Money in the Bank (11 page)

"Haryer?" said the mountainous peer affably. "Just came to see if they'd made yer comfortable. Everything all right?"

Jeff replied that everything was splendid.

"Capital," said Lord Uffenham. "Capital."

He spoke absently, for while he had not actually fallen into a trance, he had ceased to allow his attention to be riveted on what his young friend was saying. He was pottering about the room like a ruminative elephant, examining its contents with an abstracted eye. He picked up Jeff's pyjamas, and inspected them solemnly. There was a book on the table by the bed. He picked that up, and turned its pages for a moment. He also picked up and dropped into the fender a small china ornament which had been standing on the mantelpiece.

The sharp, splintering sound caused by the descent of this
objet d'art
seemed to rouse him from his reverie. Returning to the centre of things and lowering himself into a chair, he reached out a massive finger and gave Jeff a nasty blow on the knee with it. His face was benign and fatherly. In the way in which he regarded the younger man, there was genuine affection, as well as something suggestive of a stuffed owl in a taxidermist's window.

"I've been wanting a chat with you, young feller," he said.

Jeff replied courteously that he, too, had been counting the moments.

"Remember what we were talking about in that office?"

It seemed to Jeff that the other, if he was expecting him to have forgotten this already, must be crediting him with a memory as uncertain as his own. He said, with a touch of surprise:

"The diamonds, do you mean?"

"Lord-love-a-duck, no, not the diamonds. About you being potty about my dashed niece."

Jeff would have preferred him not to allude to the divinest of her sex as his dashed niece, but he abstained from rebuke. Policy dictated a friendly and respectful attitude towards this old codger.

"Oh, yes."

"Still love her, hey?"

Jeff assured him that the passage of two and a half hours had made no difference in his fervour, except perhaps to deepen it, and Lord Uffenham seemed relieved.

"That's good. Because I told her you did, and if you had changed your mind, it might have made me look a silly ass."

Although a young man not ill-equipped with
sang froid
Jeff found it impossible to restrain a start.

"You told her I loved her?"

"Yerss."

"I see. Er—how did she appear to take it?"

"Looked a bit thoughtful, it seemed to me."

"I see."

"Gave me the impression she was turning the thing over in her mind."

"I see."

"What's the matter? You sound stuffy."

"Oh, no. It only occurred to me that she might have thought it a little sudden."

"You've got to be sudden with a girl like Anne. Listen," said Lord Uffenham, once more driving a piston-like finger at Jeff's knee, "I'll tell yer something. When I saw yer this evening, I took an instant liking to yer."

"That was very nice of you. I can assure you that I, for my part---"

"Don't interrupt, blast yer. An instant liking, I say. I'm a great reader of character—got an eye like an X-ray—and I saw at a glance that you were a fine young feller. I have neither chick nor child—at least, I don't think so," said Lord Uffenham, after a moment's hesitation, "and I regard you as a son. As a son, dash it. You're just the sort of feller I'd like to see married to Anne. You're like I was at your age, a hell of a young chap. They don't seem to breed 'em nowadays. Most modern young men are squirts and perishers. D'yer know Mrs. Cork's nephew, Lionel Green?"

"We have met."

"There's a perisher for you. There's a squirt, if you want one. A Hivite and a Jcbusite, no less. And Anne goes and gets engaged to him."

"What!"

"That's right. With the pick of the land at her disposal, she goes and gets secretly engaged to Lionel Green."

Jeff was shaken to his foundations. The hideous news had found him utterly unprepared. Not for an instant had he suspected the possibility of this dreadful state of things.

True, Mrs. Cork had hinted at such a possibility, but he had naturally paid little attention to her wild theories. If Mrs. Cork, he had felt, had observed anything in the relations of Anne Benedick and Lionel Green, it had no doubt been the wart Green persecuting the girl with his loathsome addresses. And as for all that stuff about her eyes blazing when she read of his, Jeff's, pitiless
expose
of the man, he had simply not believed it. What had happened, he presumed, was that her eyes had shone with a pretty delight, as what girl's would not, who read of a pill who had persecuted her with his addresses being put on the griddle by a brilliantly incisive young cross-examiner.

