Summer Moonshine (15 page)

'Well, there isn't one, anyway. That's the last of the bottle. Yes, Imogen told me you were her beau, and then I happened to overhear that young fellow telling you about her father being after you with his horsewhip, so I'd gotten all the facts and was ready for his lordship when he came along. I'm fond of that niece of mine, and anybody she's fond of is my buddy. You stay on this boat as long as you like.'

'It's awfully good of you.'

'Not at all, not-a-tall. I'm for you. I admire the way you came here, just to see her, knowing all the time that peril lurked.'

Adrian perceived that he must dissemble. His companion's hospitality, it was clear, was being offered to him purely in his capacity of Jane's betrothed. Once allow Mr Bulpitt to gather that there was an 'ex' attached to the word, and this sanctuary would be barred to him. And it was imperative that he remain in the neighbourhood until he had been able to get in touch with Tubby.

'Oh, well,' he said modestly.

'It was swell,' said Mr Bulpitt. And now I'll have to leave you for a while. Got to go along to the inn and see someone. Make yourself at home. I'll be back as soon as I can manage.'

T
HE
mellow afternoon was well advanced toward the cool peace of evening when Mr Bulpitt reached the Goose and Gander. He directed his steps to the public bar, and was glad to find it unoccupied except for the blonde young lady who stood behind the counter and played the role of St Bernard dog to the thirsty wayfarers of Walsingford Parva. It was she whom he had come to see.

She greeted his entry with a friendly smile. The daughter of J. B. Attwater's brother, who lived in London, she had been sent down by her parents to make herself pleasant and helpful to the proprietor of the Goose and Gander, who was the wealthy one of the family, and she had conceived a strong distaste for what she termed the dog's island in which she found herself. There seemed to her little to do in Walsingford Parva, and nobody with whom to do it. Her clientele, consisting, as it did, of worthy sons of the soil, who, after telling her it was a fine day, were inclined to relapse into thoughtful silences running anywhere from ten to twenty minutes, bored her. The one bright spot in her drab life was Mr Bulpitt.

Thirty years spent in kidding waitresses in quick-lunch restaurants from Maine to California had developed in Samuel Bulpitt an unsurpassed technique with the sex, and he had
made himself a warm favourite with the Goose and Gander's temporary barmaid.

'The usual, Mr Bulpitt?' she said brightly.

'The usual,' assented Mr Bulpitt. 'Say you've been doing your hair a different way.'

'Faney you noticing that! How does it look?'

'Swell. Like Greta Garbo.'

'Do you really think so?'

'I'll say.'

'Back in London, most of the boys tell me I look more like Myrna Loy.'

'Well, there's a touch of her too. And Ginger Rogers. . . . Got a box of matches?'

'Here you are.'

'Show you a trick,' said Mr Bulpitt.

He did three, to her great satisfaction. An atmosphere of cosy cordiality thus achieved, he sat for some moments, sipping his beer in silence.

'We had some excitement here this afternoon,' said Miss Attwater. 'Missed it, of course, myself, but that's my luck. Myrtle told me about it. She's the girl with the adenoids.'

'Oh, yes?'

'Don't know what it was all about, but it seems Sir Buckstone Abbott was chasing some young fellow with a horsewhip all over the garden.'

'You don't say!'

'And I said to Myrtle, "Well, I'm glad something exciting sometimes happens here," I said, "because of all the dead-and-alive holes—" Don't you find it a bit quiet for you, Mr Bulpitt?'

'When you get to my age, you'll like quiet.'

'Your age!'

'A hundred and four last birthday. I'm not saying I mightn't have found the place kind of motionless when I was going good.'

'I'll bet you've had some rare old times in your day.'

'You're not so far wrong there, girlie.'

'I expect you raised old Harry back in the reign of William the Conqueror.'

Mr Bulpitt, who, during these exchanges, had been debating in his mind how best to approach the subject which he had come to discuss, perceived that he had been given a cue. He allowed a thoughtful look to creep over his face, then emitted a low chuckle.

'What's the joke?'

'Oh, I was just thinking of something. Something that happened in the old days.'

'What?'

'Oh, nothing, really.'

'What was it?'

'Maybe it wouldn't amuse you,' said Mr Bulpitt diffidently. 'It was a sort of practical joke. Some people don't like them.'

