The Luck of the Bodkins

by P. G. Wodehouse

  It was not merely the fact that his heart was broken that caused Ambrose Tennyson to look like this. Other circumstances had contributed to his moroseness. It irked him to be used by Mr Llewellyn as a messenger boy: he resented having been compelled for even a few moments to breathe air tainted by the presence of his brother Reginald: and he thought the idea of Monty acting on the films the most idiotic he had ever heard.

  His manner, accordingly, as he delivered his message, was curt, even abrupt. He came to the point without preamble, wishing to get the thing over and done with, so that he might return to the promenade deck and resume his day-dreams about taking a running jump over the vessel's side - a policy which he considered, and perhaps rightly, would make Miss Blossom feel pretty silly.

  'You know Llewellyn?' he said.

  Monty admitted to knowing Mr Llewellyn, though only slightly. Just, he explained, in the way of asking him to spell things, if Ambrose knew what he meant. The impression he conveyed was that if he happened not to have his pocket dictionary handy, he used Ivor Llewellyn.

  'He wants you to go into the pictures,' said Ambrose scowling heavily.

  A slight confusion occurred here. Monty interpreted the announcement as an invitation from the president of the Superba-Llewellyn to accompany him to some motion-picture performance which was to be held on board the ship, and he spoke for a while in appreciative vein of the marvels of modern ocean travel - all these liners, he meant to say, with their ballrooms and swimming-baths and cinema palaces and what not.

  Lavish, said Monty, not mincing his words, absolutely lavish. He predicted a not distant future when vessels plying between Southampton and New York would offer their patrons a polo field, a full-size golf course and a few hundred acres of rough shooting.

  This caused Ambrose to grind his teeth a little. The panegyric had cut into his valuable time. Every minute spent in this state-room meant a minute when he was not on the promenade deck contemplating suicide.

  'Not "to" the pictures,' he said, wishing that when Monty had fallen into the fountain that bump-supper night at Oxford he had not been idiot enough to pull him out.' "Into" the pictures. He wants you to act for him.'

  Monty could make nothing of this. He stared, perplexed,

  ‘Act?’

  ‘Act.’

  ‘What-act?' ‘Yes, act.'

  'You don't mean,' said Monty, clutching at the word which seemed to provide a sort of shadowy clue to what his companion was driving at, 'act!'

  Ambrose Tennyson clenched his fists and groaned a silent groan. Better balanced men than he had found Monty Bodkin in what might be called his goggling mood a little trying.

  'Oh, for heaven's sake! You have the most infernal habit,' he said, 'when anyone says the simplest thing to you, of letting your lower jaw drop and looking like a half-witted sheep staring over a fence. Don't do it. I'm not quite myself just now, and it makes me want to hit you with something. Listen. Ivor Llewellyn, in his capacity of president of the Superba-Llewellyn Motion Picture Corporation of Llewellyn City, Southern California, produces motion pictures. In order to produce these motion pictures he requires actors to act in them. He wants to know if you will be one of those actors.'

  Monty brightened. He had seen daylight.

  'He wants me to act?'

  ‘That's right - act. He sent me to a?k if you would accept a contract. What shall I tell him?' ‘I see. Oh, ah, yes. Yes,' said Monty coyly. ‘H'm. Ha.'

  'And what the devil, precisely,’ inquired Ambrose, 'does that mean?'

  He was saying to himself that he must be strong, that he must have self-control and ride himself on the curb. Juries, he knew, looked askance at men who strangled even the half-witted in their beds.

  Monty's coyness was now positively painful to the eye. 'But I've never acted in my life. Except once at my old kindergarten.'

  'Well, do you propose to begin now? Or not? For goodness sake let me have something definite. He is waiting for me to report.'

  'I don't see how ‘I can.'

  ‘Right. That's all I wanted to know.'

  'I can't understand why he wants me to.'

  'Nor can I. But apparently he does. Well, I’ll go and tell him you thank him for the offer but have other views.'

  'Yes. I like that. Other views. That's good.'

  'Right.'

