“Oh, Bingo, darling,” said Mrs Bingo, “ought you?”
“Eh?” said Bingo, groping for the gist.
“Your weak stomach,” explained Mrs Bingo.
Bingo was amazed.
“How do you mean, weak stomach? My stomach’s terrific. Ask anyone at the Drones. It’s the talk of the place.”
“Well, you know what happened at that Christmas party at the Wilkinsons when you were six. Nannie says she will never forget it.”
Bingo flushed darkly.
“Has she been telling you about that?”
“Yes. She says your stomach was always terribly weak, and you would overeat yourself at children’s parties. She says you would stuff and stuff and stuff and go out and be sick and then come back and stuff and stuff and stuff again.”
Bingo drew himself up rather coldly. No man likes to be depicted as a sort of infant Vitellius, particularly in the presence of a parlourmaid with flapping ears who is obviously drinking it all in with a view to going off and giving the cook something juicy to include in her memoirs.
“No more jam omelette, thank you,” he said reservedly.
“Now, that’s very sensible of you,” said Mrs Bingo. “And Nannie thinks it would be ever so much safer if you gave up cigarettes and cocktails.”
Bingo sank back in his chair feeling as if he had been slapped in the eye with a wet sock.
A couple of days later things took a turn for the worse. Returning from the office and heading for the nursery for a crack with Algernon Aubrey, Bingo met Mrs Bingo in the hail. It seemed to him that her manner during the initial embracings and pip-pippings was a little strange.
“Bingo,” she said, “do you know a girl named Valerie Twistleton?”
“Oh, rather. Pongo Twistleton’s sister. Known her all my life. She’s engaged to Horace Davenport.”
“Oh, is she?” Mrs Bingo seemed relieved. “Then you don’t see much of her now?”
“Not much. Why?”
“Nannie was saying that you made yourself rather conspicuous with her at that Christmas party at the Wilkinsons. She says you kept kissing her under the mistletoe. She says you used to kiss all the little girls.”
Bingo reeled. It was the last picture a husband would wish to be built up in his wife’s mind’s eye. Besides, a chivalrous man always shrinks from bandying a woman’s name, and he was wondering what would happen if this loose talk were to come to die ears of Horace Davenport, the Drones Club’s leading Othello.
“She must be thinking of someone else,” he said hoarsely. “I was noted as a child for my aloofness and austerity. My manner towards the other sex was always scrupulously correct. Do you know what the extraordinary ramblings of this Byles suggest to me?” he went on. “They suggest that the old blister is senile and quite unequal to the testing office of ministering to Algy. Boot her out is my advice and sign on someone younger.”
“You would prefer a young nurse?”
Bingo is no fool.
“Not a young nurse. A sensible, middle-aged nurse. I mean to say, Nannie Byles will never see a hundred and seven again.”
“She was fifty last birthday, she tells me.”
“She tells you. Ha!”
“Well, anyway, I wouldn’t dream of letting her go. She is wonderful with Algy, and she looks after your things like a mother.”
“Oh, very well. Only don’t blame me when it’s too late.”
“When what’s too late?”
“I don’t know,” said Bingo. “Something.”
As he went on to the nursery to pass the time of day with Algernon Aubrey, his heart was leaden. No question now of his ignoring his peril. He could not have been better informed regarding it if the facts had been broadcast on a nation-wide hook-up. A few more of these revelations from this voice from the past and he would sink to the level of a fifth-rate power. Somehow, by some means, he told himself, if his prestige in the home was to be maintained, he must get rid of this Nannie.
The woman knew too much.
As a matter of fact, though he would not have cared to have the thing known, his prestige at the moment was quite rocky enough, without having any Nannies nibbling at the foundations. A very serious crisis was impending in his domestic affairs, threatening to make his name a hissing and a byword.
When Bingo receives his envelope from Wee Tots on the first of the month, it is too often his practice, in defiance of Mrs Bingo’s expressed wishes, to place its contents on the nose of some horse of whose speed and resolution he has heard good reports, and such horses have a nasty habit of pausing half-way down the stretch to pick daisies. And this had happened now. A mistaken confidence in Sarsaparilla for the three o’clock at Ally Pally had not only cleaned him out but had left him owing his bookie ten quid. This tenner would have to be coughed up in the course of the next few days, and tenners in this iron age are hard to come by.
