Money for Nothing (5 page)

He was brooding on the scene in much the same spirit of captious criticism as that in which Lot had once regarded the Cities of the Plain, when the Collegiate Buddies suddenly suspended their cacophony, and he saw Pat and Hugo coming back to the table.

But the Buddies had only been crouching, the better to spring. A moment later they were at it again, and Pat, pausing, looked expectantly at Hugo.

Hugo shook his head.

'I've just seen Ronnie Fish up in the balcony,' he said. 'I positively must go and confer with him. I have urgent matters to discuss with the old leper. Sit down and talk to John. You've got lots to talk about. See you anon. And, if there's anything you want, order it, paying no attention whatever to the prices in the right-hand column. Thanks to Thos, I'm made of money tonight.'

Hugo melted away: Pat sat down: and John, with another abrupt change of mood, decided that he had misjudged the Mustard Spoon. A very jolly little place, when you looked at it in the proper spirit. Nice people, a distinctly lovable head waiter, and as attractive a lot of musicians as he remembered ever to have seen. He turned to Pat, to seek her confirmation of these views, and, meeting her gaze, experienced a rather severe shock. Her eyes seemed to have frozen over. They were cold and hard. Taken in conjunction with the fact that her nose turned up a little at the end, they gave her face a scornful and contemptuous look.

'Hullo!' he said, alarmed. 'What's the matter?'

'Nothing.'

'Why are you looking like that?'

'Like what?'

'Well...'

John had little ability as a word-painter. He could not on the spur of the moment give anything in the nature of detailed description of the way Pat was looking. He only knew he did not like it.

'I suppose you expected me to look at you "with eyes overrunning with laughter?"'

'Eh?'

'"Archly the maiden smiled, and with eyes over-running with laughter said in a tremulous voice 'Why don't you speak for yourself, John'?"'

'I don't know what you're talking about.'

'Don't you know
The Courtship of Miles Standish
? I thought that must have been where you got the idea. I had to learn chunks of it at school, and even at that tender age I always thought Miles Standish a perfect goop. "If the great captain of Plymouth is so very eager to wed me, why does he not come himself and take the trouble to woo me? If I am not worth the wooing, I surely am not worth the winning." And yards more of it. I knew it by heart once. Well, what I want to know is, do you expect my answer direct, or would you prefer that I communicated with your agent?'

'I don't understand.'

'Don't you? No? Really?'

'Pat, what's the matter?'

'Oh, nothing much. When we were dancing just now, Hugo proposed to me.'

A cold hand clutched at John's heart. He had not a high opinion of his cousin's fascinations, but the thought of anybody but himself proposing to Pat was a revolting one.

'Oh, did he?'

'Yes, he did. For you.'

'For me? How do you mean, for me?'

'I'm telling you. He asked me to marry you. And very eloquent he was, too. All the people who heard him – and there must have been dozens who did – were much impressed.'

She stopped: and, as far as such a thing is possible at the Mustard Spoon when Ben Baermann's Collegiate Buddies are giving an encore of 'My Sweetie is a Wow', there was silence. Emotion of one sort or another had deprived Pat of words: and, as for John, he was feeling as if he could never speak again.

He had flushed a dusky red, and his collar had suddenly become so tight that he had all the sensations of a man who is being garrotted. And so powerfully had the shock of this fearful revelation affected his mind that his only coherent thought was a desire to follow Hugo up to the balcony, tear him limb from limb, and scatter the fragments on to the tables below.

Pat was the first to find speech. She spoke quickly, stormily.

'I can't understand you, Johnnie. You never used to be such a jellyfish. You did have a mind of your own once. But now . . . I believe it's living at Rudge all the time that has done it. You've got lazy and flabby. It's turned you into a vegetable. You just loaf about and go on and on, year after year, having your three fat meals a day and your comfortable rooms and your hot-water bottle at night . . .'

'I don't!' cried John, stung by this monstrous charge from the coma which was gripping him.

