'Jeeves,' I said, emerging from the old tub, 'rally round.'
'Yes, sir.'
I beamed on the man with no little geniality. I was putting in a week
or two in Paris at the moment, and there's something about Paris that
always makes me feel fairly full of _espièglerie_ and _joie de vivre_.
'Lay out our gent's medium-smart raiment, suitable for Bohemian
revels,' I said. 'I am lunching with an artist bloke on the other side
of the river.'
'Very good, sir.'
'And if anybody calls for me, Jeeves, say that I shall be back towards
the quiet evenfall.'
'Yes, sir. Mr Biffen rang up on the telephone while you were in your
bath.'
'Mr Biffen? Good heavens!'
Amazing how one's always running across fellows in foreign
cities--coves, I mean, whom you haven't seen for ages and would have
betted weren't anywhere in the neighbourhood. Paris was the last place
where I should have expected to find old Biffy popping up. There was
a time when he and I had been lads about town together, lunching and
dining together practically every day; but some eighteen months back
his old godmother had died and left him that place in Herefordshire,
and he had retired there to wear gaiters and prod cows in the ribs and
generally be the country gentleman and landed proprietor. Since then I
had hardly seen him.
'Old Biffy in Paris? What's he doing here?'
'He did not confide in me, sir,' said Jeeves--a trifle frostily, I
thought. It sounded somehow as if he didn't like Biffy. And yet they
had always been matey enough in the old days.
'Where's he staying?'
'At the Hotel Avenida, Rue du Colisée, sir. He informed me that he was
about to take a walk and would call this afternoon.'
'Well, if he comes when I'm out, tell him to wait. And now, Jeeves,
_mes gants, mon chapeau, et le whangee de monsieur_. I must be popping.'
It was such a corking day and I had so much time in hand that near the
Sorbonne I stopped my cab, deciding to walk the rest of the way. And
I had hardly gone three steps and a half when there on the pavement
before me stood old Biffy in person. If I had completed the last step I
should have rammed him.
'Biffy!' I cried. 'Well, well, well!'
He peered at me in a blinking kind of way, rather like one of his
Herefordshire cows prodded unexpectedly while lunching.
'Bertie!' he gurgled, in a devout sort of tone. 'Thank God!' He
clutched my arm. 'Don't leave me, Bertie. I'm lost.'
'What do you mean, lost?'
'I came out for a walk and suddenly discovered after a mile or two
that I didn't know where on earth I was. I've been wandering round in
circles for hours.'
'Why didn't you ask the way?'
'I can't speak a word of French.'
'Well, why didn't you call a taxi?'
'I suddenly discovered I'd left all my money at my hotel.'
'You could have taken a cab and paid it when you got to the hotel.'
'Yes, but I suddenly discovered, dash it, that I'd forgotten its name.'
And there in a nutshell you have Charles Edward Biffen. As vague and
woollen-headed a blighter as ever bit a sandwich. Goodness knows--and
my Aunt Agatha will bear me out in this--I'm no master-mind myself but
compared with Biffy I'm one of the great thinkers of all time.
'I'd give a shilling,' said Biffy wistfully, 'to know the name of that
hotel.'
'You can owe it me. Hotel Avenida, Rue du Colisée.'
'Bertie! This is uncanny. How the deuce did you know?'
'That was the address you left with Jeeves this morning.'
'So it was. I had forgotten.'
'Well, come along and have a drink and then I'll put you in a cab and
send you home. I'm engaged for lunch, but I've plenty of time.'
We drifted to one of the eleven cafés which jostled each other along
the street and I ordered restoratives.
'What on earth are you doing in Paris?' I asked.
'Bertie, old man,' said Biffy solemnly, 'I came here to try and forget.'
'Well, you've certainly succeeded.'
'You don't understand. The fact is, Bertie, old lad, my heart is
broken. I'll tell you the whole story.'
'No, I say!' I protested. But he was off.
'Last year,' said Biffy, 'I buzzed over to Canada to do a bit of salmon
fishing.'
I ordered another. If this was going to be a fish-story, I needed
stimulants.
'On the liner going to New York I met a girl.' Biffy made a sort of
curious gulping noise not unlike a bulldog trying to swallow half a
cutlet in a hurry so as to be ready for the other half. 'Bertie, old
man, I can't describe her. I simply can't describe her.'
This was all to the good.
'She was wonderful! We used to walk on the boat-deck after dinner. She
was on the stage. At least, sort of.'