He stared, aghast.

"You don't mean that?"

This seemed to puzzle Lord Uffenham.

"What d'yer think I mean?" he asked.

"It's too frightful."

"Ghastly."

"We must save her."

"Exactly.  You must cut him out."

"I will."

"How do you propose to set about it?"

"Well---"

Lord Uffenham raised a hand, like a policeman directing traffic.

"That's enough. That tells me the whole story. You aren't thinking along the right lines. If you were, you wouldn't have said 'Well … you'd have said 'Set about it? I'll tell yer how I'm going to set about it. By setting about
her,
dash it, and sweeping her off her dashed feet!' That's what you would have said, and that's the only way you'll do it. Grab her! Seize her! Fold her in a close embrace. A really close embrace. One that'll make her ribs creak. Kiss her, too, of course. Kiss her repeatedly. At the same time saying 'You are my mate, dash it,' or something to that effect. That'll do the trick. That'll divert her mind from that oily French polisher of hers."

He ceased. The glow faded from his eyes, which took on the glazed and corpselike look with which Jeff had now become familiar. His thoughts had drifted away to the year 1911 and a girl in a hat like a herbaceous border, whose name, if memory served him aright, had been Maudie.

Jeff was glad of the silence. He took advantage of it to try to fight down the rising feeling of nausea with which these revolting words had filled him. He had become very fond of Lord Uffenham, but it was plain to him that the old gentleman's soul, if you could call it that, and his own were, like his own and Mr. Shoesmith's, poles apart. Their whole outlook on love and the way in which it should find expression was diametrically opposed. A costermonger, sporting with his donah on Hampstead Heath on a Bank Holiday, would probably have felt that Lord Uffenham had the right idea. To Jeff, who since meeting Anne Benedick had become practically pure spirit, his whole technique was appalling. The thought of soiling Anne, that ethereal being, with this knock-'em-down-and-drag-'em--out type of wooing got in amongst his finer feelings as if they had been hit by a black-jack, and, but for the fact that the latter was in a trance and in any case had got to be conciliated and kept friendly, he would have given the loose-thinking peer a severe look.

Lord Uffenham came to life in that sudden way of his, like a male Galatea.

"Got any money?" he asked.

The abrupt question startled Jeff, but he prepared to do his bit. It occurred to him that in the peculiar circumstances he would presumably have to tip Lord Uffenham at the conclusion of his visit. He could only suppose that the other preferred to collect in advance.

"How much do you want?"

"To marry on, I mean."

"Oh?" said Jeff, enlightened. "Well, I'm not rich. Just a few hundred a year, left me by a godfather. And I make a bit by writing."

"What d'yer write?"

"What are usually called thrillers. I shall be starting a new book any day now. Do you read thrillers?"

"Oh, yerss."

"Then you will enjoy this one. It has an absolutely original central idea."

"Is that so?"

"A good many authors of goose-fleshers, you may have noticed, in order to chill the spinal chord, have given their Master Criminal a twisted ear. I am breaking fresh ground and striking an entirely new note by allotting mine two. You see the extraordinary cleverness of this? We shudder at a fiend in human shape, even one of whose aural appendages looks as if it had been chewed by a wild cat. Let him have a couple, covering both p4rt and starboard sides, and our blood turns to ice."

Lord Uffenham seemed only mildly impressed.

"Sounds pretty dashed silly," he said. "Don't suppose there's much money in writing, anyway. Mrs. Cork wrote a book about her adventures in Africa, called
A Woman In The Wilds,
and I expect it sold about a dozen copies. She can't even give the thing away without exerting the full strength of her personality. I've seen her force copies on visitors, regardless of their age or sex, like a nurse making a child swallow liquorice powder. No, you'll have to find those diamonds."

"I mean to."