'Well, bed-socks, then,' amended Pat. 'You've just let yourself be cosseted and pampered till the You that used to be there has withered away and you've gone blah. My dear, good Johnnie,' said Pat vehemently, riding over his attempt at speech and glaring at him above a small, perky nose whose tip had begun to quiver even as it had always done when she lost her temper as a child. 'My poor, idiotic, fat-headed Johnnie, do you seriously expect a girl to want to marry a man who hasn't the common, elementary pluck to propose to her for himself and has to get someone else to do it for him?'

'I didn't!'

'You did.'

'I tell you I did not.'

'You mean you never asked Hugo to sound me out?'

'Of course not. Hugo is a meddling, officious idiot, and if I'd got him here now, I'd wring his neck.'

He scowled up at the balcony. Hugo, who happened to be looking down at the moment, beamed encouragingly and waved a friendly hand as if to assure his cousin that he was with him in spirit. Silence, tempered by the low wailing of the Buddy in charge of the saxophone and the unpleasant howling of his college friends, who had just begun to sing the chorus, fell once more.

'This opens up a new line of thought,' said Pat at length. 'Our Miss Wyvern appears to have got the wires crossed.' She looked at him meditatively. 'It's funny. Hugo seemed so convinced about the way you felt.'

John's collar tightened up another half-inch, but he managed to get his vocal cords working.

'He was quite right about the way I felt.'

'You mean . . . Really?'

'Yes.'

'You mean you're. . . . fond of me?'

'Yes.'

'But, Johnnie!'

'Damn it, are you blind?' cried John, savage from shame and the agony of harrowed feelings, not to mention a collar which appeared to have been made for a man half his size. 'Can't you see? Don't you know I've always loved you? Yes, even when you were a kid.'

'But, Johnnie, Johnnie, Johnnie!' Distress was making Pat's silver voice almost squeaky. 'You can't have done. I was a horrible kid. I did nothing but bully you from morning till night.'

'I liked it.'

'But how can you want me to marry you? We know each other too well. I've always looked on you as a sort of brother.'

There are words in the language which are like a knell. Keats considered 'forlorn' one of them. John Carroll was of opinion that 'brother' was a second.

'Oh, I know. I was a fool. I knew you would simply laugh at me.'

Pat's eyes were misty. The tip of her nose no longer quivered, but now it was her mouth that did so. She reached out across the table and her hand rested on his for a brief instant.

'I'm not laughing at you, Johnnie, you – you chump. What would I want to laugh at you for? I'm much nearer crying. I'd do anything in the world rather than hurt you. You must know that. You're the dearest old thing that ever lived. There's no one on earth I'm fonder of.' She paused. 'But this . . . it – it simply isn't on the board.'

She was looking at him, furtively, taking advantage of the fact that his face was turned away and his eyes fixed on the broad, swallow-tailed back of Mr Ben Baermann. It was odd, she felt, all very odd. If she had been asked to describe the sort of man whom one of these days she hoped to marry, the description, curiously enough, would not have been at all unlike dear old Johnnie. He had the right clean, fit look – she knew she could never give a thought to anything but an outdoor man – and the straightness and honesty and kindliness which she had come, after moving for some years in a world where they were rare, to look upon as the highest of masculine qualities. Nobody could have been farther than John from the little, black-moustached dancing-man type which was her particular aversion, and yet . . . well, the idea of becoming his wife was just simply too absurd and that was all there was to it.

But why? What, then, was wrong with Johnnie? Simply, she felt, the fact that he was Johnnie. Marriage, as she had always envisaged it, was an adventure. Poor cosy, solid old Johnnie would have to display quite another side of himself, if such a side existed, before she could regard it as an adventure to marry him.

'That man,' said John, indicating Mr Baermann, 'looks like a Jewish black beetle.'

Pat was relieved. If by this remark he was indicating that he wished the recent episode to be taken as concluded, she was very willing to oblige him.

'Doesn't he?' she said. 'I don't know where they can have dug him up from. The last time I was here, a year ago, they had another band, a much better one. I think this place has gone down. I don't like the look of some of these people. What do you think of Hugo's friends?'

'They seem all right.' John cast a moody eye at Miss Molloy, a prismatic vision seen fitfully through the crowd. She was laughing, and showing in the process teeth of a flashing whiteness. 'The girl's the prettiest girl I've seen for a long time.'

