Mr Mulliner Speaking (29 page)

Ambrose made one last appeal to his guests' better feelings.

'You can't really want oysters at this time of day,' he said almost pleadingly.

'I bet you we can,' said Old Stinker.

'I bet you a billion pounds we can,' said Wilfred.

'Oh, all right,' said Ambrose. 'Oysters.'

He sank back in his chair and endeavoured to avert his eyes from the grim proceedings. Æons passed, and he was aware that the golluping noises at his side had ceased. All things end in time. Even the weariest river winds somewhere to the sea. Wilfred and Old Stinker had stopped eating oysters.

'Finished?' he asked in a cold voice.

There was a moment's pause. The boys seemed hesitant.

'Yes, if there aren't any more.'

'There aren't,' said Ambrose. He beckoned to the waiter, who was leaning against the wall dreaming of old, happy murders of his distant youth. 'Ladishion,' he said curtly.

'Sare?'

'The bill.'

'The pill? Oh yes, sare.'

Shrill and jovial laughter greeted the word.

'He said ''pill''!' gurgled Old Stinker.

' ''Pill''!' echoed Wilfred.

They punched each other delightedly to signify their appreciation of this excellent comedy. The waiter flushed darkly, muttered something in his native tongue and seemed about to reach for his stiletto. Ambrose reddened to the eyebrows. Laughing at waiters was simply one of the things that aren't done, and he felt his position acutely. It was a relief when the Black Hander returned with his change.

There was only a solitary sixpence on the plate, and Ambrose hastened to dip in his pocket for further coins to supplement this. A handsome tip would, he reasoned, show the waiter that, though circumstances had forced these two giggling outcasts upon him, spiritually he had no affiliation with them. It would be a gesture which would put him at once on an altogether different plane. The man would understand that, dubious though the company might be in which he had met him, Ambrose Wiffin himself was all right and had a heart of gold. 'Simpatico', he believed these Italians called it.

And then he sat up, tingling as from an electric shock. From pocket to pocket his fingers flew, and in each found only emptiness. The awful truth was clear. An afternoon spent in paying huge taxi-fares, buying seats for motion-picture performances, pressing half-crowns into the palms of Czeko-Slovakian Rear-Admirals and filling small boys with oysters had left him a financial ruin. That sixpence was all he had to get these two blighted boys back to Eaton Square.

Ambrose Wiffin paused at the cross-roads. In all his life he had never left a waiter untipped. He had not supposed it could be done. He had looked upon the tipping of waiters as a natural process, impossible to evade, like breathing or leaving the bottom button of your waistcoat unfastened. Ghosts of by-gone Wiffins – Wiffins who had scattered largesse to the multitude in the Middle Ages, Wiffins who in Regency days had flung landlords purses of gold – seemed to crowd at his elbow, imploring the last of their line not to disgrace the family name. On the other hand, sixpence would just pay for bus-fares and remove from him the necessity of walking two miles through the streets of London in a squashed top hat and in the society of Wilfred and Old Stinker . . .

If it had been Wilfred alone . . . Or even Old Stinker alone . . . Or if that hat did not look so extraordinarily like something off the stage of a low-class music-hall . . .

Ambrose Wiffin hesitated no longer. Pocketing the sixpence with one swift motion of the hand and breathing heavily through his nose, he sprang to his feet.

'Come on!' he growled.

He could have betted on his little friends. They acted just as he had expected they would. No tact. No reticence. Not an effort towards handling the situation. Just two bright young children of Nature, who said the first thing that came into their heads, and who, he hoped, would wake up to-morrow morning with ptomaine-poisoning.

'I say!' It was Wilfred who gave tongue first of the pair, and his clear voice rang through the restaurant like a bugle. 'You haven't tipped him!'

'I say!' Old Stinker chiming in, extraordinarily bell-like. 'Dash it all, aren't you going to tip him?'

'You haven't tipped the waiter,' said Wilfred, making his meaning clearer.

'The waiter,' explained Old Stinker, clarifying the situation of its last trace of ambiguity. 'You haven't tipped him!'

'Come on!' moaned Ambrose. 'Push out! Push out!'

A hundred dead Wiffins shrieked a ghostly shriek and covered their faces with their winding sheets. A stunned waiter clutched his napkin to his breast. And Ambrose, with bowed head, shot out of the door like a conscience-stricken rabbit. In that supreme moment he even forgot that he was wearing a top hat like a concertina. So true is it that the greater emotion swallows up the less.

A heaven-sent omnibus stopped before him in a traffic-block. He pushed his little charges in, and, as they charged in their gay, boyish way to the further end of the vehicle, seated himself next to the door, as far away from them as possible. Then, removing the hat, he sat back and closed his eyes.

Hitherto, when sitting back with closed eyes, it had always been the custom of Ambrose Wiffin to give himself up to holy thoughts about Bobbie. But now they refused to come. Plenty of thoughts, but not holy ones. It was as though the supply had petered out.

Too dashed bad of the girl, he meant, letting him in for a thing like this. Absolutely too dashed bad of her. And, mark you, she had intended from the very beginning, mind you, to let him in for it. Oh yes, she had. All that about suddenly remembering an appointment, he meant to say. Perfect rot. Wouldn't hold water for a second. She had never had the least intention of coming into that bally moving-picture place. Right from the start she had planned to lure him into the thing and then ooze off and land him with these septic kids, and what he meant was that it was too dashed bad of her.