'You mean like making an April fool of somebody?'

'That sort of thing.'

'What happened?'

'Well, it was this way' said Mr Bulpitt.

The story which he told was long and rambling, and many might have considered that the characters in it, stated by him to have near died laughing, had been easily amused, but it went over well with his audience. J. B. Attwater's niece giggled heartily.

'You must have had lots of fun in those days,' she said.

'Oh, lots,' said Mr Bulpitt. 'I often look back and think what a barrel of fun we had. But there was a crowd of us then. That's why we could work stunts like that. It was one for all and all for one, like the Three Musketeers. You can't do nothing constructive by yourself. Often and often I wish I'd got some of the old gang around. Why, say, listen; there's a friend of mine up at the Hall I could play a swell joke on right now. Only what's the use? I can't do it alone. I'd need a girl to help me.'

'What sort of a girl?'

'Any sort, just so long as she wasn't dumb.'

'You mean foolish?'

'No, really dumb. I'd want her to talk to the guy over the telephone.'

'Couldn't I do it?'

Mr Bulpitt lowered his glass.

'I hadn't thought of you,' he said, untruly. 'Why, say, that's an idea. Sure you could do it. And it would be a bit of fun for you, seeing you're finding things kind of dull here.'

'What would I have to say?'

'I'd write it all down for you. It's like this. This friend of mine, his name's Vanringham.'

'I know. The gentleman that was staying here.'

'No, his brother. You want to get the right one. This one's T P. Vanringham.'

'I see.'

'And he's a fellow that thinks all the girls are crazy about him. So here's the gag I want to pull on him. I want this girl – you, if you say you'll do it – to call him on the phone and make a date to meet him. Where would be a good place? I know. Say the second milestone on the Walsingford road. I've been there. There's bushes back of it. We'd need bushes.'

'Why?'

'To hide in and spring out of from. It's like this: You don't say who you are, y'understand; you're just a mystery woman that's seen him around and fallen for him in a big way, and you want to make a date. You tell him you'll meet him at the second milestone, and he gets all worked up and patting himself on the back, and along he comes, all in his best clothes, and then, instead of it being a lovely girl, it's me. I jump out from the bushes at him and say, "Hello, there!" And that'll be a big laugh.'

He chuckled richly, and Mr Attwater's niece chuckled, too, but only out of politeness. Privately, she was feeling a little disappointed. It seemed to her that a great deal of trouble was to be taken for a rather disproportionate result. But she could not say so, with Mr Bulpitt smiling his sunny smile and looking like a boy about to be taken to the circus. She was a warmhearted girl, and his childlike innocence touched her.

And listen,' said Mr Bulpitt, scribbling industriously. This is what you say.'

She read the script, and at once thought more highly of the scheme. It now began to seem to her rich in humorous possibilities. Mr Bulpitt's plot might be weak, but she liked his dialogue.

'You are a one,' she said admiringly.

'You'll do it?'

'Rather.'

'Then do it now,' said Mr Bulpitt.

Tubby Vanringham, seated beneath the large cedar which shaded the western end of the terrace of Walsingford Hall, had begun to find it hard to endure with fortitude the life of captivity which had been thrust upon him. A moody frown was on his brow and his gaze, fixed on the river gleaming coolly
below him, was a wistful gaze, like that of Moses on the summit of Mount Pisgah. He was conscious of a growing ennui. The sight of those silver waters, in which he longed to be sporting like the porpoise he rather resembled, tantalized him. Missing his two swims a day had tried him sorely.

Nor was this the only deprivation that irked him as a result of the cramped and restricted conditions now governing his life. Jane Abbott, on this very terrace, had told him that he was the sort of man who was lost without a girl, and her intuition had not misled her. Even more than for the daily bathe, he found himself pining for feminine society.

In the matter of feminine society, Walsingford Hall was at the moment a little understaffed. There was Mrs Shepley, who wore spectacles; Mrs Folsom, who had large teeth; Miss Prudence Whittaker, whose extraordinary views on accepting presents from city slickers and deplorable tendency to initiate actions for heart balm ruled her out of consideration; and Jane. And though he would have been perfectly content to pass the last few days in Jane's company, the pleasure had been denied him. She seemed to have become monopolized by his brother Joe.

