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  ‘If you’re looking for Miss Brown, Mr Fish, I’ve an idea she’s gone to a place called Mario’s.’

  He poured further details into Ronnie’s throbbing ear. Mr Carmody had rung up on the phone, might have been ar-parse four, and he, Bashford, not listening but happening to hear, had thought he had caught something said about this place Mario’s.

  ‘Mario’s?’ said Ronnie. ‘Thanks, Bashford. Mario’s, eh? Right!’

  The porter, for Eton and Cambridge train their sons well, found nothing in the way Mr Fish spoke to cause a thrill. Totally unaware that he had been conversing with Othello’s younger brother, he went back to his den in the basement and sat down with a good appetite to steak and chips. And Ronnie, quivering from head to foot, started the car and drove off.

  Jealousy, said Shakespeare, and he was about right, is the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat he feeds on. By the time Ronald Overbury Fish pushed through the swinging-door that guards the revelry at Mario’s from the gaze of the passer-by, he was, like the Othello he so much resembled, perplexed in the extreme. He felt hot all over, then cold all over, then hot again, and the waiter who stopped him on the threshold of the dining-room to inform him that evening-dress was indispensable on the dancing-floor, and that flannel suits must go up to the balcony, was running a risk which would have caused his insurance company to purse its lips and shake its head.

  Fortunately for him, Ronnie did not hear. He was scanning the crowd before him in an effort to find Sue.

  ‘Plenty of room in the balcony, sir,’ urged the waiter, continuing to play with fire.

  This time Ronnie did become dimly aware that somebody was addressing him, and he was about to turn and give the man one look, when half-way down a grove of black coats and gaily-decorated frocks he suddenly saw what he was searching for. The next moment he was pushing a path through the throng, treading on the toes of brave men and causing fair women to murmur bitterly that this sort of thing ought to be prevented by the management.

  Five yards from Sue’s table, Ronnie Fish would have said that his cup was full and could not possibly be made any fuller. But when he had covered another two and pushed aside a fat man who was standing in the fairway, he realized his mistake. It was not Hugo who was Sue’s companion, but a reptilian-looking squirt with narrow eyes and his hair done in ridges. And, as he saw him, something seemed to go off in Ronnie’s brain like a released spring.

  A waiter, pausing with a tray of glasses, pointed out to him that on the dancing-floor evening-dress was indispensable.

  Gentlemen in flannel suits, he added, could be accommodated in the balcony.

  ‘Plenty of room in the balcony, sir,’ said the waiter.

  Ronnie reached the table. Pilbeam at the moment was saying that he had wanted for a long time to meet Sue. He hoped she had got his flowers all right.

  It was perhaps a natural desire to look at anything but this odious and thrusting individual who had forced his society upon her, that caused Sue to raise her eyes.

  Raising them, she met Ronnie’s. And, as she saw him, her conscience, which she had supposed lulled for the night, sprang to life more vociferous than ever. It had but been crouching, the better to spring.

  ‘Ronnie!’

  She started up. Pilbeam also rose. The waiter with the glasses pressed the edge of his tray against Ronnie’s elbow in a firm but respectful manner and told him that on the dancing-floor evening-dress was indispensable. Gentlemen in flannel suits, however, would find ample accommodation in the balcony.

  Ronnie did not speak. And it would have been better if Sue had not done so. For, at this crisis, some subconscious instinct, of the kind which is always waiting to undo us at critical moments, suggested to her dazed mind that when two men who do not know each other are standing side by side in a restaurant one ought to introduce them.

  ‘Mr Fish, Mr Pilbeam,’ murmured Sue.

  Only the ringing of the bell that heralds the first round of a heavy-weight championship fight could have produced more instant and violent results. Through Ronnie’s flannel-clad body a sort of galvanic shock seemed to pass. Pilbeam! He had come expecting Hugo, and Hugo would have been bad enough. But Pilbeam! The man she had said she didn’t even know. The man she hadn’t met. The man whose gifts of flowers she had professed to resent. In person! In the flesh! Hobnobbing with her in a restaurant! By Gad, he meant to say! By George! Good Gosh!