He had explored every avenue. He had bought a ticket for the club Darts sweep with his last ten bob, but had drawn a blank. He had tried to touch P. P. Purkiss for an advance of salary, but P. P. Purkiss had said that it was foreign to the policy of Wee Tots to brass up in advance. It really began to look as if he would be forced to the last awful extreme of biting Mrs Bingo’s ear, which would mean that he might hear the last of it somewhere round about the afternoon of their golden wedding day, but scarcely before then.
It was a pretty poignant position of affairs, and what made Bingo so frightfully sick about it all was that if he had been the merest fraction of a second slippier when the hat for the Darts sweep was circulating, he would have been on velvet, for he would have secured that sweep’s most glittering prize. He had started to reach out for a ticket, and just as his fingers were about to close on it Oofy Prosser had reached out ahead of him and scooped it in. And that ticket, when opened had been found to contain the name of Horace Davenport.
Horace Davenport is a bird, who, while lacking many of the other qualities which go to make a superman, has always thrown a beautiful dart. Both at school and at the University his skill had been a byword among the sporting set, and the passage of the years had in no way diminished his accuracy. His eye was not dimmed nor his natural force abated, and anyone drawing his name in the sweep was entitled to regard the contents of the kitty as money in the bank. And this singular bit of goose, as I say, had fallen to the lot of Oofy Prosser, a bloke already stinking with the stuff. That was Oofy at the next table to us at lunch, the stout, pimpled chap. You probably noticed how rich he looked. That a fellow as oofy as Oofy should get the money seemed to Bingo a crime.
But the last thing he had anticipated was that the same reflection should have occurred to Oofy. Yet so it proved. He was in the club the morning before the Darts contest, and Oofy came up to him, looking, it seemed to Bingo, pensive. Though it is always hard to read the play of expression on Oofy’s face, because of the pimples.
“What ho, Bingo,” said Oofy.
“What ho, Oofy,” said Bingo.
“I wonder, Bingo,” said Oofy, perking himself beside him and stroking the third pimple from the left in a meditative sort of way, “if you have ever reflected how weird life is.”
Bingo agreed that life was pretty weird in spots, and Oofy said that what struck him about life-and he was a man who had gone into the thing—was that there was mismanagement somewhere.
“Gross mismanagement,” said Oofy. “Well, as an instance of what I mean, take this Darts sweep. Think of all the eager, hard-up waifs who would have given their left eyeball to draw Horace Davenport. And who gets him? I do. And what ensues? Horace is bound to win, so I spear thirty-three pound ten. What’s the use of thirty-three pound ten to me? Do you know what my annual income is? No, I won’t tell you, it would make you sick. It isn’t right, Bingo,” said Oofy warmly. “All wrong, Bingo. I shall give this ticket away. Would you like it, Bingo?”
Bingo, leaping in the air like a rising trout, said he would, and Oofy seemed to ponder. Then he said that giving Bingo
the ticket might destroy Bingo’s self-respect, and when Bingo urged very strongly that in his opinion the risk ought to be taken he pondered again.
“No,” he said at length, “I should hate to have it on my mind that I had sapped a friend’s self-respect. I will sell you this ticket, Bingo, for the nominal price of a flyer.”
A sharp cry of agony escaped Bingo. He had sufficient capital for the club luncheon at four-and-sixpence, but no more. Then an idea struck him.
“Will you hold it open for a couple of hours?”
“Certain,” said Oofy. “I shall be here till a quarter past one. Slip me the money then, and the ticket is yours.”
The idea that had struck Bingo was this. In his bedroom at home there was a set of diamond cuff links, a present from Mrs Bingo on his last birthday, worth, he estimated, five pounds of any pawnbroker’s money. What simpler than to secure these, thrust them up the spout, snaffle the Horace Davenport ticket, get his hooks on the thirty-three pounds ten, rush back to the pawnbroker’s, de-spout the links and return to Position One? It would afford a masterly solution of the whole difficulty.
