“Be brave, Tuppy. Fix your thoughts on that cold steak-and-kidney pie
in the larder. As the Good Book says, it cometh in the morning.”
“Yes, in the morning. And it’s now about half-past nine at night. You
would bring that pie up, wouldn’t you? Just when I was trying to keep
my mind off it.”
I saw what he meant. Hours must pass before he could dig into that pie.
I dropped the subject, and we sat for a pretty good time in silence.
Then he rose and began to pace the room in an overwrought sort of way,
like a zoo lion who has heard the dinner-gong go and is hoping the
keeper won’t forget him in the general distribution. I averted my gaze
tactfully, but I could hear him kicking chairs and things. It was plain
that the man’s soul was in travail and his blood pressure high.
Presently he returned to his seat, and I saw that he was looking at me
intently. There was that about his demeanour that led me to think that
he had something to communicate.
Nor was I wrong. He tapped me significantly on the knee and spoke:
“Bertie.”
“Hullo?”
“Shall I tell you something?”
“Certainly, old bird,” I said cordially. “I was just beginning to feel
that the scene could do with a bit more dialogue.”
“This business of Angela and me.”
“Yes?”
“I’ve been putting in a lot of solid thinking about it.”
“Oh, yes?”
“I have analysed the situation pitilessly, and one thing stands out as
clear as dammit. There has been dirty work afoot.”
“I don’t get you.”
“All right. Let me review the facts. Up to the time she went to Cannes
Angela loved me. She was all over me. I was the blue-eyed boy in every
sense of the term. You’ll admit that?”
“Indisputably.”
“And directly she came back we had this bust-up.”
“Quite.”
“About nothing.”
“Oh, dash it, old man, nothing? You were a bit tactless, what, about
her shark.”
“I was frank and candid about her shark. And that’s my point. Do you
seriously believe that a trifling disagreement about sharks would make
a girl hand a man his hat, if her heart were really his?”
“Certainly.”
It beats me why he couldn’t see it. But then poor old Tuppy has never
been very hot on the finer shades. He’s one of those large, tough,
football-playing blokes who lack the more delicate sensibilities, as
I’ve heard Jeeves call them. Excellent at blocking a punt or walking
across an opponent’s face in cleated boots, but not so good when it
comes to understanding the highly-strung female temperament. It simply
wouldn’t occur to him that a girl might be prepared to give up her
life’s happiness rather than waive her shark.
“Rot! It was just a pretext.”
“What was?”
“This shark business. She wanted to get rid of me, and grabbed at the
first excuse.”
“No, no.”
“I tell you she did.”
“But what on earth would she want to get rid of you for?”
“Exactly. That’s the very question I asked myself. And here’s the
answer: Because she has fallen in love with somebody else. It sticks
out a mile. There’s no other possible solution. She goes to Cannes all
for me, she comes back all off me. Obviously during those two months,
she must have transferred her affections to some foul blister she met
out there.”
“No, no.”
“Don’t keep saying ‘No, no’. She must have done. Well, I’ll tell
you one thing, and you can take this as official. If ever I find
this slimy, slithery snake in the grass, he had better make all the
necessary arrangements at his favourite nursing-home without delay,
because I am going to be very rough with him. I propose, if and when
found, to take him by his beastly neck, shake him till he froths, and
pull him inside out and make him swallow himself.”
With which words he biffed off; and I, having given him a minute or two
to get out of the way, rose and made for the drawing-room. The tendency
of females to roost in drawing-rooms after dinner being well marked, I
expected to find Angela there. It was my intention to have a word with
Angela.
To Tuppy’s theory that some insinuating bird had stolen the girl’s
heart from him at Cannes I had given, as I have indicated, little
credence, considering it the mere unbalanced apple sauce of a bereaved
man. It was, of course, the shark, and nothing but the shark, that had
caused love’s young dream to go temporarily off the boil, and I was
convinced that a word or two with the cousin at this juncture would set
everything right.
For, frankly, I thought it incredible that a girl of her natural
sweetness and tender-heartedness should not have been moved to her
foundations by what she had seen at dinner that night. Even Seppings,
Aunt Dahlia’s butler, a cold, unemotional man, had gasped and
practically reeled when Tuppy waved aside those _nonnettes de poulet
Agnès Sorel_, while the footman, standing by with the potatoes, had
stared like one seeing a vision. I simply refused to consider the
possibility of the significance of the thing having been lost on a nice
girl like Angela. I fully expected to find her in the drawing-room with
her heart bleeding freely, all ripe for an immediate reconciliation.
In the drawing-room, however, when I entered, only Aunt Dahlia met the
eye. It seemed to me that she gave me rather a jaundiced look as I hove
in sight, but this, having so recently beheld Tuppy in his agony, I
attributed to the fact that she, like him, had been going light on the
menu. You can’t expect an empty aunt to beam like a full aunt.
“Oh, it’s you, is it?” she said.
Well, it was, of course.
“Where’s Angela?” I asked.
“Gone to bed.”
“Already?”
“She said she had a headache.”
“H’m.”
I wasn’t so sure that I liked the sound of that so much. A girl who
has observed the sundered lover sensationally off his feed does not
go to bed with headaches if love has been reborn in her heart. She
sticks around and gives him the swift, remorseful glance from beneath
the drooping eyelashes and generally endeavours to convey to him that,
if he wants to get together across a round table and try to find a
formula, she is all for it too. Yes, I am bound to say I found that
going-to-bed stuff a bit disquieting.
“Gone to bed, eh?” I murmured musingly.
“What did you want her for?”
“I thought she might like a stroll and a chat.”
“Are you going for a stroll?” said Aunt Dahlia, with a sudden show of
interest. “Where?”
“Oh, hither and thither.”
“Then I wonder if you would mind doing something for me.”
“Give it a name.”
“It won’t take you long. You know that path that runs past the
greenhouses into the kitchen garden. If you go along it, you come to a
pond.”
“That’s right.”
“Well, will you get a good, stout piece of rope or cord and go down
that path till you come to the pond----”
“To the pond. Right.”
“--and look about you till you find a nice, heavy stone. Or a fairly
large brick would do.”
“I see,” I said, though I didn’t, being still fogged. “Stone or brick.
Yes. And then?”
“Then,” said the relative, “I want you, like a good boy, to fasten the
rope to the brick and tie it around your damned neck and jump into the
pond and drown yourself. In a few days I will send and have you fished
up and buried because I shall need to dance on your grave.”
I was more fogged than ever. And not only fogged--wounded and
resentful. I remember reading a book where a girl “suddenly fled from
the room, afraid to stay for fear dreadful things would come tumbling
from her lips; determined that she would not remain another day in this
house to be insulted and misunderstood.” I felt much about the same.
Then I reminded myself that one has got to make allowances for a woman
with only about half a spoonful of soup inside her, and I checked the
red-hot crack that rose to the lips.
“What,” I said gently, “is this all about? You seem pipped with
Bertram.”
“Pipped!”
“Noticeably pipped. Why this ill-concealed animus?”
A sudden flame shot from her eyes, singeing my hair.
“Who was the ass, who was the chump, who was the dithering idiot who
talked me, against my better judgment, into going without my dinner? I
might have guessed----”