  His fists clenched. Eton was forgotten, Cambridge not even a memory. He inhaled so sharply that a man at the next table who was eating a mousse of chicken stabbed himself in the chin with his fork. He turned on Pilbeam with a hungry look. And at this moment, the waiter, raising his voice a little, for he was beginning to think that Ronnie’s hearing was slightly affected, mentioned as an interesting piece of information that the management of Mario’s preferred to reserve the dancing-floor exclusively for clients in evening-dress. But there was a bright side. Gentlemen in flannel suits could be accommodated in the balcony.

  It was the waiter who saved Percy Pilbeam. Just as a mosquito may divert for an instant a hunter who is about to spring at and bite in the neck a tiger of the jungle, so did this importunate waiter divert Ronnie Fish. What it was all about, he was too overwrought to ascertain, but he knew that the man was annoying him, pestering him, trying to chat with him when he had business elsewhere. With all the force of a generous nature, sorely tried, he plugged the waiter in the stomach with his elbow. There was a crash which even Leopold’s band could not drown. The man who had stabbed himself with the fork had his meal still further spoiled by the fact that it suddenly began to rain glass. And, as regards the other occupants of the restaurant, the word ‘Sensation’ about sums the situation up.

  Ronnie and the management of Mario’s now formed two sharply contrasted schools of thought. To Ronnie the only thing that seemed to matter was this Pilbeam – this creeping, slinking, cuckoo-in-the-nest Pilbeam, the Lothario who had lowered all speed records in underhand villainy by breaking up his home before he had got one. He concentrated all his faculties to the task of getting round the table, to the other side of which the object of his dislike had prudently withdrawn, and showing him in no uncertain manner where he got off.

  To the management, on the other hand, the vital issue was all this broken glassware. The waiter had risen from the floor, but the glasses were still there, and scarcely one of them was in a condition ever to be used again for the refreshment of Mario’s customers. The head-waiter, swooping down on the fray like some god in the Iliad descending from a cloud, was endeavouring to place this point of viewbefore Ronnie. Assisting him with word and gesture were two inferior waiters – Waiter A and Waiter B.

  Ronnie was in no mood for abstract debate. He hit the head-waiter in the abdomen, Waiter A in the ribs, and was just about to dispose of Waiter B, when his activities were hampered by the sudden arrival of reinforcements. From all parts of the room other waiters had assembled – to name but a few, Waiters C, D, E, F, G, and H – and he found himself hard pressed. It seemed to him that he had dropped into a Waiters’ Convention.

  As far as the eye could reach, the arena was crammed with waiters, and more coming.

  Pilbeam had disappeared altogether, and so busy was Ronnie now that he did not even miss him. He had reached that condition of mind which the old Vikings used to call Berserk and which among modern Malays is termed running amok.

  Ronnie Fish in the course of his life had had many ambitions. As a child, he had yearned some day to become an engine-driver. At school, it had seemed to him that the most attractive career the world had to offer was that of the professional cricketer. Later, he had hoped to run a prosperous night-club. But now, in his twenty-sixth year, all these desires were cast aside and forgotten. The only thing in life that seemed really worth while was to massacre waiters; and to this task he addressed himself with all the energy and strength at his disposal.

  Matters now began to move briskly. Waiter C, who rashly clutched the sleeve
of Ronnie’s coat, reeled back with a hand pressed to his right eye. Waiter D, a married man, contented himself with standing on the outskirts and talking Italian. But Waiter E, made of sterner stuff, hit Ronnie rather hard with a dish containing omelette aux champignons, and it was as the latter reeled beneath this buffet that there suddenly appeared in the forefront of the battle a figure wearing a gay uniform and almost completely concealed behind a vast moustache, waxed at the ends. It was the commissionaire from the street-door; and anybody who has ever been bounced from a restaurant knows that commissionaires are heavy metal.