'How do you mean, sort of?'
'Well, she had posed for artists and been a mannequin in a big
dressmaker's and all that sort of thing, don't you know. Anyway, she
had saved up a few pounds and was on her way to see if she could get
a job in New York. She told me all about herself. Her father ran a
milk-walk in Clapham. Or it may have been Cricklewood. At least, it was
either a milk-walk or a boot-shop.'
'Easily confused.'
'What I'm trying to make you understand,' said Biffy, 'is that she came
of good, sturdy, respectable middle-class stock. Nothing flashy about
her. The sort of wife any man might have been proud of.'
'Well, whose wife was she?'
'Nobody's. That's the whole point of the story. I wanted her to be
mine, and I lost her.'
'Had a quarrel, you mean?'
'No, I don't mean we had a quarrel. I mean I literally lost her. The
last I ever saw of her was in the Customs sheds at New York. We were
behind a pile of trunks, and I had just asked her to be my wife, and
she had just said she would and everything was perfectly splendid, when
a most offensive blighter in a peaked cap came up to talk about some
cigarettes which he had found at the bottom of my trunk and which I had
forgotten to declare. It was getting pretty late by then, for we hadn't
docked till about ten-thirty, so I told Mabel to go on to her hotel and
I would come round next day and take her to lunch. And since then I
haven't set eyes on her.'
'You mean she wasn't at the hotel?'
'Probably she was. But--'
'You don't mean you never turned up?'
'Bertie, old man,' said Biffy, in an overwrought kind of way, 'for
Heaven's sake don't keep trying to tell me what I mean and what I don't
mean! Let me tell this my own way, or I shall get all mixed up and have
to go back to the beginning.'
'Tell it your own way,' I said hastily.
'Well, then, to put it in a word, Bertie, I forgot the name of the
hotel. By the time I'd done half an hour's heavy explaining about those
cigarettes my mind was a blank. I had an idea I had written the name
down somewhere, but I couldn't have done, for it wasn't on any of the
papers in my pocket. No, it was no good. She was gone.'
'Why didn't you make inquiries?'
'Well, the fact is, Bertie, I had forgotten her name.'
'Oh, no, dash it!' I said. This seemed a bit too thick even for Biffy.
'How could you forget her name? Besides, you told it me a moment ago.
Muriel or something.'
'Mabel,' corrected Biffy coldly. 'It was her surname I'd forgotten. So
I gave it up and went to Canada.'
'But half a second,' I said. 'You must have told her your name. I mean,
if you couldn't trace her, she could trace you.'
'Exactly. That's what makes it all seem so infernally hopeless. She
knows my name and where I live and everything, but I haven't heard a
word from her. I suppose, when I didn't turn up at the hotel, she took
it that that was my way of hinting delicately that I had changed my
mind and wanted to call the thing off.'
'I suppose so,' I said. There didn't seem anything else to suppose.
'Well, the only thing to do is to whizz around and try to heal the
wound, what? How about dinner tonight, winding up at the Abbaye or one
of those places?'
Biffy shook his head.
'It wouldn't be any good. I've tried it. Besides, I'm leaving on the
four o'clock train. I have a dinner engagement tomorrow with a man
who's nibbling at that house of mine in Herefordshire.'
'Oh, are you trying to sell that place? I thought you liked it.'
'I did. But the idea of going on living in that great, lonely barn of a
house after what has happened appals me, Bertie. So when Sir Roderick
Glossop came along--'
'Sir Roderick Glossop! You don't mean the loony-doctor?'
'The great nerve specialist, yes. Why, do you know him?'
It was a warm day, but I shivered.
'I was engaged to his daughter for a week or two,' I said, in a hushed
voice. The memory of that narrow squeak always made me feel faint.
'Has he a daughter?' said Biffy absently.
'He has. Let me tell you all about--'
'Not just now, old man,' said Biffy, getting up. 'I ought to be going
back to my hotel to see about my packing.'
Which, after I had listened to his story, struck me as pretty low-down.
However, the longer you live, the more you realize that the good old
sporting spirit of give-and-take has practically died out in our midst.
So I boosted him into a cab and went off to lunch.
* * * * *
It can't have been more than ten days after this that I received a
nasty shock while getting outside my morning tea and toast. The English
papers had arrived, and Jeeves was just drifting out of the room after
depositing _The Times_ by my bedside, when, as I idly turned the pages
in search of the sporting section, a paragraph leaped out and hit me
squarely in the eyeball.