With the feeling that he might just as well have been on a desert island, Tubby tried again to interest himself in the book which lay open upon his knee. But once more he found it too deep for him. It was entitled 'Murder at Bilbury Manor', and was a whodunit of the more abstruse type, in which everything turns on whether a certain character, by catching the three-forty-three train at Hilbury and changing into the four-sixteen at Milbury, could have reached Silbury by five-twenty-seven, which would have given him just time to disguise himself and be sticking knives into people at Bilbury by six-thirty-eight.

The detective and his friend had been discussing this question for about forty pages with tremendous animation, but Tubby found himself unable to share their eager enthusiasm. The thing left him cold, and he was just wondering if the solution of the whole problem of coping with this interminable afternoon might not be to go to sleep till the dressing gong sounded, when Pollen came to inform him that he was wanted on the telephone, and this time, Sir Buckstone not being present, was able to deliver the message.

'Telephone?' said Tubby, instantly alert. Even this trivial break in the monotony was welcome to him. 'Who is it?'

'The lady did not give a name, sir.'

Tubby started. The terrace flickered before his eyes. Hope, which he had thought long since dead, stirred in its winding cloth.

'Lady?' he said, speaking in a husky, trembling voice. The lady?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Gosh!' said Tubby.

It was at a speed remarkable on so warm a day that he covered the distance to the house. Not even had he been a fiend in human shape trying to make the four-sixteen connection at Milbury, could he had moved more nippily.

'Hello?' he breathed into the instrument. 'Hello. . . . Yes. This is Mr Vanringham.'

A musical voice, faintly Cockney in its timbre, spoke at the other end of the wire:

'Mr T.P. Vanringham?'

'Yup.'

The voice seemed to be combating a disposition to giggle.

'You don't know who I am.'

'Who are you?'

'Ah, that ud be telling.'

'Your voice sounds familiar.'

'I don't know why it should. We've never met.'

'Haven't we?'

'No. But I'd like to.'

'Me too.'

'I've seen you about.'

'Have you?'

'Yes. And,' said the voice coyly, 'I admired you so much.'

'Did you?'

'Oh, I did.'

Tubby was obliged to support himself against the wall. His voice, when he next spoke, shook as his legs were doing. Manna in the wilderness seemed to him but a feeble way of describing this.

'Say! Say, couldn't we meet sometime?'

'I'd love to, if you would. Would you?'

'You betcher.'

'We might go for a walk.'

'That's right.'

'But I don't want people to see me.'

'I get you.'

'They talk so.'

'Yes.'

'So, if you'd really like to—'

'I should say so.'

'Well, then, be at the second milestone on the Walsingford road at three o'clock tomorrow afternoon. I'll be waiting there. And when you come, make a noise like a linnet.'

'Why?'

'Because I'll be hiding, because I don't want people to see me, because they talk so.'

'I see. Sure. Yes, I understand. Like a what?'

'A linnet. The bird, you know. Then I'll know it's you, and I'll come out. Pip-pip,' said the mysterious unknown. The line was not in the script, but the scene had gone so well that she felt entitled to gag.

Tubby hung up the receiver. He was breathing tensely. It is always gratifying to a romantic young man to discover that the mere sight of himself has inspired uncontrollable admiration in a member of the other sex. He looked forward with bright anticipation to this meeting, so particularly attractive at a time when his heart was bruised and life had seemed to hold nothing but gloom and boredom.

It only remained to get straight on this linnet proposition. He took counsel of Pollen, whom he encountered as he was leaving the hall.

'Say, Pollen, do you know anything about birds?'

'Yes, sir. Birds have always been something of a hobby of mine. I find it interesting to observe their habits.'

'How are you on linnets?'

'Sir?'

'I mean, do you happen to know what sort of noise they make?'

'Oh, I beg your pardon. I did not follow you for a moment. Yes, sir. The rough song of the linnet is "Tolic-gow-gow, tolic-joey-fair, tolic-hickey-gee, tolic-equay-quake, tuc-tuc-whizzie, tuc-ruc-joey, equay-quake-a-weet, tuc-tuc-wheet."'

'It is?'

Tubby stood for a moment in thought.

'Oh, hell!' he said. 'I'll whistle.'