Another Part of the Wood

by Denis Mackail

  Thus Snubs Tipton remained motionless and unconscious in the ditch, until the moon sank and the sun rose, and the first of the milk-lorries—which rest not even on Whit-Sunday—came rattling and roaring towards him.

  Chapter XII

  Beaky at the “Majestic”—Breakfast with the Adored One—Humiliation of Gertie—Startling discovery in a suit-case—Pippingfold again—An interesting engagement—Significant expression on Snubs Tipton’s face—The End.

  1

  There being, it would seem, no limit to the power exercised by Mrs. Shirley over the Majestic Hotel, it was in the Majestic Hotel that Beaky reopened his eyes, groaned, sneezed, and generally speaking came to himself. Doubtless, if Mrs. Shirley had so willed it, he would have found himself in a room overlooking the sea, or even in the bridal suite; but it had been sufficient for her purpose in this immediate emergency that he should be admitted to a bedroom at all, and the management—as represented by crimped hair and striped trousers—had produced from up its obliging sleeve a small apartment at the back of the fourth floor. An apartment which gave on to the glass roof of the hotel garage, and on to the tall chimney of the Newcliff Steam Laundry, and on to red and grey roofs climbing slowly towards the sky-line. An apartment furnished in the very earliest Majestic style, and smelling faintly of linoleum and soot. Yet an interesting apartment in that Mrs. Shirley’s ascendancy had apparently conjured it into existence out of absolutely nothing at all.

  “Well, madam,” crimped hair and striped trousers had said, “of course we’re crowded right out. In fact, I’ve been turning visitors away all afternoon, and there isn’t literally an empty corner. Still, madam, I’ll see what I can do.”

  At these words Number 437 must have materialised out of the ether, and so completely and realistically that it had even remembered to provide a key in the reception-bureau. Beaky was carried into the lift, and elevated, and extracted, and taken along the corridor, and by the time that all this had been done, there—most magically and mysteriously—was Number 437 waiting to receive him. The key fitted the door; he was borne in, and lowered carefully on to the bed.

  Trust Mrs. Shirley to have accumulated a doctor, and trust Sylvia—though she had hardly spoken to him—to have made it the doctor’s one wish and aim in life to allay her anxiety and calm her fears. “Nothing broken,” he said. “Very slight concussion, possibly. Possibly not even that. Keep him quiet till the morning, and he’ll be as fit as a fiddle. The pulse is splendid.”

  This was a lie, or, if you prefer it, a professional euphemism; but more than justified by the look in Sylvia’s eyes.

  “Is it really?” she said. “And may I—may I go in and see him?”

  Here she made the mistake of glancing at her mother, and Mrs. Shirley shook her head.

  “No, darling,” she said. “Better not.”

  And she glanced at the doctor, and the doctor thought what a very attractive woman she was, and instantly took her side—though she had actually interrupted him as he was on the point of saying that nothing could do the patient more good.

  “Well, well,” he said, instead. “Perhaps he’d better keep quite quiet. Shock, you know. Nothing serious, but …”

  It was a little difficult to keep one’s head in such captivating company. Medically speaking, he had been astonished by the patient’s rapid recovery, though it would be foolish to dismiss the case too hurriedly when there was every chance that he could convincingly pay at least two more visits. But as a human being—and who could fail to be a human being with these delightful people?—all he really wanted was to agree with them both, and to tell them whatever they wanted to hear. He blinked from one to the other, all eagerness to contradict himself at the first hint that this was what they would like. But Sylvia was looking away, and her mother seemed quite satisfied with the diagnosis as it stood.

  “It’s very good of you,” she said. “I hope we didn’t interrupt your dinner? Sylvia—the doctor’s just going.”

  The doctor’s face fell, and rose again—if that be the correct antithesis—as the younger of the two charmers smiled and held out her hand.

