Laughing Gas (23 page)

'Quite, thanks. It's so early in the evening, isn't it?' 'Is it?' I said, surprised. 'The usual hour for a snort, surely?'

'You seem to speak as an expert. Do you often take what you call a snort at this time?' 'Oh, rather.' 'Fancy that. Whisky?' 'Whisky invariably.' 'And I see you smoke as well.' 'Oh, yes. In fact, rather better.' 'Always cigarettes?' 'Sometimes cigarettes.
I prefer a pipe.' 'Well, well!
At your age?'

I couldn't follow this - possibly because the buzzing sensation in my head had now become more pronounced. The keen edge of my mind seemed a bit blunted.

'My age?' I said. 'Why, dash it, I'm twenty-seven.'

'What!'

'Absolutely. Twenty-eight next March.'

'Well, well, well! I should never have thought it.'

'You wouldn't?'

'No.'

'You wouldn't have thought it?' 'I certainly would not.'

Why this should have struck me as so droll, I don't know, but it amused me enormously, and I burst into a hearty guffaw. I had just finished this guffaw and was taking aboard breath with which to start another, when the door opened and in came April, looking extraordinarily ultra in some filmy stuff,
Mousseline de sole,
I shouldn't wonder, or something along those lines. Anyway, it was filmy and suited her fragile loveliness like the dickens.

When I say she came in, she didn't right away. She stood framed in the doorway, gazing wistfully before her as if in some beautiful reverie. At this point, however, I unleashed the second guffaw, and it seemed to hit her like a bullet. She started as if she had stepped on a tin-tack.

'You
!'
she said, in an odd, explosive sort of way. 'What are you doing here?' I took a sip of whisky and soda.

'I want to see you on a matter of vital importance,' I said gravely, and was annoyed to find that the sentence had come out as one word. 'I want to see you u
p-on a matter of vital import
ance,' I added, spacing it out a bit this time.

'He has brought you a lovely bouquet,' said Miss Wycherley.

The nosegay didn't seem to go very big. I was not feeling strong enough to pick it up, but I shoved it forward with my foot and April looked at it in - it seemed to me -a rather distant manner. She appeared not too pleased about something. She swallowed once or twice, as if trying to overcome some powerful emotion.

"Well, you can't stay here,' she said at length, speaking with something of an effort. 'Miss Wycherley has come to interview me.'

This interested me.

'Are you an interviewer, old horse?' I said. 'Yes. I'm from the
Los Angeles Chronicle.
I wonder if I could take a photograph of you?' 'Charge ahead.'

'No, don't put your glass down. Just as you are. The cigarette in your mouth, I think. Yes, that's splendid.' April drew a deep breath.

'Perhaps,' she said, 'you would prefer that I left you together?'

'Oh, don't go,' I urged hospitably.

'No, no,' said Miss Wycherley. 'I would like to interview you both. Such a wonderful chance, finding you both here like this.'

'Exactly,' I agreed. 'Two stones with one bird. Dashed good idea. Carry on,' I said, closing my eyes so that I could listen better.

The next thing I remember is opening my eyes and feeling considerably clearer in the bean. That strange, blurred sensation had passed. I take it that I must have dozed off for a moment or two. As I came to the surface, April was speaking.

'No,' she was saying in a low, sweet voice, 'I have never been one of those girls who think only of themselves and their career. To me the picture is everything. I work solely for its success, with no thought of personal advantage. In this last picture of mine, as you say, many girls might have objected to the way the director kept pushing little Joey Cooley here forward and giving him all the best shots.' Here she paused and flashed an affectionate glance in my direction. 'Oh, you're awake, are you? Yes, I'm talking about you, you cute little picture-stealer,' she said with a roguish smile that nearly made me fall at her feet then and there. 'He is a dreadful, dreadful little picture-stealer, isn't he?'
she said.

'He certainly ran away with that one,' assented the horse-faced female.

'Don't I know
it!'
said April with a silvery little laugh. 'I could see from the start what the director was trying to do, of course, but I said to myself: "Mr Bui winkle is a very experienced man. He knows best. If Mr Bulwinkle wishes me to efface myself for the good of the picture", I said to myself, "I am only too pleased". I felt that the success of the picture was the only thing that mattered. I don't know if you see what I mean?'

Miss Wycherley said she saw just what she meant, adding that it did her credit.

'Oh, no,' said April. 'It is just that I am an artist. If you are an artist, you cease to exist as an individual. You become just part of the picture.'

That about concluded her portion of the entertainment, for at this point Miss Wycherley, perceiving that the mists of sleep had rolled away, turned to me and wanted to know what I thought about things. And as it happens that I hold strong views on the films, I rather collared the conversation from now on. I told her what I thought was wrong with the pictures, threw out a few personal criticisms of the leading stars - mordant perhaps, but justified - and, in a word, generally hauled up my slacks. I welcomed this opportunity of voicing my views,

because in the past, whenever I had tried to do it at the Drones, there had always been rather a disposition on the part of my audience to tell me to put a sock in it.

So for about ten minutes I delivered a closely reasoned address, and then Miss Wycherley got up and said it had all been most interesting and she was sure she had got some excellent material for to-morrow's paper, and that she must be getting back to the office to write it up. April conducted her to the front door and saw her off, while I, observing that one of my shoelaces had worked loose in the recent race for life, got out of my chair and started to tie it up.

And I was still in the stooping posture necessitated by this task, when I heard a soft footstep behind me. April had returned.

'Half a jiffy,' I said. 'I'm just—'

The words died, in my throat. For even as I spoke them a jarring agony shot through my entire system and I whizzed forward and came up against the chesterfield. For an instant I had an idea that one of those earthquakes which are such a common feature of life in California must have broken loose. Then the hideous truth came home to me.

