Mr Mulliner Speaking (28 page)

A stifled exclamation escaped Ambrose, and he shot a fevered glance at the taxi's clock. The sight of the figures on it caused him a sharp pang. Not six with a fives-bat, he felt. Ten. And of the juiciest.

'Splendid,' said Bobbie. 'Hop in. Tell him to drive to the Tivoli.'

Ambrose suppressed the words he had been about to utter; and, climbing into the cab, settled himself down and devoted his attention to trying to avoid the feet of Bobbie's cousin Wilfred, who sat opposite him. The boy seemed as liberally equipped with these as a centipede, and there was scarcely a moment when his boots were not rubbing the polish off Ambrose's glittering shoes. It was with something of the emotions of the Ten Thousand Greeks on beholding the sea that at long last he sighted the familiar architecture of the Strand. Soon he would be sitting next to Bobbie in a dimly lighted auditorium, and a man with that in prospect could afford to rough it a bit on the journey. He alighted from the cab and plunged into the queue before the box-office.

Wedged in among the crowd of pleasure-seekers, Ambrose, though physically uncomfortable, felt somehow a sort of spiritual refreshment. There is nothing a young man in love finds more delightful than the doing of some knightly service for the loved one: and, though to describe as a knightly service the act of standing in a queue and buying tickets for a motion-picture entertainment may seem straining the facts a little, to one in Ambrose's condition a service is a service. He would have preferred to be called upon to save Bobbie's life: but, this not being at the moment feasible, it was something to be jostling in a queue for her sake.

Nor was the action so free from peril as might appear at first sight. Sheer, black disaster was lying in wait for Ambrose Wiffin. He had just forced his way to the pay-box and was turning to leave after buying the tickets when the thing happened. From somewhere behind him an arm shot out, there was an instant's sickening suspense, and then the top hat which he loved nearly as much as life itself was rolling across the lobby with a stout man in the uniform of a Czeko-Slovakian Rear-Admiral in pursuit.

In the sharp agony of this happening, it had seemed to Ambrose that he had experienced the worse moment of his career. Then he discovered that it was in reality merely the worst but one. The sorrow's crown of sorrow was achieved an instant later when the Admiral returned, bearing in his hand a battered something which for a space he was unable to recognize.

The Admiral was sympathetic. There was a bluff, sailorly sympathy in his voice as he spoke.

'Here you are, sir,' he said. 'Here's your rat. A little the worse for wear, this sat is, I'm afraid, sir. A gentleman happened to step on it. You can't step on a nat,' he said sententiously, 'not without hurting it. That tat is not the yat it was.'

Although he spoke in the easy manner of one making genial conversation, his voice had in it a certain purposeful note. He seemed like a Rear-Admiral who was waiting for something: and Ambrose, as if urged by some hypnotic spell, produced half-a-crown and pressed it into his hand. Then, placing the remains on his head, he tottered across the lobby to join the girl he loved.

That she could ever, after seeing him in a hat like that, come to love him in return seemed to him at first unbelievable. Then Hope began to steal shyly back. After all, it was in her cause that he had suffered this great blow. She would take that into account. Furthermore, girls of Roberta Wickham's fine fibre do not love a man entirely for his hat. The trousers count, so do the spats. It was in a spirit almost optimistic that he forced his way through the crowd to the spot where he had left the girl. And as he reached it the squeaky voice of Old Stinker smote his ear.

'Golly!' said Old Stinker. 'What have you done to your hat?'

Another squeaky voice spoke. Aunt Marcia's son Wilfred was regarding him with the offensive interest of a biologist examining some lower organism under the microscope.

'I say,' said Wilfred, 'I don't know if you know it, but somebody's been sitting on your hat or something. Did you ever see a hat like that, Stinker?'

'Never in my puff,' replied his friend.

Ambrose gritted his teeth.

'Never mind my hat! Where's Miss Wickham?'

'Oh, she had to go,' said Old Stinker.

It was not for a moment that the hideous meaning of the words really penetrated Ambrose's consciousness. Then his jaw fell and he stared aghast.

'Go? Go where?'

'I don't know where. She went.'

'She said she had just remembered an appointment,' explained Wilfred. 'She said . . .'

'. . . that you were to take us in and she would join us later if she could.'

'She rather thought she wouldn't be able to, but she said leave her ticket at the box-office in case.'

'She said she knew we would be all right with you,' concluded Old Stinker. 'Come on, let's beef in or we'll be missing the educational two-reel comic.'

Ambrose eyed them wanly. All his instincts urged him to smack these two heads as heads should be smacked, to curse a good deal, to wash his hands of the whole business and stride away. But Love conquers all. Reason told him that here were two small boys, a good deal ghastlier than any small boy he had yet encountered. In short, mere smack-fodder. But Love, stronger than reason, whispered that they were a sacred trust. Roberta Wickham expected him to take them to the movies and he must do it.

And such was his love that not yet had he begun to feel any resentment at this desertion of hers. No doubt, he told himself, she had had some good reason. In anyone a shade less divine, the act of sneaking off and landing him with these two disease-germs might have seemed culpable: but what he felt at the moment was that the Queen could do no wrong.