  “Thank you most awfully,” she was saying. “You— you don’t know how——”

  “Just a moment, darling,” said Mrs. Shirley. And she walked away with the doctor, and he was so maddened by her fascination that he tried to laugh at the idea of payment—but without the slightest effect, for which he was glad when he came to his senses. And he said that he would send in a little something to help the patient to sleep, and that he’d come back first thing in the morning, but that Mrs. Shirley mustn’t hesitate to ring him up if she felt the least wish to do so, and if he might say so what a charming girl she had. Quite charming. “And your son-in-law——”

  “What!” cried Mrs. Shirley. And bit her lip. And began to laugh.

  And the doctor laughed, too—as insanely as if he had been listening to an encore played by a string quartette. And he wrung Mrs. Shirley’s hand quite painfully, and cackled again, and scampered away in the most unprofessional manner imaginable—turning at the head of the stairs to wave encouragingly, and nearly falling headlong down them as this really most bewitching woman waved back at him.

  “What a delightful family,” he said to himself, and only wished that they could all have slight concussion every day in the week; so long as they had it when he happened to be looking out of his surgery window, as he had so fortunately been doing when that curious accident had taken place. Thus he beamed and chuckled, and hurried off to the chemist round the corner.

  “But, Mummie darling,” said Sylvia, “why not?”

  “Darling—because I’d rather you didn’t.”

  “I see. At least, I don’t really, but——”

  “To-morrow,” said Mrs. Shirley, “you shall talk to him as much as you like. But just for this evening—well, I’d have to be there too, you see. And——”

  “Oh. Was that what you were going to say when you started?”

  “No. I don’t know what I was going to say.”

  “I see, darling. You—you don’t think he’ll get up and run away, though—do you?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Nor do I,” said Sylvia, looking so adorable that our pen trembles as we describe it; that it is all that we can do not to lose our head like the doctor, and come bursting into the story and paying her the most outrageous compliments to her face.

  “Besides,” said Mrs. Shirley, with an enchanting twinkle of her own, “he can’t get out till I say so. You see, I’ve locked him in.”

  This, most decidedly, was anything but what she had meant to say when she started, but it cleared the air far more satisfactorily than any of the things which she had meant to say. For Sylvia laughed. And Mrs. Shirley laughed, too. And they were laughing at themselves, and at each other, and at Mr. R. H. Brett, and they couldn’t stop even though the thunder came and rolled outside—which, as everyone knows, has a tendency to make one rather solemn. And everything was going to be all right, but it was so much more exciting and amusing to have a last evening together like this than to have missed it by hurrying things, or to have spoilt it by discussing them. Beaky’s name was not mentioned again, but the light which danced in Sylvia’s eyes was continually reflected in her mother’s.

  “That was far better than the pierrots could possibly have been,” said Sylvia to herself, as she smiled at the face in her bedroom looking-glass. “And I’d have hated to be in a tin place like that while the storm was going on.”

  The smile suddenly faded.

  “Oh, I can’t wait, I can’t wait!” she cried. “And what if I’m absolutely wrong?”

  The smile returned, mockingly.

  “You’ve got to wait,” it said. “And do you imagine for one instant that you’re wrong?”

  “Well, no,” said Sylvia, with the frankness for which her character had always been distinguished. And she jumped into bed, and sang herself to sleep.

  2

 
; So Beaky had no more visitors that night except a page-boy who startled him by entering with a pass-key and some pyjamas—(Did you know that big hotels can always provide these? Well, Mrs. Shirley did)—and a toothbrush and a glass of water and a pill.

  “Mrs. Shirley’s compliments, sir,” he piped, “and will you please swallow this? And the lady said would you please wait for the doctor before you get up, sir.”