Yes, he declined to mince his words. Too dashed bad. Not playing the game. A bit thick. In short – well, to put it in a nut-shell, too dashed bad.

The omnibus rolled on. Ambrose opened his eyes in order to note progress. He was delighted to observe that they were already nearing Hyde Park Corner. At last he permitted himself to breathe freely. His martyrdom was practically over. Only a little longer now, only a few short minutes, and he would be able to deliver the two pestilences F.O.B. at their dens in Eaton Square, wash them out of his life for ever, return to the comfort and safety of his cosy rooms, and there begin life anew.

The thought was heartening: and Ambrose, greatly restored, turned to sketching out in his mind the details of the drink which his man, under his own personal supervision, should mix for him immediately upon his return. As to this he was quite clear. Many fellows in his position – practically, you might say, saved at last from worse than death – would make it a stiff whisky-and-soda. But Ambrose, though he had no prejudice against whisky-and-soda, felt otherwise. It must be a cocktail. The cocktail of a lifetime. A cocktail that would ring down the ages, in which gin blended smoothly with Italian vermouth and the spot of old brandy nestled like a trusting child against the dash of absinthe . . .

He sat up sharply. He stared. No, his eyes had not deceived him. At the far end of the omnibus Trouble was rearing its ugly head.

On occasions of great disaster it is seldom that the spectator perceives instantly every detail of what is toward. The thing creeps upon him gradually, impinging itself upon his consciousness in progressive stages. All that the inhabitants of Pompeii, for example, observed in the early stages of that city's doom was probably a mere puff of smoke. 'Ah,' they said, 'a puff of smoke!' and let it go at that. So with Ambrose Wiffin in the case of which we are treating.

The first thing that attracted Ambrose's attention was the face of a man who had come in at the last stop and seated himself immediately opposite Old Stinker. It was an extraordinarily solemn face, spotty in parts and bathed in a rather remarkable crimson flush. The eyes, which were prominent, wore a fixed far-away look. Ambrose had noted them as they passed him. They were round, glassy eyes. They were, briefly, the eyes of a man who has lunched.

In the casual way in which one examines one's fellow-passengers on an omnibus, Ambrose had allowed his gaze to flit from time to time to this person's face. For some minutes its expression had remained unaltered. The man might have been sitting for his photograph. But now into the eyes there was creeping a look almost of animation. The flush had begun to deepen. For some reason or other, it was plain, the machinery of the brain was starting to move once more.

Ambrose watched him idly. No premonition of doom came to him. He was simply mildly interested. And then, little by little, there crept upon him a faint sensation of discomfort.

The man's behaviour had now begun to be definitely peculiar. There was only one adjective to describe his manner, and that was the adjective odd. Slowly he had heaved himself up into a more rigid posture, and with his hands on his knees was bending slightly forward. His eyes had taken on a still glassier expression, and now with the glassiness was blended horror. Unmistakable horror. He was staring fixedly at some object directly in front of him.

It was a white mouse. Or, rather, at present merely the head of a white mouse. This head, protruding from the breast-pocket of Old Stinker's jacket, was moving slowly from side to side. Then, tiring of confinement, the entire mouse left the pocket, climbed down its proprietor's person until it reached his knee, and, having done a little washing and brushing-up, twitched its whiskers and looked across with benevolent pink eyes at the man opposite. The latter drew a sharp breath, swallowed, and moved his lips for a moment. It seemed to Ambrose that he was praying.

The glassy-eyed passenger was a man of resource. Possibly this sort of thing had happened to him before and he knew the procedure. He now closed his eyes, kept them closed for perhaps half a minute, then opened them again.

The mouse was still there.

It is at moments such as this that the best comes out in a man. You may impair it with a series of injudicious lunches, but you can never wholly destroy the spirit that has made Englishmen what they are. When the hour strikes, the old bull-dog strain will show itself. Shakespeare noticed the same thing. His back against the wall, an Englishman, no matter how well he has lunched, will always sell his life dearly.

The glassy-eyed man, as he would have been the first to admit, had had just that couple over the eight which make all the difference, but he was a Briton. Whipping off his hat and uttering a hoarse cry – possibly, though the words could not be distinguished, that old, heart-stirring appeal to St George which rang out over the fields of Agincourt and Crécy – he leaned forward and smacked at the mouse.

The mouse, who had seen it coming, did the only possible thing. It side-stepped and, slipping to the floor, went into retreat there. And instantaneously from every side there arose the stricken cries of women in peril.

History, dealing with the affair, will raise its eyebrows at the conductor of the omnibus. He was patently inadequate. He pulled a cord, stopped the vehicle, and, advancing into the interior, said ' 'Ere!' Napoleon might just as well have said ' 'Ere!' at the battle of Waterloo. Forces far beyond the control of mere words had been unchained. Old Stinker was kicking the glassy-eyed passenger's shin. The glassy-eyed man was protesting that he was a gentleman. Three women were endeavouring to get through an exit planned by the omnibus's architect to accommodate but one traveller alone.

And then a massive, uniformed figure was in their midst.

'Wot's this?'

Ambrose waited no longer. He had had sufficient. Edging round the newcomer, he dropped from the omnibus and with swift strides vanished into the darkness.