  The door slammed. Monty, finding himself alone, left his bed without delay and, hurrying to the mirror, stood peering into it with a questioning, what-is-it-master-likes-so-much expression on his face. He was consumed with curiosity as to what there could be about his personal appearance that had caused Ivor Llewellyn, presumably a hard man to please in the matter of faces, to single him out from the crowd and make him so extraordinarily flattering an offer.

  He sifted the evidence thoroughly - examining his reflection full face, side face, three-quarter face and over the left shoulder, smiling genially, tenderly, cynically, and bitterly; and finally frowning, first with menace and then with reproach. He also registered surprise, dismay, joy, horror, loathing, and renunciation.

  But when the returns were all in, he still had to confess himself baffled. No matter how much he smiled and frowned, he was totally unable to see what Mr Llewellyn had seen. Where the president of the Superba-Llewellyn apparently beheld one of those faces that launch a thousand ships, all he could detect was just the same old regulation, workaday set of features which he had been carrying around the West End of London for years - without, it is true, exciting actual hostility or mob violence, but certainly not knocking the public in any sense cold.

  He had given the thing up as one of those insoluble mysteries and was wondering whether, now that he was out of bed, he might not as well stay out and get dressed, when there was a loud cry without, a forceful bang upon the door, and Miss Lotus Blossom came sailing over the threshold in the confident manner of one on whom the freedom of some city is about to be bestowed.

  Monty's absence from the life of the ship on the preceding day had not passed unnoticed by Lottie Blossom, and she had decided that as soon as she was up and about this morning it would be only neighbourly if she called and made inquiries. By this she meant that she would go and hammer on his door and shout 'Bring out your dead!' through the keyhole. She was a kind-hearted girl.

  That she had not done so earlier was due to the fact that she was a leisurely riser when making an ocean voyage. At Hollywood she could, if her art demanded it, be on the set made up at 6 am, but on board ship she preferred to take her breakfast in bed and linger over it. It was only now, accordingly, that she found herself able to pay the proposed visit

  Having bathed, she fed her alligator - who, if she could not get a human finger, liked the yolk of a hard-boiled egg of a morning - and dressed herself in a white and green sports suit topped off with a leopard-skin cape and a coal-heaver hat in scarlet felt. Then she tied a pink ribbon round the alligator's neck, tucked it under her arm and set forth on her errand of mercy.

  As she came out of her state-room Ambrose came out of Monty's.

  ‘Oo, look!' she cried. 'Hello, Ambrose.'

  'Good morning,' said the novelist. His voice was cold and hard and proud and aloof. It had shaken him to see her there, but he did not betray his emotion by any weak simperings. He bore himself like a man who has purged all weakness from his soul. 'Good morning,' he said, and stalked off towards Mr Llewellyn's room without another word - about as dignified an exit, he flattered himself, as man had ever made. By speaking thus, and stalking in that manner, he had, he rather fancied,, made it pretty clear to Miss Blossom that there went a man in whose iron bosom regret and remorse had no existence.

  As for Lottie, a tender smile played over her face, the smile of a mother who watches her child in a tantrum. She followed him with loving eyes till he had disappeared; then, turning to Monty's door, smote it a hearty buffet, issued her demand for corpses and went in.

  The sight of her sent Monty leaping between the sheets again as if he had been shot out
of a gun. No nymph surprised while bathing could have been quicker off the mark.

  Lottie Blossom did not share his modest confusion.

  'Hello, beautiful,' she said. 'Were you doing your daily dozen?'

  'No I-er-’

  Monty was finding it difficult to play the host. A courteous ease of manner was beyond him. It seemed only too plain that his visitor was planning for the duration of the voyage to treat his state-room as a sort of annex to her own, and the prospect filled him with tremors and alarms. For though, as Albert Peasemarch had pointed out, it was not likely that a pure, sweet English girl would come wandering into his bedchamber, there was always the hideous possibility of such an occurrence. As he watched his guest seat herself with effortless grace on the foot of the bed, the thought of Gertrude was bulking very largely in his mind.

  He was also wishing that if Miss Blossom found it necessary to invade his privacy, she would not bring her alligator with her.