The woman I loved had kicked me in the pants.

Chapter 22

I
rose
to ray feet with some of the emotions of a man who has just taken the Cornish Express in the small of the back. She was standing looking at me with her hands on her hips, grinding her teeth quietly, and I gazed back with reproach and amazement, like Julius
Caesar at Brutus. 'I say!
' I said.

To describe myself as astounded at what had occurred would be to paint but a feeble picture of the turmoil going on beneath my frilly shirt. I had lost my grip entirely. I found the situation one in which it was not easy to maintain a patrician calm.

To the idea that there was practically nothing that couldn't happen to the unfortunate bird who had been rash enough to take on the identity of little Joey Cooley I had become by this time, of course, pretty well accustomed. That T. Murphies and O. Flowers should be going about seeking to commit mayhem on my person I was able to accept as in the natural order of things. If it had been Miss Brinkmeyer who had thus booted me, I could have understood. I might even have sympathized. But this particular spot of bother had come as a complete surprise. When it came to April June catching me fruity ones on the seat of the bags, I was frankly unable to follow the run of what Mr Brinkmeyer would have called the sequence.

'I say, what?' I said.

In addition to being shaken to my foundations spiritually, I was in none too good shape physically. The wound was throbbing painfully, and I had to feel the top of my head to make sure that the spine had not come through. Not since early boyhood, a time when a certain exuberance in my manner had, I believe, rather invited this sort of thing, could I recall having stopped such a hot one.

'I say, dash it 1' I said.

Yet even now my love was so deep that had she expressed anything in the nature of contrition or apology -pleaded that her foot had slipped, or something like that -I think I would have been willing to forgive and forget and make a fresh start.

But she didn't express anything of the dashed kind. She seemed to glory in her questionable conduct. There was unmistakable triumph and satisfaction in her demeanour.

'There
I
' she said. 'How did you like that? Laugh that
off!'

But nothing was farther from my thoughts than merriment. I couldn't have laughed at that moment to please a dying aunt.

For I saw now what must have happened. The exacting conditions of life in Hollywood, with its ceaseless strain and gruelling work, had proved too much for this girl's frail strength. Brainstorms had ensued. Nervous breakdowns had bobbed up. In a word, crushed by the machine, she had gone temporarily off her onion.

My heart bled for her. I forgot my aching base.

'There, there,' I said, and was about to suggest a cup of hot tea and a good lie-down, when she continued:

'Maybe that will teach you not to go crawling to directors so that they will let you hog the camera
!'

The scales fell from my eyes. I saw that my diagnosis had been wrong. The shocking truth hit me like a wet towel. This was no nervous breakdown caused by overwork. Incredible though it might seem after all she had been saying about the artist not caring a hoot for personal glory so long as the picture came out well, it was straight professional jealousy. It was the old Murphy-Flower stuff all over again, only a dashed sight more serious. Because in adjusting my little difficulties with Thomas and Orlando I had had plenty of room to manoeuvre in. Now, I was cooped up within four walls, and who could predict the upshot?

I have made it pretty clear, I think, in the course of this narrative, that what ha
d so drawn me to April June had
been her wistful gentleness. In her, as I have repeatedly suggested, I could have put my shirt on it that I had found a great white soul.

There was nothing wistful and gentle about her now. The soft blue eyes I had admired so much were hard and had begun to shoot out sparks. The skin I would have loved to touch was flushed, the mouth set in a rigid line, the fingers twitching. She seemed to me, in brief, to be exhibiting all the earmarks of one of those hammer murderesses you read about in the papers who biff husbands over the coconut and place the remains in a trunk: and with all possible swiftness I removed myself to the other side of the chesterfield and stood staring at her dumbly. And, as I did so, I realized for the first time how a hen must look to a worm.

She went on speaking in tones that bore no resemblance whatever to those which had so fascinated me at our first meeting. The stuff came out in a high, vibrating soprano that went through me like a bradawl.

'And maybe you'll know enough after this to keep away when I'm receiving the Press. I like your gall, coming butting in when a special representative of a leading daily paper is approaching me for my views on Art and the trend of public taste! You and your bouquets!' Here, baring her teeth unpleasantly, she kicked the nosegay. 'I've a good mind to make you eat it.'

I sidled a little farther behind the chesterfield. Less and less did I like the turn the conversation was taking.

'I did think I would be safe from you in my own home. But no. In you come oozing like oil.'

I would have explained here, if she had given me the opportunity, that I had had an excellent motive in so oozing, for I had come solely in order to save her from a fate which, if not exactly worse than death, would have been distinctly unpleasant. But she did not give me the opportunity.

'Trying to attract all the attention to yourself, as usual. Well, if you think you can get away with that, think again.

You can just throw hay on that idea. You expect me, do you, not only to act as a stooge for you in front of the camera, but to sit smiling in the background while you horn in and swipe my interview?'

Again I endeavoured to assure her that she was totally mistaken in her view of the situation, and once more she nipped in ahead of me.

'Of all the nerve! Of all the crust! Of all the — But what,' she cried, breaking off, 'is the sense of standing here talking about it?'

I felt the same myself. It seemed to me that nothing was to be gained by continuing the conference.

'Quite,' I said. 'Right ho. Then I'll be pushing, what?'

'You stay where you are.'

'But I thought you said—'

'Let me get at you!
'

I could not accede to her request, which even she must have seen was unreasonable. With a swift movement of the hand she had possessed herself of a large, flat, heavy paper-knife, and the last thing I was prepared to do was to let her get at me.