A Few Quick Ones (2 page)

"Sadder than potassium broth?"

"Don't you like potassium broth? You can have seaweed soup, if you wish."

"But I don't understand. Is this a hotel?"

"Well, more a clinic, I suppose you would call it. We come here to reduce."

It is not easy to totter when seated in a chair, but Oofy managed it. He goggled at his companion, the potassium broth falling from his nerveless spoon.

"Did you say 'reduce'?"

"That's right. Doctor Hailsham, who runs the place, guarantees to take a pound a day off you, if you follow his regimen faithfully. I expect to lose three stone before I leave."

Oofy tottered again, and the room seemed to swim about him. He scarcely recognised the hollow croak that proceeded from his lips as his own voice.

"Three
stone?"

"If not more."

"You're crazy!"

"Who's crazy?"

"You are. What do you want to lose three stone for?"

"You don't think I'm a little overweight?"

"Certainly not. Just pleasantly plump."

Horace Prosser gave a
rich chuckle, seeming entertained by some amusing recollection.

"Pleasantly plump, eh? You are more flattering than Loretta was."

"Than who was?"

"A Mrs. Delancy I met on the boat, coming over. She called me a hippopotamus."

"A vulgar ill-bred female bounder!"

"Please! You are speaking of the woman I love."

"I'm what-ing of the what you
what?"

It was impossible to ascertain whether a blush mantled Horace Prosser's cheek, for in its normal state it was ruddier than
a
cherry, but he unquestionably looked coy. It would not be too much to say that he simpered. He murmured something about Ah, those moonlight nights, and when Oofy said Ah, what moonlight nights? explained that he was alluding to the moonlight nights when he and this Mrs. Delancy - a widow of some years standing - had walked together on the boat deck. It was at the conclusion of one of these promenades, he added, that he had asked her to be his wife, and she had replied that the only obstacle standing in the way of the suggested merger was his adipose deposit. She refused, she said, to walk up the aisle with a human hippopotamus.

Horace Prosser chuckled again.

"The whimsical way she put it was that a woman who married a man my size ran a serious risk of being arrested for bigamy. She confessed that she had often yearned for someone like me, but was opposed to the idea of getting twice as much as she had yearned for. Very bright, amusing woman. She comes from Pittsburgh."

Oofy choked on a spoonful of the yellow mess which had been placed before him.

"I still consider her a cad and a bounder."

"So we left it that I would go off somewhere and diet, and if some day I came to her with thirty pounds or so removed from my holdings, our talks would be resumed in what politicians call an atmosphere of the utmost cordiality. She is coming to see me soon, and I don't think she
will
be disappointed. Have some more of these carrots, my boy. Apart from acting directly on the fatty corpuscles, they are rich in Vitamins A, B, C, D, E, G and K."

Mr. Prosser went off to have a massage after he had digested his lunch, and Oofy, as he drove back to London, was still shuddering at the recollection of what the other had said about the
effeurage,
stroking, friction, kneading,
petrissage, tapotement
and vibration which massage at Hollrock Manor involved. He was appalled. With that sort of thing going on in conjunction with the potassium broth and dandelion coffee, it was plain that the man would come to the post a mere shadow. Lord Blicester, if in anything like mid-season form, would make rings round him.

Many young men in such a situation would have thrown in the towel and admitted defeat, but Oofy kept his head.

"I must be calm, calm," he was saying to himself as he went to the Drones next day, and it was with outward calmness that he approached Freddie Widgeon, who was having a ham sandwich at the bar.

"Gosh, Freddie," he said, after they had pip-pipped, "I'm glad I ran into you. Do you notice that I am quivering like an aspen?"

"No," said Freddie. "Are you quivering like an aspen?"

"You bet I'm quivering like an aspen."

"Why are you quivering like an aspen?"

"Well, wouldn't any man of good will be quivering like an aspen if he had had the narrowest of escapes from letting an old friend down? Here are the facts in a nutshell. With the best of motives, if you remember, I persuaded you to exchange your Lord Blicester ticket for my Uncle Horace. You recall that?"

"Oh, rather. You wanted to do your Boy Scout act of kindness for the day."

"Exactly. And now what do I find?

"What do you find?"

