Laughing Gas (5 page)

'Why? Don't you like Eggy?'

'I love him like a brother. One of my oldest pals. But I should have thought that for domestic purposes someone who was occasionally sober would have suited you better.'

'Eggy's all right.'

'Oh, he's all
right.
He enjoys it.'

'There's lots of good stuff in Eggy.'

'Quite. And more going in every minute.'

'His trouble is that he has always had too much money and too much spare time. What he needs is a job. I've got him one.'

'And he's accepted office?'

'You bet he's accepted office.'

I was rather overcome.

'Ann,' I said, 'you're a marvel!'

'How so, Mister Bones?'

'Why, making Eggy work. It's never been done before.' 'Well, it's going to be done now. He starts to work tomorrow.'

'That's splendid. One feels a certain pang of pity for whoever it is he's starting to work for, but that's splendid. The family were worried about him.'

'I don't wonder. I can't imagine anybody more capable of worrying a family than Eggy. Just suppose if Job had had him as well as boils!'

The garden was beginning to fill up now, and several thirsty souls had come prowling up to the table like lions to the drinking-hole. We moved away.

'Tell me about yourself, Ann,' I said. 'You're working hard all the time, of course?'

'Oh, yes. Always on the job - such as it is.'

'How do you mean, such as it is? Don't you like it?'

'Not very much.'

'But I should have thought it would just have suited you, being a press agent.' 'A what?'

'Eggy told me you were April June's press agent.'

'He was a little premature. That's what I'm hoping to be, if all goes well, but nothing's settled yet. It all depends on whether something comes off or not.'

'What's that?'

'Oh, just an idea I've got. If it works out as I'm hoping she says she will sign on the dotted line. I shan't know for a couple of days. In the meantime, I'm a sort of governess-companion-nursemaid.'

'A what?'

'Well, I don't know how else you would describe the job. Have you ever heard of Joey Cooley?'

'One of these child stars, isn't he? I have an idea April June told me something about him being in her last picture.'

'That's right. Well, I look after him. Tend him and guard him and all that.'

'But what about your newspaper work? I thought you worked on newspapers and things.'

'I did till a short while ago. I was on a Los Angeles paper. But the depression has upset everything. They let me go. I tried other papers. No room. I tried free-lancing, but there's nothing in free-lancing nowadays. So, having to eat, I took what I could. That's how I come to be governess-companion-nursemaid to Joey.'

I must say I felt a pang. I knew how keen she had been on her work.

'I say, I'm frightfully sorry.'

'Thanks, Reggie. You always had a kind heart.'

'Oh, I don't know.'

'Yes, you did. Pure gold and in the right place. It was your poor feet that let you down.'

'Oh, dash it, I wish you wouldn't harp on that.' 'Was I harping?'

'Certainly you were harping. That's the second time you've dug my feet up. If you knew what gyp those shoes were giving me that night ... I thought they were going to burst every moment like shrapnel. ... However, that is neither here nor there. I'm awfully sorry you're having such a rotten time.'

'Oh, it's not really so bad. I don't want to pose as a martyr. I'm quite happy. I love young Joseph. He's a scream.'

'All the same, it must be pretty foul for you. I mean, I know how you must want to be out and about, nosing after stories and getting scoops or whatever you call them.'

'It's sweet of you to be sympathetic, Reggie, but I think I'm going to be all right. I'm practically sure this thing I was speaking of will come off - I don't see how there can be a hitch - and when it does I shall rise on stepping-sto
nes of my dead self to higher th
ings.'

'Good.'

'Though, mind you, there's a darker side. It won't be all jam being April June's press agent.' 'What! Why not?' 'She's a cat.'

I shuddered from stem to stern, as stout barks do when buffeted by the waves. 'A
what?
'

'A cat. There's another word that would describe her even better, but "cat" meets the case.' I mastered my emotion with an effort. 'April June,' I said, 'is the sweetest, noblest, divinest girl in existence. The loveliest creature you could shake a stick at in a month of Sundays, and as good as she is beautiful. She's wonderful. She's marvellous. She's super. She's the top.'

She looked at me sharply.

'Hullo! What's all this?'

I saw no reason to conceal my passion.

'I love her,' I said.

'What!'

'Definitely.'

'It can't be true.'

'It is true. I w
orship the ground she treads on,’
'Well, for crying in the soup!'

'I don't know what that expression means, but I still stick to my story. I worship the ground she treads on.'

She went into the silence for a moment. Then she spoke in a relieved sort of voice.

'Well, thank goodness, there isn't a chance that she'll look at you.'

'Why not?'

'It's all over Hollywood that she's got her hooks on some fool of an Englishman. A man called Lord Havershot. That's the fellow she's going to marry.'

A powerful convulsion shook me from base to apex.

'What!'

'Yes.'

'Is that official?' 'Quite, I believe.'

I drew a deep breath. The coloured lanterns seemed to be dancing buck and
wing steps around me. 'Good egg!
' I said. 'Because I'm him.' 'What!'

'Yes. Since we - er - last met, there has been a good deal of mortality in the f
amily and I've copped the title’
She was staring at me, wide-eyed. 'Oh, hell! 'she
said. 'Why, "oh,
hell"?'

'This is awful’

'It is nothing of the kind. I like it.' She clutched my coat.

'Reggie, you mustn't do this. Don't make a fool of yourself.'

'A fool of myself, eh?'

