Nothing Serious, Page 4

  The spectacle perplexed him. He had always known that Bramley was bracing, but he had never supposed that it was as bracing as all this. And he had pulled up in order to get a better view, when the substantial blonde, putting on a burst of speed in the straight, reached the car and hurled herself into it.

  “Quick!” she said.

  “Quick?” said Freddie. He was puzzled. “In what sense do you use the word ‘Quick’?” he asked, and was about to go further into the thing when the whiskered bird came dashing up and scooped the girl out of the car as if she had been a winkle and his hand a pin.

  The girl grabbed hold of Freddie, and Freddie grabbed hold of the steering wheel, and the whiskered bird continued to freeze on to the girl, and for a while the human chain carried on along these lines. Then there was a rending sound, and the girl and Freddie came apart.

  The whiskered bozo regarded him balefully.

  “If we weren’t in a public place,” he said, “I would horsewhip you. If I had a horsewhip.”

  And with these words he dragged the well-nourished girl from the scene, leaving Freddie, as you may well suppose, quite a bit perturbed and a long way from grasping the inner meaning.

  The recent fracas had left him half in and half out of the car, and he completed the process by alighting. He had an idea that the whiskered ancient might have scratched his paint. But fortunately everything was all right, and he was leaning against the bonnet, smoking a soothing cigarette, when Mavis Peasmarch spoke behind him.

  “Frederick!” she said.

  Freddie tells me that at the sound of that loved voice he sprang six feet straight up in the air, but I imagine this to be an exaggeration. About eighteen inches, probably. Still, he sprang quite high enough to cause those leaning out of the windows of Marina Crescent to fall into the error of supposing him to be an adagio dancer practising a new step.

  “Oh, hullo, darling!” he said.

  He tried to speak in a gay and debonair manner, but he could not but recognize that he had missed his objective by a mile. Gazing at Mavis Peasmarch, he noted about her a sort of rigidity which he didn’t like. Her eyes were stern and cold, and her lips tightly set. Mavis had inherited from her father that austere Puritanism which makes the old boy so avoided by the County, and this she was now exuding at every pore.

  “So there you are!” he said, still having a stab at the gay and debonair.

  “Yes,” said Mavis Peasmarch.

  “I’m here, too,” said Freddie.

  “So I see,” said Mavis Peasmarch.

  “I’m staying with a pal. I thought I’d come here and surprise you.”

  “You have,” said Mavis Peasmarch. She gave a sniff that sounded like a nor’easter ripping the sails of a stricken vessel. “Frederick, what does this mean?”

  “Eh?”

  “That girl.”

  “Oh, that girl?” said Freddie. “Yes, I see what you mean. You are speaking of that girl. Most extraordinary, wasn’t it?”

  “Most.”

  “She jumped into my car, did you notice?”

  “I did. An old friend?”

  “No, no. A stranger, and practically total, at that.”

  “Oh?” said Mavis Peasmarch, and let go another sniff that went echoing down the street. “Who was the old man?”

  “I don’t know. Another stranger, even more total.”

  “He said he wanted to horsewhip you.”

  “Yes, I heard him. Dashed familiar.”

  “Why did he want to horsewhip you?”

  “Ah, there you’ve got me. The man’s thought processes are a sealed book to me.”

  “The impression I received was that he resented your having made his daughter the plaything of an idle hour.”

  “But I didn’t. As a matter of fact, I haven’t had much spare time since I got here.”

  “Oh?”

  “The solution that suggests itself to me is that we have stumbled up against one of those E. Phillips Oppenheim situations. Yes, that would explain the whole thing. Here’s how I figure it out. The girl is an international spy. She got hold of the plans of the fortifications and was taking them to an accomplice, when along came the whiskered bird, a secret service man. You could see those whiskers were a disguise. He thought I was the accomplice.”

  “Oh?”

  “How’s your brother Wilfred?” asked Freddie, changing the subject.

  “Will you please drive me to my hotel?” said Mavis, changing it again.

  “Oh, right,” said Freddie. “Right.”

