I don’t want to bore you, don’t you know, and all that sort of rot, but
I must tell you about dear old Freddie Meadowes. I’m not a flier at
literary style, and all that, but I’ll get some writer chappie to give
the thing a wash and brush up when I’ve finished, so that’ll be all
right.
Dear old Freddie, don’t you know, has been a dear old pal of mine for
years and years; so when I went into the club one morning and found him
sitting alone in a dark corner, staring glassily at nothing, and
generally looking like the last rose of summer, you can understand I
was quite disturbed about it. As a rule, the old rotter is the life and
soul of our set. Quite the little lump of fun, and all that sort of
thing.
Jimmy Pinkerton was with me at the time. Jimmy’s a fellow who writes
plays—a deuced brainy sort of fellow—and between us we set to work to
question the poor pop-eyed chappie, until finally we got at what the
matter was.
As we might have guessed, it was a girl. He had had a quarrel with
Angela West, the girl he was engaged to, and she had broken off the
engagement. What the row had been about he didn’t say, but apparently
she was pretty well fed up. She wouldn’t let him come near her, refused
to talk on the phone, and sent back his letters unopened.
I was sorry for poor old Freddie. I knew what it felt like. I was once
in love myself with a girl called Elizabeth Shoolbred, and the fact
that she couldn’t stand me at any price will be recorded in my
autobiography. I knew the thing for Freddie.
“Change of scene is what you want, old scout,” I said. “Come with me to
Marvis Bay. I’ve taken a cottage there. Jimmy’s coming down on the
twenty-fourth. We’ll be a cosy party.”
“He’s absolutely right,” said Jimmy. “Change of scene’s the thing. I
knew a man. Girl refused him. Man went abroad. Two months later girl
wired him, ‘Come back. Muriel.’ Man started to write out a reply;
suddenly found that he couldn’t remember girl’s surname; so never
answered at all.”
But Freddie wouldn’t be comforted. He just went on looking as if he had
swallowed his last sixpence. However, I got him to promise to come to
Marvis Bay with me. He said he might as well be there as anywhere.
Do you know Marvis Bay? It’s in Dorsetshire. It isn’t what you’d call a
fiercely exciting spot, but it has its good points. You spend the day
there bathing and sitting on the sands, and in the evening you stroll
out on the shore with the gnats. At nine o’clock you rub ointment on
the wounds and go to bed.
It seemed to suit poor old Freddie. Once the moon was up and the breeze
sighing in the trees, you couldn’t drag him from that beach with a
rope. He became quite a popular pet with the gnats. They’d hang round
waiting for him to come out, and would give perfectly good strollers
the miss-in-baulk just so as to be in good condition for him.
Yes, it was a peaceful sort of life, but by the end of the first week I
began to wish that Jimmy Pinkerton had arranged to come down earlier:
for as a companion Freddie, poor old chap, wasn’t anything to write
home to mother about. When he wasn’t chewing a pipe and scowling at the
carpet, he was sitting at the piano, playing “The Rosary” with one
finger. He couldn’t play anything except “The Rosary,” and he couldn’t
play much of that. Somewhere round about the third bar a fuse would
blow out, and he’d have to start all over again.
He was playing it as usual one morning when I came in from bathing.
“Reggie,” he said, in a hollow voice, looking up, “I’ve seen her.”
“Seen her?” I said. “What, Miss West?”
“I was down at the post office, getting the letters, and we met in the
doorway. She cut me!”
He started “The Rosary” again, and side-slipped in the second bar.
“Reggie,” he said, “you ought never to have brought me here. I must go
away.”
“Go away?” I said. “Don’t talk such rot. This is the best thing that
could have happened. This is where you come out strong.”
“She cut me.”
“Never mind. Be a sportsman. Have another dash at her.”
“She looked clean through me!”
“Of course she did. But don’t mind that. Put this thing in my hands.
I’ll see you through. Now, what you want,” I said, “is to place her
under some obligation to you. What you want is to get her timidly
thanking you. What you want——”
“But what’s she going to thank me timidly for?”