'Yes. She'll make you miserable. I may be going to depend on her for my bread and butter, but that shan't stop me doing my best to open your eyes. You're such a sweet, simple old ass that you can't see what everybody else sees. The woman's poison. She's frightful. Everybody knows it. Vain, affected, utterly selfish, and as hard as nails.'

I had to laugh at that.

'As hard as nails, eh?'

'Harder.'

I laughed again. Whole thing so dashed absurd.

'You think so, do you?' I said. 'Funny you should say that. Extremely funny. Because the one thing she is is gentle and sensitive and highly strung and so forth. Let me tell you of a little episode that occurred on the train. I was describing round five of the recent heavyweight championship contest to her, and when I came to the bit about the blood her eyeballs rolled upwards and she swooned away.'

'She did, did she?'

'Passed right out. I never saw anything so womanly in my life.'

'And it didn't occur to you, I suppose, that she was just putting on an act?' 'An act?'

'Yes. And it worked, apparently. Because now I hear that you follow her everywhere she goes, bleating.' 'I do not bleat.'

'The story going the round of the clubs is that you do bleat. People say they can hear you for miles on a clear day. My poor Reggie, she was just fooling you. The woman goes to all the fights in Los Angeles and revels in them.'

'I don't believe it.'

'She does, I tell you. Can't you see that she was simply making a play for you because you're Lord Havershot? That's all she's after - the title. For heaven's sake, Reggie, lay off while there's still time.'

I eyed her coldly and detached my coat from her grasp.

'Let us talk of something else,' I said.

'There's nothing else I want to talk about.'

Then don't let's talk at all. I don't know if you realize it, but what we're doing is perilously near to speaking lightly of a woman's name - the sort of thing chaps get kicked out of clubs for.'

'Reggie, will you listen to me?'

'No. I jolly well won't.'

'Reggie!'

'No. Let's drop the subj.' She gave a little sigh.

'Oh, very well,' she said. 'I might have known it would be no use trying to drive sense into a fat head like yours ... April June!'

'Why do you say "April June" like that?'

'Because it's the only way to say it.'

'Well, let me tell you I resent your saying "April June" as if you were mentioning the name of some particularly unpleasant disease.'

'That is the way I shall go on saying "April June".'

I bowed stiffly.

'Oh, right ho,' I said. 'Please yourself. After all, your methods of voice production are your own affair. And now, as I observe my hostess approaching, I will beetle along and pay my respects. This will leave you at liberty to go off into a corner by yourself and say "April June", if you so desire, till the party is over and they lock up the house and put the cat out.'

'They don't put her out. She lives here.'

I made no reply to this vulgar crack. I felt that it was beneath me. Besides, I couldn't think of anything. I moved away in silence. I could feel Ann's eyes on the back of my neck, like Eggy's spiders, but I did not look round.

I pushed off to where April was greeting a covey of guests and barged in, hoping ere long to be able to detach her from the throng and have a private word with her on a tender and sentimental subject.

Well, of course, it wasn't easy, because a hostess has much to occupy her, but eventually she seemed satisfied that she had got things moving and could leave people to entertain themselves, so I collared a table for two in a corner of the lawn and dumped her down there. And we had steak and kidney pie and the usual fixings, and presently we started wading into vanilla ice-cream.

And all the while my determination to slap my heart down before her was growing. Ann's derogatory remarks hadn't weakened me in the slightest. All rot, they seemed to me. As I watched this lovely girl shovelling down the stuff, I refused to believe that she wasn't everything that was perfect. I braced myself for the kick-off. At any moment now, I felt, it might occur. It was simply a question of watching out for the psychological moment and leaping on it like a ton of bricks the second it shoved its nose up.

The conversation had turned to her work. She had said something about her chances of doing a quiet sneak to bed at a fairly early hour, because she was supposed to be on the set, made up, at six on the following a.m. for some retakes; and the mere idea of being out of the hay at a time like that made me quiver with tender compassion.

'Six o'clock!' I said. 'Gosh!'

'Yes, it's not an easy life. I often wonder if one's public ever realize how hard it is.'

'It must be frightful.'

'One does get a little tired sometimes.'

'Still,' I said, doing a spot of silver-lining-pointing, 'there's money in it, what?'

'Money!'

'And fame.'

She smiled a faint, saintly sort of smile and champed a spoonful of ice-cream.

'Money and fame
mean nothing to me, Lord Haver
shot.' 'No?'

'Oh, no. My reward is the feeling that I am spreading happiness, that I am doing my little best to cheer up this tired world, that I am giving the toiling masses a glimpse of something bigger and better and more beautiful.'

'What ho,' I said reverently.

'You don't think it silly of me to feel like that?'

'I think it's terrific'

'I'm so glad. You see, it's a sort of religion with me. I feel like a kind of priestess. I think of all those millions of drab lives, and I say to myself what does all the hard work and the distasteful publicity matter if I can bring a little sunshine into their drab round. You're laughing at me?'

'No, no. Absolutely not.'

'Take Pittsburgh, for instance. They eat me in Pittsburgh. My last picture but one grossed twenty-two thousand there on the week. And that makes me very happy, because I think of all those drab lives in Pittsburgh being brightened up like that. And Cincinnati. I was a riot in Cincinnati. People's lives are very drab in Cincinnati, too.'

'It's wonderful!' She sighed.

'I suppose it is. Yes, of course it is. All those drab lives, I mean. And yet is it enough? That is what one asks oneself sometimes. One is lonely now and then. One feels one wishes one could get away from it all and be just an ordinary happy wife and mother. Sometimes one dreams of the patter of little feet...'