"It's an odd thing," said Lord Uffenham. "Just now, turning out some old papers, I came on a diary I'd lost, and there was an entry against April the fourth—the word 'Bank.' I couldn't understand it. That was the way I sometimes used to jot down a reminder of where I'd put those dashed diamonds, when I happened to think of a particularly out-of-the-way place. There was another entry, for instance, which said 'Rover.' That was when I hid 'em at the bottom of the dog's bag of biscuits. But what the devil 'Bank' can have signified, I can't tell you. I would never have dreamed of putting the things in any bank. I don't believe in banks, except for keeping a little small change in. Yet there it was, dated April the fourth, and it was on April the fifth that I had my motor accident."

"Curious."

"Very curious. I can only suppose the note must have referred to something else. Probably my bank manager had asked me to call. No, if you find the things, it'll be in some dashed ingenious place, where no one would ever have thought of looking. But don't you worry. I never forget anything, not permanently.
I
can remember the exact tone of voice in which a certain gal used to say 'Don't!' as far back as the year '09."

"I suppose girls often used to say 'Don't!' to you in '09?"

"Pretty often. Yerss, fairly frequently. And that brings me back to Anne. She'll say 'Don't!' But pay no attention. Grab her. What yer looking like that for?"

Jeff hastily erased from his features the look of revolted austerity which he had injudiciously allowed to appear there, and substituted for it the smile of good-fellowship

"I was only thinking," he said, putting the suggestion forward with a diffidence which robbed it of offence, "that while the method which you advocate might be admirable—how shall I put it?—well, might be admirable with a certain type of—subject, isn't there the danger in this particular case that it might have unfortunate results? "

"Don't see your point."

"Miss Benedick is so spiritual."

"Nothing of the kind. Healthy, normal girl, with a normal liking for romance."

"That's exactly what I mean. Is there anything really romantic in the course of action which you suggest? I should have said not. I can see such methods as invaluable in helping to win a bar-room scrap, but ... Well, what I really mean is that I should have thought Miss Benedick would have preferred the troubadour to the stevedore type of wooer."

"Troubadour? What d'yer mean?"

"The Troubadours were minstrels of the Middle Ages, who used to get their results—and it was universally admitted that they did get results—by means of the honeyed word rather than the quick smash-and-grab. I confess that I was thinking of relying on the honeyed word."

"You'll be a fool, if you do."

"You don't think that if the word were really honeyed

"No, I don't. I know Anne. Known her ever since she was so high."

"Tell me about her when she was so high."

"Haven't time. Just remembered I've got to give that feller Molloy a telegram. Came half an hour ago. I was on my way to his room, when I stopped in here. Well, you be thinking over what I've said. I'm an older man than you, an older, wiser man, and I know a thing or two. Troubadours, indeed! Of all the dashed nonsense."

And with these withering words, Lord Uffenham heaved himself to his feet and plodded ponderously from the room.

He left behind him a young man unconvinced and still more than a little revolted. Despite his proficiency as a buzzer, Jeff was at heart modest and diffident. He was inclined to idealise the other sex. Anne, in particular, filled him with a deep and worshipping humility. This would not prevent him, should he find himself alone with her, talking easily and well—the love behind the humility would, indeed, stimulate him to new heights of eloquence—but it acted as a definite bar to any idea of behaving towards her with the physical abandon of a greyhound pouncing on an electric hare.

He lit another cigarette, and fell to musing on the apparently wilful eccentricity which had led a girl like her to plight her troth to so outstanding a human gumboil as Lionel Green.

Lord Uffenham, meanwhile, had presented himself at the door of the Molloy apartment, had delivered the belated telegram and departed. Soapy opened it, and uttered an exclamation.

"From Chimp," he said, his eyes widening. "Wants to see me to-morrow. Reply paid, and the address he gives is 'Halsey Buildings, Halsey Court, Mayfair.'"

He passed the communication to his wife, and she, too, read it with widening eyes.

"Then he's still there!"

"Still there."

"He hasn't sold out."

"No."

"I knew all along," said Mrs. Molloy, her teeth corning together with a little click, "that it was oompus-boompus."

CHAPTER XII

The fine weather was still holding up on the following morning, but no ray of sunshine penetrated into the murky interior of Halsey Court when Mr. and Mrs. Molloy entered it. It looked dingier than ever, and the number of people cooking cabbage in the immediate neighbourhood seemed to have increased.