignoring his peril. He could not have been better informed regarding it if the facts had been broadcast on a nation-wide hook-up. A few more of these revelations from this voice from the past and he would sink to the level of a fifth-rate power. Somehow, by some means, he told himself, if his prestige in the home was to be maintained, he must get rid of this Nannie.

  The woman knew too much.

  As a matter of fact, though he would not have cared to have the thing known, his prestige at the moment was quite rocky enough, without having any Nannies nibbling at the foundations. A very serious crisis was impending in his domestic affairs, threatening to make his name a hissing and a byword.

  When Bingo receives his envelope from Wee Tots on the first of the month, it is too often his practice, in defiance of Mrs Bingo’s expressed wishes, to place its contents on the nose of some horse of whose speed and resolution he has heard good reports, and such horses have a nasty habit of pausing half-way down the stretch to pick daisies. And this had happened now. A mistaken confidence in Sarsaparilla for the three o’clock at Ally Pally had not only cleaned him out but had left him owing his bookie ten quid. This tenner would have to be coughed up in the course of the next few days, and tenners in this iron age are hard to come by.

  He had explored every avenue. He had bought a ticket for the club Darts sweep with his last ten bob, but had drawn a blank. He had tried to touch P. P. Purkiss for an advance of salary, but P. P. Purkiss had said that it was foreign to the policy of Wee Tots to brass up in advance. It really began to look as if he would be forced to the last awful extreme of biting Mrs Bingo’s ear, which would mean that he might hear the last of it somewhere round about the afternoon of their golden wedding day, but scarcely before then.

  It was a pretty poignant position of affairs, and what made Bingo so frightfully sick about it all was that if he had been the merest fraction of a second slippier when the hat for the Darts sweep was circulating, he would have been on velvet, for he would have secured that sweep’s most glittering prize. He had started to reach out for a ticket, and just as his fingers were about to close on it Oofy Prosser had reached out ahead of him and scooped it in. And that ticket, when opened had been found to contain the name of Horace Davenport.

  Horace Davenport is a bird, who, while lacking many of the other qualities which go to make a superman, has always thrown a beautiful dart. Both at school and at the University his skill had been a byword among the sporting set, and the passage of the years had in no way diminished his accuracy. His eye was not dimmed nor his natural force abated, and anyone drawing his name in the sweep was entitled to regard the contents of the kitty as money in the bank. And this singular bit of goose, as I say, had fallen to the lot of Oofy Prosser, a bloke already stinking with the stuff. That was Oofy at the next table to us at lunch, the stout, pimpled chap. You probably noticed how rich he looked. That a fellow as oofy as Oofy should get the money seemed to Bingo a crime.

  But the last thing he had anticipated was that the same reflection should have occurred to Oofy. Yet so it proved. He was in the club the morning before the Darts contest, and Oofy came up to him, looking, it seemed to Bingo, pensive. Though it is always hard to read the play of expression on Oofy’s face, because of the pimples.

  “What ho, Bingo,” said Oofy.

  “What ho, Oofy,” said Bingo.

  “I wonder, Bingo,” said Oofy, perking himself beside him and stroking the third pimple from the left in a meditative sort of way, “if you have ever reflected how weird life is.”

  Bingo agreed that life was pretty weird in spots, and Oofy said that what struck him about life-and he was a man who had gone into the thing—was that there was mismanagement somewhere.

  “Gross mismanagement,” said Oofy. “Well, as an instance of what I mean, take this Darts sweep. Think of all the eager, hard-up waifs who would have given their left eyeball to draw Horace Davenport. And who gets him? I do. And what ensues? Horace is bound to win, so I spear thirty-three pound ten. What’s the use of thirty-three pound ten to me? Do you know what my annual income is? No, I won’t tell you, it would make you sick. It isn’t right, Bingo,” said Oofy warmly. “All wrong, Bingo. I shall give this ticket away. Would you like it, Bingo?”

  Bingo, leaping in the air like a rising trout, said he would, and Oofy seemed to ponder. Then he said that giving Bingo the ticket might destroy Bingo’s self-respect, and when Bingo urged very strongly that in his opinion the risk ought to be taken he pondered again.

  “No,” he said at length, “I should hate to have it on my mind that I had sapped a friend’s self-respect. I will sell you this ticket, Bingo, for the nominal price of a flyer.”

  A sharp cry of agony escaped Bingo. He had sufficient capital for the club luncheon at four-and-sixpence, but no more. Then an idea struck him.
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  “Will you hold it open for a couple of hours?”

  “Certain,” said Oofy. “I shall be here till a quarter past one. Slip me the money then, and the ticket is yours.”

  The idea that had struck Bingo was this. In his bedroom at home there was a set of diamond cuff links, a present from Mrs Bingo on his last birthday, worth, he estimated, five pounds of any pawnbroker’s money. What simpler than to secure these, thrust them up the spout, snaffle the Horace Davenport ticket, get his hooks on the thirty-three pounds ten, rush back to the pawnbroker’s, de-spout the links and return to Position One? It would afford a masterly solution of the whole difficulty.

  The Bingo residence, being one of those houses off Wimbledon Common, takes a bit of getting to, but he made good time there and sneaking in unobserved was able to present himself at the club at ten minutes past one. Oofy was still there. The five changed hands. And Bingo, who had stuck out for eight pounds ten at the pawnbroker’s so as to have a bit of spending money, went off to the Savoy grill to revel. There are moments in a man’s life when the club luncheon at four-and-sixpence is not enough.

  And he had just got back to the office after the repast and was about to settle down to the composition of a thoughtful editorial on What Tiny Hands Can Do For Nannie, wishing that his own tiny hands could take her by the scruff of the neck and heave her out on her left ear, when Mrs Bingo rang up to say that, her mother having had one of her spells at her South Kensington abode, she was buzzing along there and would not be able to get home to-night.

  Bingo said he would miss her sorely, and Mrs Bingo said she knew he would, and Bingo was preparing to toodle-oo and ring off, when Mrs Bingo uttered a sudden yip.

  “Oh, Bingo, I knew there was something else. All this excitement about Mother put it out of my head. Your diamond links have been stolen!”

  It was a pure illusion, of course, but Bingo tells me that as he heard these words it seemed to him that P. P. Purkiss, who was visible through the doorway of the inner office, suddenly started doing an Ouled Nail Stomach dance. His heart leaped sharply and became entangled with his tonsils. It was a matter of some moments before he was able to disengage it and reply.