Pat gave an imperceptible start. She was suddenly aware of a feeling which was remarkably like uneasiness. It lurked at the back of her consciousness like a small formless cloud.

'Oh!' she said.

Yes, the feeling was uneasiness. Any other man who at such a moment had said those words she would have suspected of a desire to pique her, to stir her interest by a rather obviously assumed admiration of another. But not John. He was much too honest. If Johnnie said a thing, he meant it.

A quick flicker of concern passed through Pat. She was always candid with herself, and she knew quite well that, though she did not want to marry him, she regarded John as essentially a piece of personal property. If he had fallen in love with her, that was, of course, a pity: but it would, she realized, be considerably more of a pity if he ever fell in love with someone else. A Johnnie gone out of her life and assimilated into that of another girl would leave a frightful gap. The Mustard Spoon was one of those stuffy, overheated places, but, as she meditated upon this possibility, Pat shivered.

'Oh!' she said.

The music stopped. The floor emptied. Mr Molloy and his daughter returned to the table. Hugo remained up in the gallery, in earnest conversation with his old friend, Mr Fish.

Ronald Overbury Fish was a pink-faced young man of small stature and extraordinary solemnity. He had been at school with Hugo and also at the University. Eton was entitled to point with pride at both of them, and only had itself to blame if it failed to do so. The same remark applies to Trinity College, Cambridge. From earliest days Hugo had always entertained for R. O. Fish an intense and lively admiration, and the thought of being compelled to let his old friend down in this matter of the Hot Spot was doing much to mar an otherwise jovial evening.

'I'm most frightfully sorry, Ronnie, old thing,' he said immediately the first greetings were over. 'I sounded the aged relative this afternoon about that business and there's nothing doing.'

'No hope?'

'None.'

Ronnie Fish surveyed the dancers below with a grave eye. He removed the stub of his cigarette from its eleven-inch holder, and recharged that impressive instrument.

'Did you reason with the old pest?'

'You can't reason with my Uncle Lester.'

'I could,' said Mr Fish.

Hugo did not doubt this. Ronnie, in his opinion, was capable of any feat.

'Yes, but the only trouble is,' he explained, 'you would have to do it at long range. I asked if I might invite you down to Rudge and he would have none of it.'

Ronnie Fish relapsed into silence. It seemed to Hugo, watching him, that that great brain was busy, but upon what train of thought he could not conjecture.

'Who are those people you're with?' he asked at length.

'The big chap with the fair hair is my cousin John. The girl in green is Pat Wyvern. She lives near us.'

'And the others? Who's the stately-looking bird with the brushed-back hair who has every appearance of being just about to address a gathering of constituents on some important point of policy?'

'That's a fellow named Molloy. Thos G. I met him at the fight. He's an American.'

'He looks prosperous.'

'He isn't so prosperous as he was before the fight started. I took thirty quid off him.'

'Your uncle, from what you have told me, is pretty keen on rich men, isn't he?'

'All over them.'

'Then the thing's simple,' said Ronnie Fish. 'Invite this Mulcahy or whatever his name is to Rudge, and invite me at the same time. You'll find that in the ecstasy of getting a millionaire on the premises your uncle will forget to make a fuss about my coming. And once I am in I can talk this business over with him. I'll guarantee that if I can get an uninterrupted half-hour with the old boy I can easily make him see the light.'

A rush of admiration for his friend's outstanding brain held Hugo silent for a moment. The bold simplicity of the move thrilled him.

'What it amounts to,' continued Ronnie Fish, 'is that your uncle is endeavouring to do you out of a vast fortune. I tell you, the Hot Spot is going to be a gold mine. To all practical intents and purposes he is just as good as trying to take thousands of pounds out of your pocket. I shall point this out to him, and I shall be surprised if I can't put the thing through. When would you like me to come down?'

'Ronnie,' said Hugo, 'this is absolute genius.' He hesitated. He had no wish to discourage his friend, but he desired to be fair and above-board. 'There's just one thing. Would you have any objection to performing at the village concert?'

'I should enjoy it.'

'They're sure to rope you in. I thought you and I might do the Quarrel scene from
Julius Caesar
again.'