"I'll tell you what I find. I find that in comparison with my Uncle your Uncle is slender. I had a letter from Uncle Horace this morning, enclosing a
snapshot of himself. Take a look at it."

Freddie examined the snapshot, and such was his emotion that the ham sandwich flew from his grasp.

"Crumbs!"

"You may well say Crumbs!"

"Golly!"

"And also Golly!”

“I said the same thing myself. It is pretty obvious, I think you will agree with me, that Blicester hasn't a
chance. A good selling-plater, I admit, but this time he has come up against a
classic yearling."

"You told me your uncle had been perspiring for years in the hot sun of the Argentine."

"No doubt the sun was not as hot as I have always supposed, or possibly his pores do not work freely. I also said, I recall, that he did a
lot of riding over pampas. I was wrong. On the evidence of this photograph he can't have ridden over a pampa in his life. Well, fortunately I discovered this in time. There is only one thing to do, Freddie. We must change tickets again."

Freddie gaped.

"You really…Oh, thanks," he said, as a
passing Bean picked up the ham sandwich and returned it to him. "You really mean that?"

"I certainly do."

"I call it pretty noble of you."

"Oh, well, you know how it is. Once a Boy Scout, always a Boy Scout," said Oofy, and a few moments later he was informing the Crumpet that the list in his notebook must once more be revised.

It was Oofy's practice, whenever life in London seemed to him to be losing its savour and the conversation of his fellow members of the Drones to be devoid of its customary sparkle, to pop over to Paris and get a nice change, and shortly after his chat with Freddie he made another of his trips to the French capital. And as he sat sipping an aperitif one morning at a Cafe on the Champs Elysees, his thoughts turned to his Uncle Horace, and not for the first time he found himself marvelling that the love of a woman could have made that dedicated man mortify the flesh as he was doing. Himself, Oofy would not have forgone the simplest pat of butter to win the hand of Helen of Troy, and had marriage with Cleopatra involved the daily drinking of potassium broth and seaweed soup, there would have been no question of proceeding with the ceremony. "I am sorry," he would have said to Egypt's queen, "but if those are your ideas, I have no option but to cancel the order for the wedding cake and see that work is stopped on the bridesmaids' dresses."

He looked at his watch. About now his uncle, in Hollrock Manor's picturesque little bar, would be ordering his glass of parsnip juice preparatory to tackling whatever garbage the bill of fare was offering that day, perfectly contented because love conquered all and so forth. Ah, well, he felt, it takes all sorts to make a world.

At this point in his reverie his meditations were interrupted by a splintering crash in his rear and, turning, he perceived that a chair at a near-by table had disintegrated beneath the weight of a very stout man in a tweed suit. And he was just chuckling heartily at the amusing incident, when the laughter died on his lips. The well-nourished body extricating itself from the debris was that of his Uncle Horace - that selfsame Uncle Horace whom he had just been picturing among the parsnip juices and seaweed soups of Hollrock Manor, Herts. "Uncle!" he cried, hastening to the spot. "Oh, hullo, my boy," said Mr. Prosser, starting to dust himself off. "You here? They seem to make these chairs very flimsy nowadays." he muttered with a touch of peevishness. Or it may be," he went on in more charitable vein, "that I have put on a little weight these last few weeks. This French cooking. Difficult always to resist those sauces. What are you doing in La Ville Lumiere ?"

"What are
you
doing in La Ville Lumiere ?" demanded Oofy. "Why aren't you at that frightful place in Hertfordshire?"

"I left there ages ago."

"But how about the woman you love?"

"What woman I love?"

"The one who called you a hippopotamus."

"Oh, Loretta Delancy. That's all over. It turned out to be just one of those fleeting shipboard romances. You know how they all look good to you at sea and fade out with a pop when you get ashore. She came to Hollrock Manor one afternoon, and the scales fell from my eyes. Couldn't imagine what I had ever seen in the woman. The idea of going through all that dieting and massage for her sake seemed so damn silly that next day I wrote her a civil note telling her to take a running jump into the nearest lake and packed up and left. Well, it's nice to run into you like this, my dear boy. We must have some big dinners together. Are you staying long in Paris?"

"I'm leaving today," said Oofy. "I have to see a man named Widgeon on business."