  That night, Freddie lay awake, ill at ease. There had been something in the adored object’s manner, when he dropped her at the hotel, which made him speculate as to whether that explanation of his had got over quite so solidly as he had hoped. He had suggested coming in and having a cosy chat, and she had said No, please, I have a headache. He had said how well she was looking, and she had said Oh? And when he had asked her if she loved her little Freddie, she had made no audible response.

  All in all, it looked to Freddie as if what is technically called a lover’s tiff had set in with a good deal of severity, and as he lay tossing on his pillow he pondered quite a bit on how this could be adjusted.

  What was needed here, he felt, was a gesture—some spectacular performance on his part which would prove that his heart was in the right place.

  But what spectacular performance?

  He toyed with the idea of saving Mavis from drowning, only to dismiss it when he remembered that on the rare occasions when she took a dip in the salty she never went in above the waist.

  He thought of rescuing old Bodsham from a burning building.

  But how to procure that burning building? He couldn’t just set a match to the Hotel Magnifique and expect it to go up in flames.

  And then, working through the family, he came to little Wilfred, and immediately got a Grade-A inspiration. It was via Wilfred that he must oil back into Mavis’s esteem. And it could be done, he saw, by going to St. Asaph’s and asking the Rev. Aubrey Upjohn to give the school a half-holiday. This kindly act would put him right back in the money.

  He could picture the scene. Wilfred would come bounding in to tea one afternoon. “Coo!” Mavis would exclaim. “What on earth are you doing here? Have you run away from school?”

  “No,” Wilfred would reply, “the school has run away from me. In other words, thanks to Freddie Widgeon, that prince of square-shooters, we have been given a half-holiday.”

  “Well, I’m blowed!” Mavis would ejaculate. “Heaven bless Freddie Widgeon! I had a feeling all along that I’d been misjudging that bird.”

  At this point, Freddie feel asleep.

  Often, when you come to important decisions overnight, you find after sleeping on them that they are a bit blue around the edges. But morning, when it came, found Freddie still resolved to go through with his day’s good deed. If, however, I were to tell you that he liked the prospect, I should be deceiving you. It is not too much to say that he quailed at it. Years had passed since his knickerbocker days, but the Rev. Aubrey Upjohn was still green in his memory. A man spiritually akin to Simon Legree and the late Captain Bligh of the Bounty, with whose disciplinary methods his own had much in common, he had made a deep impression on Freddie’s plastic mind, and the thought of breezing in and trying to sting him for a half-holiday was one that froze the blood more than a bit.

  But two things bore him on: (a) his great love, and (b) the fact that it suddenly occurred to him that he could obtain a powerful talking point by borrowing Bingo’s baby and taking it along with him.

  Schoolmasters, he knew, are always anxious to build for the future. To them, the infant of to-day is the pupil at so much per of to-morrow. It would strengthen his strategic position enormously if he dangled Bingo’s baby before the man’s eyes and said:

  “Upjohn, I can swing a bit of custom your way. My influence with the parents of this child is stupendous. Treat me right, and down it goes on your waiting list.” It would make all the difference.

  So, waiting till Bingo’s back and Mrs Bingo’s back were turned, he scooped up Junior and started out. And presently he was ringing the front door bell of St. Asaph’s, the younger generation over his arm, concealed beneath a light overcoat. The parlourmaid showed him into the study, and he was left there to drink in the details of the well-remembered room which he had not seen for so many years.

  Now, it so happened that he had hit the place at the moment when the Rev. Aubrey was taking the senior class in Bible history, and when a headmaster has got his teeth into a senior class he does not readily sheathe the sword. There was consequently a longish stage wait, and as the minutes passed Freddie began to find the atmosphere of the study distinctly oppressive.

  The last time he had been in this room, you see, the set-up had been a bit embarrassing. He had been bending over a chair, while the Rev. Aubrey Upjohn, strongly posted in his rear, stood measuring the distance with half-closed eyes, preparatory to bringing the old malacca down on his upturned trousers seat. And memories like this bring with them a touch of sadness.