'Oh, all right,' he said dully. 'Push in.'

Old Stinker had not yet exhausted the theme of the hat.

'I say,' he observed, 'that hat looks pretty rummy, you know.'

'Absolutely weird,' assented Wilfred.

Ambrose regarded them intently for a moment, and his gloved hand twitched a little. But the iron self-control of the Wiffins stood him in good stead.

'Push in,' he said in a strained voice. 'Push in.'

In the last analysis, however many highly-salaried stars its cast may contain and however superb and luxurious the settings of its orgy-scenes, the success of a super-film's appeal to an audience must always depend on what company each unit of that audience is in when he sees it. Start wrong in the vestibule, and entertainment in the true sense is out of the question.

For the picture which the management of the Tivoli was now presenting to its patrons Hollywood had done all that Art and Money could effect. Based on Wordsworth's well-known poem 'We are Seven', it was entitled 'Where Passion Lurks', and offered such notable favourites of the silver screen as Laurette Byng, G. Cecil Terwilliger, Baby Bella, Oscar the Wonder-Poodle, and Professor Pond's Educated Sea-Lions. And yet it left Ambrose cold.

If only Bobbie had been at his side, how different it all would have been. As it was, the beauty of the story had no power to soothe him, nor could he get the slightest thrill out of the Babylonian Banquet scene which had cost five hundred thousand dollars. From start to finish he sat in a dull apathy: then, at last, the ordeal over, he stumbled out into daylight and the open air. Like G. Cecil Terwilliger at a poignant crisis in the fourth reel, he was as one on whom Life has forced its bitter cup, and who has drained it to the lees.

And it was this moment, when a strong man stood face to face with his soul, that Old Stinker with the rashness of Youth selected for beginning again about the hat.

'I say,' said Old Stinker, as they came out into the bustling Strand, 'you've no idea what a blister you look in that lid.'

'Priceless,' agreed Wilfred cordially.

'All you want is a banjo and you could make a fortune singing comic songs outside the pubs.'

On his first introduction to these little fellows it had seemed to Ambrose that they had touched the lowest possible level to which Humanity can descend. It now became apparent that there were hitherto unimagined depths which it was in their power to plumb. There is a point beyond which even a Wiffin's self-control fails to function. The next moment, above the roar of London's traffic there sounded the crisp note of a well-smacked head.

It was Wilfred who, being nearest, had received the treatment: and it was at Wilfred that an elderly lady, pausing, pointed with indignant horror in every waggle of her finger-tip.

'Why did you strike that little boy?' demanded the elderly lady.

Ambrose made no answer. He was in no mood for conundrums. Besides, to reply fully to the question, he would have been obliged to trace the whole history of his love, to dilate on the agony it had caused him to discover that his goddess had feet of clay, to explain how little by little through the recent entertainment there had grown a fever in his blood, caused by this boy sucking peppermints, shuffling his feet, giggling and reading out the sub-titles. Lastly, he would have had to discuss at length the matter of the hat.

Unequal to these things, he merely glowered: and such was the calibre of his scowl that the other supposed that here was the authentic Abysmal Brute.

'I've a good mind to call a policeman,' she said.

It is a peculiar phenomenon of life in London that the magic word 'policeman' has only to be whispered in any of its thoroughfares to attract a crowd of substantial dimensions: and Ambrose, gazing about him, now discovered that their little group had been augmented by some thirty citizens, each of whom was regarding him in much the same way that he would have regarded the accused in a big murder-trial at the Old Bailey.

A passionate desire to be elsewhere came upon the young man. Of all things in this life he disliked most a scene: and this was plainly working up into a scene of the worst kind. Seizing his sacred trusts by the elbow he ran them across the street. The crowd continued to stand and stare at the spot where the incident had occurred.

For some little time, safe on the opposite pavement, Ambrose was too busily occupied in reassembling his disintegrated nervous system to give any attention to the world about him. He was recalled to mundane matters by a piercing squeal of ecstasy from his young companions.

'Oo! Oysters!'

'Golly! Oysters!'

And he became aware that they were standing outside a restaurant whose window was deeply paved with these shellfish. On these the two lads were gloating with bulging eyes.

'I could do with an oyster!' said Old Stinker.

'So could I jolly well do with an oyster,' said Wilfred.

'I bet I could eat more oysters than you.'

'I bet you couldn't.'

'I bet I could.'

'I bet you couldn't.'

'I bet you a million pounds I could.'

'I bet you a million trillion pounds you couldn't.'

Ambrose had had no intention of presiding over the hideous sporting contest which they appeared to be planning. Apart from the nauseous idea of devouring oysters at half-past four in the afternoon, he resented the notion of spending any more of his money on these gargoyles. But at this juncture he observed, threading her way nimbly through the traffic, the elderly lady who had made the Scene. A Number 33 omnibus could quite easily have got her, but through sheer carelessness and over-confidence failed to do so: and now she was on the pavement and heading in their direction. There was not an instant to be lost.

'Push in,' he said hoarsely. 'Push in.'

A moment later, they were seated at a table and a waiter, who looked like one of the executive staff of the Black Hand, was hovering beside them with pencil and pad.