  This one, whose name was McTeague, and who had spent many lively years in the army before retiring to take up his present duties, had a grim face made of some hard kind of wood and the muscles of a village blacksmith. A man of action rather than words, he clove his way through the press in silence. Only when he reached the centre of the maelstrom did he speak. This was when Ronnie, leaping upon a chair the better to perform the operation, hit him on the nose. On receipt of this blow, he uttered the brief monosyllable ‘Ho!’ and then, without more delay, scooped Ronnie into an embrace of steel and bore him towards the door, through which was now moving a long, large, leisurely policeman.

  IV

  It was some few minutes later that Hugo Carmody, emerging from the telephone-booth on the lower floor where the cocktail bar is, sauntered back into the dancing-room and was interested to find waiters massaging bruised limbs, other waiters replacing fallen tables, and Leopold’s band playing in a sort of hushed undertone like a band that has seen strange things.

  ‘Hullo!’ said Hugo. ‘Anything up?’

  He eyed Sue inquiringly. She looked to him like a girl who has had some sort of a shock.

  Not, or his eyes deceived him, at all her old bright self.

  ‘What’s up?’ he asked.

  ‘Take me home, Hugo!’

  Hugo stared.

  ‘Home? Already? With the night yet young?’

  ‘Oh, Hugo, take me home, quick.’

  ‘Just as you say,’ assented Hugo agreeably. He was now pretty certain that something was up. ‘One second to settle the bill, and then homeward ho. And on the way you shall tell me all about it. For I jolly well know,’ said Hugo, who prided himself on his keenness of observation, ‘that something is – or has been – up.’

  5 A PHONE CALL FOR HUGO

  The Law of Great Britain is a remorseless machine, which, once set in motion, ignores first causes and takes into account only results. It will not accept shattered dreams as an excuse for shattering glassware: nor will you get far by pleading a broken heart in extenuation of your behaviour in breaking waiters. Haled on the morrow before the awful majesty of Justice at Bosher Street Police Court and charged with disorderly conduct in a public place – to wit, Mario’s Restaurant, and resisting an officer – to wit, P. C.

  Murgatroyd, in the execution of his duties, Ronald Fish made no impassioned speeches.

  He did not raise clenched fists aloft and call upon heaven to witness that he was a good man wronged. Experience, dearly bought in the days of his residence at the University, had taught him that when the Law gripped you with its talons the only thing to do was to give a false name, say nothing and hope for the best.

  Shortly before noon, accordingly, on the day following the painful scenejust described, Edwin Jones, of 7 Nasturtium Villas, Cricklewood, poorer by the sum of five pounds, was being conveyed in a swift taxi-cab to his friend Hugo Carmody’s hotel, there to piece together his broken life and try to make a new start.

  On the part of the man Jones himself during the ride there was a disposition towards silence. He gazed before him bleakly and gnawed his lower lip. Hugo Carmody, on the other hand, was inclined to be rather jubilant. It seemed to Hugo that after a rocky start things had panned out pretty well.

  ‘A nice, smooth job,’ he said approvingly. ‘I was scanning the beak’s face closely during the summing up and I couldn’t help fearing for a moment that it was going to be a case of fourteen days without the option. As it is, here you are, a free man, and no chance of your name being in the papers. A moral victory, I call it.’

  Ronnie released his lower lip in order to bare his teeth in a bitter sneer.

  ‘I wouldn’t care if my name were in every paper in London.’

  ‘Oh, come, old loofah! The honoured name of Fish?’

  ‘What do I care about anything now?’

  Hugo was concerned. This morbid strain, he felt, was unworthy of a Nasturtium Villas Jones.

  Aren’t you rather tending to make a bit too much heavy weather over this?’

  ‘Heavy weather!’

  ‘I think you are. After all, when you come right down to it, what has happened? You find poor little Sue . . .’

  ‘Don’t call her “poor little Sue”!’

  ‘You find the party of the second part,’ amended Hugo, ‘at a dance place. Well, why not?

  What, if you follow me, of it? Where’s the harm in her going out to dance?’

  ‘With a man she swore she didn’t know!’

  ‘Well, at the time when you asked her, probably she didn’t know him. Things move quickly in a great city. I wish I had a quid for every girl I’ve been out dancing with, whom I hadn’t known from Eve a couple of days before.’

  ‘She promised me she wouldn’t go out with a soul.’