  Outside the French window the sun was shining, and it seemed to Freddie that what was needed to dissipate the feeling of depression from which he had begun to suffer was a stroll in the garden with a cigarette. He sauntered out, accordingly, and had paced the length of the grounds and was gazing idly over the fence at the end of them, when he perceived that beyond this fence a certain liveliness was in progress.

  He was looking into a small garden, at the back of which was a house. And at an upper window of this house was a girl. She was waving her arms at him.

  It is never easy to convey every shade of your meaning by waving your arms at a distance of forty yards, and Freddie not unnaturally missed quite a good deal of the gist. Actually, what the girl was trying to tell him was that she had recently met at the bandstand on the pier a man called George Perkins, employed in a London firm of bookmakers doing business under the trade name of Joe Sprockett; that a mutual fondness for the Overture to Zampa had drawn them together; that she had become deeply enamoured of him; that her tender sentiments had been fully reciprocated; that her father, who belonged to a religious sect which disapproved of bookmakers, had refused to sanction the match or even to be introduced to the above Perkins; that he— her father—had intercepted a note from the devout lover, arranging for a meeting at the latter’s boarding-house (10, Marina Crescent) and a quick wedding at the local registrar’s; and that he —she was still alluding to her father—had now locked her in her room until, in his phrase, she should come to her senses. And what she wanted Freddie to do was let her out. Because good old George was waiting at 10, Marina Crescent with the licence, and if she could only link up with him they could put the thing through promptly.

  Freddie, as I say, did not get quite all of this, but he got enough of it to show him that here was a damsel in distress, and he was stirred to his foundations. He had not thought that this sort of thing happened outside the thrillers, and even there he had supposed it to be confined to moated castles. And this wasn’t a moated castle by any means. It was a two-story desirable residence with a slate roof, standing in park-like grounds extending to upwards of a quarter of an acre. It looked the sort of place that might belong to a retired sea captain or possibly a drysalter.

  Full of the old knight-errant spirit, for he has always been a pushover for damsels in distress, he leaped the fence with sparkling eyes. And it was only when he was standing beneath the window that he recognized in the girl who was goggling at him through the glass like some rare fish in an aquarium his old acquaintance, the substantial blonde.

  The sight cooled him off considerably. He is rather a superstitious sort of chap, and he had begun to feel that this billowy curver wasn’t lucky for him. He remembered now that a gipsy had once warned him to beware of a fair woman, and for a moment it was touch and go whether he wouldn’t turn away and ignore the whole unpleasant affair. However, the old knight-errant spirit was doing its stuff, and he decided to carry on as planned. Gathering from a quick twist of her eyebrows that the key was in the outside of the door, he nipped in through the sitting-room window, raced upstairs and did the needful. And a moment later she was emerging like a cork out of a bottle and shooting down the stairs. She whizzed into the sitting-room and whizzed through the window, and he whizzed after her. And the first thing he saw as he came skimming over the sill was her galloping round the lawn, closely attended by the whiskered bloke who had scooped her out of the car in Marina Crescent. He had a three-pronged fork in his possession and was whacking at her with the handle, getting a bull’s-eye at about every second shot.

  It came as a great surprise to Freddie, for he had distinctly understood from the way the girl had twiddled her fingers that her father was at the croquet club, and for a moment he paused, uncertain what to do.

  He decided to withdraw. No chivalrous man likes to see a woman in receipt of a series of juicy ones with a fork handle, but the thing seemed to him one of those purely family disputes which can only be threshed out between father and daughter. He had started to edge away, accordingly, when the whiskered bloke observed him and came charging in his direction, shouting the old drysalters’ battle cry. One can follow his train of thought, of course. He supposed Freddie to be George Perkins, the lovelorn bookie, and wished to see the colour of his insides. With a good deal of emotion, Freddie saw that he was now holding the fork by the handle.