But he did not see Freddie. Though he haunted the club day and night, yearning for a sight of that familiar face, not a glimpse of it did he get. He saw Bingo Little, he saw Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright, he saw Barmy Phipps, Percy Wimbush, Nelson Cork, Archibald Mulliner and all the other pillars of the Drones who lunched there daily, but always there was this extraordinary shortage of Widgeons. It was as though the young man had vanished from human ken like the captain and crew of the
Marie Celeste.

It was only when he happened to be having a quick one with an Egg who was Freddie's closest friend that the mystery of his disappearance was explained. At the mention of the absent one's name, the Egg sighed a little.

"Oh, Freddie," he said. "Yes, I can tell you about him. At the moment he is rather unfortunately situated. He owes a bookie fifty quid, and is temporarily unable to settle."

"Silly ass."

"Silly, unquestionably, ass, but there it is. What happened was that he drew an uncle in this sweep whom nobody had ever heard of, and blow me tight if he hadn't unexpectedly hit the jackpot. He showed me a snapshot of the man, and I was amazed. I could see at a glance that here was the winner, so far ahead of the field that there could be no competition. Blicester would be an honourable runner-up, but nothing more. Extraordinary how often in these big events you find a dark horse popping up and upsetting all calculations. Well, with the sweepstake money as good as in his pocket, as you might say, poor old Freddie lost his head and put his shirt on a horse at Kempton Park which finished fourth, with the result, as I have indicated, that he owes this bookie fifty quid, and no means of paying him till he collects on the sweep. And the bookie, when informed that he wasn't going to collect, advised him in a fatherly way to be very careful of himself from now on, for though he knew that it was silly to be superstitious, he - the bookie - couldn't help remembering that every time people did him down for money some unpleasant accident always happened to them. Time after time he had noticed it, and it could not be mere coincidence. More like some sort of fate, the bookie said. So Freddie is lying low, disguised in a beard by Clarkson."

"Where?"

"In East Dulwich."

"Whereabouts in East Dulwich?"

"Ah," said the Egg, "that's what the bookie would like to know."

The trouble about East Dulwich, from the point of view of a cleanshaven man trying to find a bearded man there, is that it is rather densely populated, rendering his chances of success slim. Right up to the day before the Eton and Harrow match Oofy prowled to and fro in its streets, hoping for the best, but East Dulwich held its secret well. The opening day of the match found him on the steps of the Drones Club, scanning the horizon like Sister Anne in the Bluebeard story. Surely, he felt, Freddie could not stay away from the premises on this morning of mornings.

Member after member entered the building as he stood there, accompanied by uncles of varying stoutness, but not one of those members was Freddie Widgeon, and Oofy's blood pressure had just reached a new high and looked like going to par, when a cab drew up and something bearded, shooting from its interior, shot past him, shot through the entrance hall and disappeared down the steps leading to the washroom. The eleventh hour had produced the man.

Freddie, when Oofy burst into the washroom some moments later with a "Tally-ho" on his lips, was staring at himself in the mirror, a thing not many would have cared to do when looking as he did. A weaker man than Oofy would have recoiled at the frightful sight that met his eyes. Freddie, when making his purchase at Clarkson's, had evidently preferred quantity to quality. The salesman, no doubt, had recommended something in neat Vandykes as worn by the better class of ambassadors, but Freddie was a hunted stag, and when hunted stags buy beards, they want something big and bushy as worn by Victorian novelists. The man whom Oofy had been seeking so long could at this moment of their meeting have stepped into the Garrick Club of the Sixties, and Wilkie Collins and the rest of the boys would have welcomed him as a brother, supposing him to be Walt Whitman.

"Freddie!" cried Oofy.

"Oh, hullo, Oofy," said Freddie. He was pulling at the beard in a gingerly manner, as if the process hurt him. "You are doubtless surprised…”

"No, I'm not. I was warned of this. Why don't you take that damned thing off?"

"I can't."

"Give it a tug."

"I have given it a tug, and the agony was excruciating. It's stuck on with spirit gum or something."

"Well, never mind your beard. We have no time to talk of beards. Freddie, thank heaven I have found you. Another quarter of an hour, and it would have been too late."