The Bingo residence, being one of those houses off Wimbledon Common, takes a bit of getting to, but he made good time there and sneaking in unobserved was able to present himself at the club at ten minutes past one. Oofy was still there. The five changed hands. And Bingo, who had stuck out for eight pounds ten at the pawnbroker’s so as to have a bit of spending money, went off to the Savoy grill to revel. There are moments in a man’s life when the club luncheon at four-and-sixpence is not enough.
And he had just got back to the office after the repast and was about to settle down to the composition of a thoughtful editorial on What Tiny Hands Can Do For Nannie, wishing that his own tiny hands could take her by the scruff of the neck and heave her out on her left ear, when Mrs Bingo rang up to say that, her mother having had one of her spells at her South Kensington abode, she was buzzing along there and would not be able to get home to-night.
Bingo said he would miss her sorely, and Mrs Bingo said she knew he would, and Bingo was preparing to toodle-oo and ring off, when Mrs Bingo uttered a sudden yip.
“Oh, Bingo, I knew there was something else. All this excitement about Mother put it out of my head. Your diamond links have been stolen!”
It was a pure illusion, of course, but Bingo tells me that as he heard these words it seemed to him that P. P. Purkiss, who was visible through the doorway of the inner office, suddenly started doing an Ouled Nail Stomach dance. His heart leaped sharply and became entangled with his tonsils. It was a matter of some moments before he was able to disengage it and reply.
“My links? Stolen? Absurd!”
“Well, Nannie says she was tidying your room just now and couldn’t find them anywhere.”
Bingo was himself again.
“Nannie Byles,” he said sternly, “is temperamentally incapable of finding a brass drum in a telephone booth. You are familiar with my views on that gibbering old fathead. Don’t listen to a word she says.”
“Then you wouldn’t advise sending for the police?”
“Certainly not. The police are busy men. It is not fair to waste their time.”
“Nannie says they would go round and make enquiries at all the pawnshops.”
“Exactly. And while they were doing it, what would happen? About fifty murders would be taking place and not a rozzer on duty to attend to them. One wishes sometimes that these Nannies had the rudiments of a civic conscience. Don’t you worry about those links. I can tell you just where they are. They are… no, I’ve forgotten. But it’ll come back. Well, pip-pip, light of my life,” said Bingo, and rang off.
His first act on replacing the receiver was, you will scarcely be surprised to learn, to grab his hat and nip round to the Drones for a quick one; for despite the intrepid front he had put up the news that the A.W.O.L.ness of those links had been discovered had shaken him to his foundations, and he was feeling a little like some Eliza who, crossing the ice, heard the baying of the pursuing bloodhounds.
But with the first sip of the restorative Reason returned to its throne, assuring him that there was absolutely no cause for alarm. The Darts tourney, Reason pointed out, was to take place to-morrow morning. He had the Horace Davenport ticket on his person. It followed then as doth the night the day, concluded Reason, that he would be able to restore the missing trinkets the moment he got home to-morrow afternoon.
He was just musing affectionately on Horace Davenport and feeling how fortunate he was in holding all rights to a dart hurler of his incomparable skill, when his attention was attracted by a deep sigh in his vicinity, and looking up he saw Horace approaching. And with a sudden sharp alarm he noted that something seemed to have gone wrong with the Davenport works. The other’s face was pale and drawn and the eyes behind their tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses were like those of a dead fish.
“Stap my vitals, Horace,” he cried, deeply concerned, for naturally what he would have liked to see on the eve of the Darts tournament was a rosy-cheeked, bright-eyed Horace Davenport, full of pep, ginger and the will to win. “You look a bit down among the wines and spirits. What’s the matter?”
“Well, I’ll tell you,” said Horace Davenport. “You know Valerie Twistleton.”
“Yes.”
“You know I’m engaged to her.”
“Yes.”
“Well, that is where you make your ruddy error,” said Horace Davenport. “I’m not. We have parted brass rags.”
“Why on earth?”
“Well, if you ask me, I think she loves another.”
“What rot!”