  Exactly what the harvest would have been, had nothing occurred to interfere with the old gentleman’s plans, it is hard to say. But by great good fortune he tripped over a flower-pot while he was still out of jabbing distance and came an impressive purler. And before he could get right side up again, Freddie had seized the girl, hurled her over the fence, leaped the fence himself and started lugging her across the grounds of St. Asaph’s to his car, which he had left at the front door.

  The going had been so good, and the substantial blonde was in such indifferent condition, that even when they were in the car and bowling off little came through in the way of conversation. The substantial blonde, having gasped out a request that he drive her to 10, Marina Crescent, lay back panting, and was still panting when they reached journey’s end. He decanted her and drove off. And it was as he drove off that he became aware of something missing. Something he should have had on his person was not on his person.

  He mused.

  His cigarette case?

  No, he had his cigarette case.

  His hat?

  No, he had his hat.

  His small change?…

  And then he remembered. Bingo’s baby. He had left it chewing a bit of indiarubber in the Rev. Aubrey Upjohn’s study.

  Well, with his nervous system still all churned up by his recent experiences, an interview with his old preceptor was not a thing to which he looked forward with anything in the nature of ecstasy, but he’s a pretty clear-thinking chap, and he realized that you can’t go strewing babies all over the place and just leave them. So he went back to St. Asaph’s and trotted round to the study window. And there inside was the Rev. Aubrey, pacing the floor in a manner which the most vapid and irreflective observer would have recognized as distraught.

  I suppose practically the last thing an unmarried schoolmaster wants to find in his sanctum is an unexplained baby, apparently come for an extended visit; and the Rev. Aubrey Upjohn, on entering the study shortly after Freddie had left it and noting contents, had sustained a shock of no slight order. He viewed the situation with frank concern.

  And he was turning to pace the floor again, when he got another shock. He had hoped to be alone, to think this thing over from every angle, and there was a young man watching him from the window. On this young man’s face there was what seemed to him a sneering grin. It was really an ingratiating smile, of course, but you couldn’t expect a man in the Rev. Aubrey’s frame of mind to know that.

  “Oh, hullo,” said Freddie. “You remember me, don’t you?”

  “No, I do not remember you,” cried the Rev. Aubrey. “Go away.”

  Freddie broadened the ingratiating smile an inch or two.

  “Former pupil. Name of Widgeon.”

  The Rev. Aubrey passed a weary hand over his brow. One can understand how he must have felt. First this frightful blow, I mean to say, and on top of that the re-entry into his life of a chap he hoped he’d seen the last of years and years ago.

  “Yes,” he said, in a low, toneless voice. “Yes, I remember you. Widgeon.”

  “F. F.”

  “F., as you say, F. What do you want?”

  “I came back for my baby,” said Freddie, like an apologetic plumber.

  The Rev. Aubrey started.

  “Is this your baby?”

  “Well, technically, no. On loan, merely. Some time ago, my pal Bingo Little married Rosie M. Banks, the well-known female novelist. This is what you might call the upshot.”

  The Rev. Aubrey seemed to be struggling with some powerful emotion.

  “Then it was you who left this baby in my study?”

  “Yes. You see—’

  “Ha!” said the Rev. Aubrey, and went off with a pop, as if suffering from spontaneous combustion.

  Freddie tells me that few things have impressed him more than the address to which he now listened. He didn’t like it, but it extorted a grudging admiration. Here was this man, he meant to say, unable as a clerk in Holy Orders to use any of the words which would have been at the disposal of a layman, and yet by sheer force of character rising triumphantly over the handicap. Without saying a thing that couldn’t have been said in the strictest drawing-room, the Rev. Aubrey Upjohn contrived to produce in Freddie the illusion that he had had a falling out with the bucko mate of a tramp steamer. And every word he uttered made it more difficult to work the conversation round to the subject of half-holidays.

  Long before he had reached his “thirdly,” Freddie was feeling as if he had been chewed up by powerful machinery, and when he was at length permitted to back out, he felt that he had had a merciful escape. For quite a while it had seemed more than likely that he was going to be requested to bend over that chair again. And such was the Rev. Aubrey’s magnetic personality that he would have done it, he tells me, like a shot.