  The errand and message seemed so much part of this experienced cherub’s everyday work, and his entrance had been so abrupt and unexpected, that he had gone again before Mr. Brett could do more than stare at him. And though the door was no longer jammed, as it had apparently been when he had tested it before, it was getting a bit late to go wandering in search of his benefactress. Besides, she had told him to stay where he was, and so had the doctor, and so did the shaky feeling in his preposterous legs, which was partly physical and partly emotional; and anyhow he’d got to think what he was going to say to Sylvia before he left this strange sanctuary and very likely made a worse mess of everything than he had made already.

  Meanwhile, shame and gratitude would have made him swallow something far more nauseating than that enigmatic pill, if by doing so he could oblige any member of the Shirley family; and he swallowed it, and drank the water, and brushed his teeth with the toothbrush, and donned the pyjamas, and returned to the bed to do some really solid thinking, and in five minutes was as sound asleep as he had ever been in his life. Towards morning his soul began motoring in a wild and complicated manner, and had clothed his astral body in astral pyjamas which made it particularly embarrassing that he should be en route for somebody’s wedding. Again and again he stopped, and bought or borrowed or even stole more suitable garments, and put them on and started motoring again—only to discover that he was still in the astral pyjamas and that the church was as far away as ever. And sometimes the motor was very small, so that he had to propel it as though it were a velocipede; and sometimes it was enormously large and powerful, and swept up hills and over dizzy viaducts and crumbling precipices, and shot him out, and ran away, and then came back and laughed at him and said that they were all waiting for him, and that if he wasn’t quick someone else would have to be the bridegroom. So then he knew that it was his own wedding, and the chase became more desperate and sluggish than ever. “But she never answered my letter,” he kept saying. “Oh, yes, she did,” they answered in the form of various misshapen pedestrians and pierrots and men in Panamas; “but she refused you, so you’ve got to marry Miss Mulberry. This way, now. There she is.” And they all rushed after him, and he had to escape from them with the added handicap of a spare wheel which he was unable to detach from his own leg. “Sylvia!” he shouted. “Sylvia—help!” And there she was, looking so reproachful that it was more than he could bear, and they were in the little room at Dolphin Street, and she was telling him that he’d got to give her back her photograph. And at this dreadful news he became dissolved in such a welter of self-pity and misery and remorse and bitter, unavailing regret that he could only choke and sob and fumble blindly for her hand. And the hand gripped his, and slid up to his wrist, and became larger and larger and more and more vice-like, and he tried to scream without the faintest result, and he knew that if he didn’t scream it was the end of everything, and he made a supreme effort, and screamed deafeningly with his astral lungs but only just audibly with his real ones.

  And he was in a strange bed in a strange room, with the sun shining in on his face and making him blink, and with a strange man sitting beside him and feeling his pulse.

  “Oh!” he said. “Was I asleep?”

  “Splendid!” said the doctor. “Just try moving the head.”

  Beaky moved the head.

  “Feel anything?” asked the doctor.

  Only an indescribable sense of relief.

  “No,” said Beaky. “I’m all right. Thank you.”

  “Like to get up?”

  “Well, of course. What’s the time?”

  “Past nine,” said the doctor. “Let me see you walk across the room.”

  The preposterous legs shot out of the bed, and afforded the doctor this simple pleasure.

  “You’re all right,” he said. “Better not do it again, though. You mightn’t be quite so lucky.”

  “What? Oh, I see what you mean. Oh, rather not.”

  “Right,” said the doctor. “Well, I’ll just go down and tell your good lady not to worry any more, and then I must run. Good-bye. Good luck.”

  “What?” said Beaky again. “Oh, I say—don’t I——”

  “No, no. That’s all settled.”

  A brisk nod, a brisk smile, and he had gone. Good lady? What a rum way to speak of Mrs. Shirley. Not that she wasn’t good. It was infernally and devastatingly good of her to have paid the doctor like that, and to have put him up like this, and the cheque which she should have at the first possible moment would never clear off the debt. But—— Hullo! Where were his clothes?

  A knock on the door.

  “Come in!”

  Here were his clothes.