  ‘Ah, but with a merry twinkle in her eye, no doubt? I mean to say, you can’t expect a girl nowadays to treat a promise like that seriously. I mean, dash it, be reasonable!’

  ‘And with that little worm of all people!’

  Hugo cleared his throat. He was conscious of a slight embarrassment. He had not wished to touch on this aspect of the affair, but Ronnie’s last words gave a Carmody and a gentleman no choice.

  As a matter of fact, Ronnie, old man,’ he said, ‘you are wrong in supposing that she went to Mario’s with the above Pilbeam. She went with me. Blameless Hugo, what. I mean, more like a brother than anything.’

  Ronnie declined to be comforted.

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘My dear chap!’

  ‘I suppose you think you’re damned clever, trying to smooth things over. She was at Mario’s with Pilbeam.’

  ‘I took her there.’

  ‘You may have taken her. But she was dining with Pilbeam.’

  ‘Nothing of the kind.’

  ‘Do you think I can’t believe my own eyes? It’s no use your saying anything, Hugo, I’m through with her. She’s let me down. Less than a week I’ve been away,’ said Ronnie, his voice trembling, ‘and she lets me down. Well, it serves me right for being such a fool as to think she ever cared a curse for me.’

  He relapsed into silence. And Hugo, after turning over in his mind a few specimen remarks, decided not to make them. The cab drew up before the hotel, and Ronnie, getting out, uttered a wordless exclamation.

  ‘No, let me,’ said Hugo considerately. A bit rough on a man, he felt, after coughing up five quid to the hell-hounds of the Law, to be expected to pay the cab. He produced money and turned to the driver. It was some moments before he turned back again, for the driver, by the rules of the taxi-chauffeurs’ Union, kept his petty cash tucked into his underclothing. When he did so, he was considerably astonished to find that Ronnie, while his back was turned, had, in some unaccountable manner, become Sue. The changeling was staring unhappily at him from the exact spot where he had left his old friend.

  ‘Hullo!’ he said.

  ‘Ronnie’s gone,’ said Sue.

  ‘Gone?’

  ‘Yes. He walked off as quick as he could round the corner when he saw me. He . . .’

  Sue’s voice broke. ‘He didn’t say a word.’

  ‘How did you get here?’ asked Hugo. There were other matters, of course, to be discussed later, but he felt he must get this point cleared up first.

  ‘I thought you would bring him back to your hotel, and I thought that if I could see him I could . . . say something.�
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  Hugo was alarmed. He was now practically certain that this girl was going to cry, and if there was one thing he disliked it was being with crying girls in a public spot. He would not readily forget the time when a female named Yvonne Something had given way to a sudden twinge of neuralgia in his company not far from Piccadilly Circus, and an old lady had stopped and said that it was brutes like him who caused all the misery in the world.

  ‘Come inside,’ he urged quickly. ‘Come and have a cocktail or a cup of tea or a bun or something. I say,’ he said, as he led the way into the hotel lobby and found two seats in a distant corner, ‘I’m frightfully sorry about all this. I can’t help feeling it’s my fault.’

  ‘Oh, no.’

  ‘If I hadn’t asked you to dinner . . .’

  ‘It isn’t that that’s the trouble. Ronnie might have been a little cross for a minute or two if he had found you and me together, but he would soon have got over it. It was finding me with that horrid little man Pilbeam. You see, I told him – and it was quite true – that I didn’t know him.’

  Yes, so he was saying to me in the cab.’

  ‘Did he what did he say?’

  ‘Well, he plainly resented the Pilbeam, I’m afraid. His manner, when touching on the Pilbeam, was austere. I tried to drive into his head that that was just an accidental meeting and that you had come to Mario’s with me, but he would have none of it. I fear, old thing, there’s nothing to be done but leave the whole binge to Time, the Great Healer.’

  A page-boy was making a tour of the lobby. He seemed to be seeking a Mr Gregory.

  ‘If only I could get hold of him and make him listen. I haven’t been given a chance to explain.’

  You think you could explain, even if given a chance?’

  ‘I could try. Surely he couldn’t help seeing that I really loved him, if we had a real talk?’