“I don’t agree with you. We quarrelled about a mere trifle, and I maintain that no girl would have handed a man his hat for a trifle as mere as that, unless she had already decided to hitch on elsewhere and was looking out for a chance of giving him the gate.”
Bingo’s tender heart was touched, of course, but he could not forget Horace’s great mission.
“Too bad,” he said. “But you mustn’t brood on it, old man, or you’ll go putting yourself off your stroke.”
“My stroke?”
“For the Darts binge to—morrow.”
“Oh, that? I shall not be competing,” said Horace dully. “I’m going to scratch.”
Bingo uttered a quick howl like that of a Labrador timber wolf which has stubbed its toe on a jagged rock.
“Sker-ratch?”
“Exactly what Oofy Prosser said when I told him, in the same agitated voice. But I’m dashed if I can see why you’re all so surprised,” said Horace. “Is it likely, after what has happened, that I would be in any mood for bunging darts?”
A blinding light had flashed upon Bingo. I doubt if there are half-a-dozen fellows in the club, or ten at the outside, more capable than he of detecting funny business when such is afoot. He remembered now, what he ought to have remembered before, that Oofy, despite his colossal wealth, had always been a man who would walk ten miles in tight shoes to pick up even the meanest sum that was lying around loose.
At the thought of how the subtle schemer had chiselled him out of that flyer his soul blazed in revolt, and it was with an eloquence of which he had not supposed himself capable that he now began to plead with Horace Davenport to revise his intention of scratching for the Darts tournament. And so moving were the words in which he pictured the ruin which must befall him, should the other remove his name from the list of competitors, that Horace’s better self awakened.
“This opens up a new line of thought,” said Horace. “I didn’t know Oofy had sold you that ticket. Well, to oblige you, Bingo, I will go through the hollow formality of entering the arena. But build no hopes on that. You can’t aim darts when your heart is broken. My eyes will be so dim with unshed tears that I doubt if I’ll be able to get a single double.”
As if the word “double” had touched a chord in his mind, he moved off in the direction of the bar, and Bingo, clutching his head in both hands, start
ed to think more tensely than he had ever thought in his puff.
There is no gainsaying the truth of Horace’s parting words. If there is one thing calculated to take the edge off a fellow’s form in an athletic contest, it is unrequited love. He recalled the time in his own bachelor days when a hopeless yearning for a girl whose name he had forgotten had ruined his putting touch for several weeks. What was needed here first and foremost, therefore, was some scheme for reconciling these two sundered hearts. The re-insertion of the love light in Valerie Twistleton’s eyes would put Horace Davenport right back in mid-season form and the ticket bearing his name would once more be worth thirty-three quid of the best and brightest.
And it ought not, he felt, to be so dashed difficult to get that love light resuming work at the old stand. What Horace had said about Valerie having given him the air because she loved another he regarded as the purest apple-sauce. Honoured from time to time with the girl’s confidence, he knew that she looked on the Darts wizard as a king among men. Obviously what had occurred was what is technically known as a lovers’ tiff, and this he was convinced could be set right by a few well-chosen words from a polished man of the world.
Why, then, should he not get Valerie on the ‘phone, ask her out for a bite of supper, and having lushed her up as far as his modest resources would permit plead with her to forgive and forget?
Bingo is a chap who knows a ball of fire when he sees one, and that this idea was a ball of fire he had no doubts whatever. He sped to the telephone booth, established communication, and a few minutes later the deal had been clinched. The girl checked up immediately on his proposition of a slab of supper, and suggested Mario’s popular restaurant as the mise en scène.
“Okay, Valerie, old crumpet,” said Bingo, infinitely relieved. “Eleven-fifteen at Mario’s then.”
So far so good. A smooth bit of work. But it did not take Bingo long to realise that before the revels could begin there was one rather tricky hurdle to be surmounted. Nannie Byles, like the night, had a thousand eyes, and some pretty adroit manoeuvring would be required if he was to get out of the house without her spotting him. He had no desire to be called upon to explain to Mrs Bingo on her return what he had been doing oozing off the premises in the soup and fish at half-past ten p.m. The statement that he had been on his way to give Valerie Twistleton a morsel of supper in her absence would, he felt, not go any too well.
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