  “I’ve got that oil out nicely, sir.”

  “Oh, have you? Oh, thanks awfully. Thanks.”

  “Thank you, sir. Nice morning, sir. That bit of a storm seems to have cleared the air.”

  “What? Oh, rather.”

  Beaky dressed in a dream, and slunk hurriedly down to the barber’s shop in the basement, and was shaved, and bought a clean handkerchief, and felt remarkably peckish, but had still got enough cash to pay for his own breakfast—only ought he to try and find Mrs. Shirley first, and start thanking her for——

  “Hullo, Beaky!”

  His knees knocked together, and something whirled violently round inside his chest.

  “Hullo, Sylvia.”

  “You’ve recovered, I hear.”

  “Oh, rather. That’s to say, it was nothing. I mean, I feel the most awful sort of—I mean, you must have thought me the most——”

  A severe attack of aphasia brought these observations to a muffled end. If only one could manage to look at her when one was speaking, or to speak when one was looking at her.

  “Mummie’s having breakfast in bed,” said Sylvia. “Have you had any yet?”

  “Well, no. No. Not yet, I mean.”

  “We’d better have it together, then.”

  “What? Oh, rather. I mean, oh, yes.”

  He stumbled after her. He tried to stumble past her and open the dining-room door, only a waiter anticipated him and it looked, so he imagined, as if he were trying to get in first. The waiter was surprised to receive a savage scowl, and again Beaky stumbled in the adored one’s wake.

  “This is our table. Will you order what you like?”

  “Oh, rather. But I mean——”

  Added to the difficulty of expressing himself on any subject, and the difficulty of explaining—without its really having been mentioned—that of course he was going to pay for his own breakfast, and the difficulty of discovering that he was no longer in the least peckish, and the transcendent difficulty of knowing whether or not to refer to his letter, he was overwhelmed by the realisation that this was the first time that he had ever seen Sylvia so early in the morning, and that she was far more exquisite and wonderful in this intimate atmosphere than he had ever known her before. And the little faces she was making at that typewritten menu-card. Oh, gosh, what luck he was in, and what a fool he was not to know what to do with it!

  “Er——”

  “But, Beaky, what——”

  “’Begyourpardon?”

  “—what were you doing?”

  “Doing? Oh—yesterday, you mean?”

  “Yes. When I saw you. Why did those other people drive off like that?”

  “What other—— Oh, didn’t you see? That was Snubs and Noodles.”

  “Noodles? But why—— What were you all doing? And why didn’t they wait? Didn’t they see you’d fallen out?”

  “I don’t know,” sai
d Beaky.

  “But I don’t understand. I thought …”

  Here Sylvia’s quick faces flickered more rapidly than ever, for it suddenly seemed that perhaps Beaky hadn’t come to Newcliff to look for her, after all. And what had Noodles been doing there, when the school had said that she’d gone away? And how did Mr. Tipton come into it? And why should these last two characters have deserted the first with such extraordinary precipitance?

  “I don’t understand,” she repeated. “Beaky—what on earth were you all doing?” And though this was certainly the most important question, she couldn’t help asking a second one. “And where did the others go to?”

  “I don’t know,” said Beaky. “We hadn’t settled.”

  “Hadn’t settled what?”

  “Well, you see, it all happened so quickly. And I don’t think they did notice me. And I’d no idea you were here.”

  “Oh.”

  “And Gertie was making such a row that——”

  “Gertie? Who’s Gertie?”

  “Snubs’s car, I mean. He calls her that.”

  “Oh, I see. Only I don’t. Had you just come down for drive, then?”

  “No no. I’m telling you, Sylvia. We’d lost Noodles.”

  “But you said——”

  “I know. We’d just found her. You see …”

  Most distinctly he didn’t want to talk about Noodles, or to expose the disgrace which she had brought on the family name. But if Sylvia asked him—and particularly if she looked at him like that—then he supposed she’d got to be told.