  Lottie Blossom was all cheerfulness and affability. The sombre mood which had caused her to go 'Oomph, oomph' in this state-room two days before had been a mere thing of the moment. She was now in excellent fettle - as radiant and happy as only a redhaired girl who enjoys emotional quarrelling can be after a thoroughly invigorating turn-up. Life, to be really life for her, had to consist of a series of devastating rows and terrific reconciliations. Anything milder she considered insipid. Lotus Blossom had been born a Murphy of Hoboken, and all the Hoboken Murphys were like that.

  'Well, kid,' she said, 'how's tricks?' She placed the alligator lovingly on the coverlet and gazed about her like a returned exile surveying his boyhood home. 'Seems ages since I was last in here. And yet everything in the dear old place comes back to me. How's the Horror on the Bathroom Wall? Still there?'

  'Still there,' Monty assured her. She struck a philosophical note.

  'Funny to think that if somebody like Sinclair Lewis had written that, he'd have got about a dollar a word for it. Whereas I get nothing. Ah, well, that's how it goes.'

  Monty, with a silent nod, expressed his agreement. That, his nod said, was how it went.

  'I say,' he said, changing the subject and turning to one that was very near his heart. Ms that bally animal safe?'

  'You mean my alligator?'

  ‘Yes.'

  Miss Blossom seemed surprised.

  'Why, sure. Who's going to hurt him?'

  ‘I mean,' said Monty, perceiving that she had missed the gist, 'doesn't he gnaw one to the bone, or anything?'

  'Not,' said Miss Blossom, 'if you don't tease him. I wouldn't wiggle my toes if I were you. He's apt to snap at moving objects.'

  A great calm fell on Monty's toes.

  'Well,' said Miss Blossom, returning to her original theme, 'how's tricks? You weren't feeling so good yesterday, were you? Is this your first trip across?'

  Monty, about to nod, refrained, fearing lest the movement might come under the head of those that the alligator was accustomed to snap at.

  'Yes,' he said.

  'Then I don't wonder that storm upset you. Personally, I enjoyed it. I always feel that if there's a storm you're getting your money's worth. Talking of storms, I met Ambrose outside.'

  'Yes. He had been in here.’

  'How did you think he was looking?’

  'A bit on the mouldy side, what?'

  'Me, too.’ Miss Blossom smiled tenderly. 'Poor clam,' she said, with a loving quaver in her voice. 'I've broken our engagement, you know.'

  'On, yes?'

  'Yes, sir. That's what I meant about storms. One broke loose on the top deck that first night out. Some breeze!' ‘Oh, yes.'

  'Yes, sir. We went to the mat all right’ ‘And the engagement's broken?' 'Well, call it cracked. I'm going to make it up today.' 'That's good. He seemed to me as if he was brooding on it a bit’

  'Yes, he's taken it pretty hard. Still, it's all for his own good. He'll be much happier in the long run if he gets it into his bean that he can't pull a James Cagney on me every time he's a mite upset. Just imagine! Flying off the handle that way because I kissed his brother Reggie! Why shouldn't I kiss Reggie?'

  ‘Quite.'

  ‘I think a girl's right to put a stick of dynamite underneath the loved one every now and then, when he gets above himself, don't you?'

  'Oh, rather.’

  'Her dignity demands it’ 'Definitely.'

  'This makes the third time I've done it. Broken the engagement, I mean. The first was forty-three seconds after I'd said I would marry him.'

  'Forty-three seconds?'

  'Forty-three seconds. I guess that's a record. European, anyway. Yessir, forty-three seconds after I'd said I'd marry him I broke the engagement because he took a swing at Wilfred.'

  ‘Your little brother?'

  'My little alligator. I held Wilfred up to his face and said: "Kiss papa," and Ambrose gave a short horrible gurgle and knocked him out of my hands. Imagine! Might have cracked him.'

  She spoke indignantly, as one confident of the sympathy of her audience, but Monty found himself entirely pro-Ambrose. He considered that in the scene thus vividly described the novelist had acted with great courage and spirit, and wished, as Wilfred, yawning broadly, nestled against his right foot, that he was man enough to do the same. This alligator was, no doubt, of great value to his guest in her professional capacity, but meeting it socially, as it were, like this was preying upon his spirits.

  He was also wondering how much longer Miss Blossom intended to remain.

  ‘It took him a week to square himself that time. The other time was more kind of serious, because it really looked as if it was going to be the finish. It was when we'd got to discussing what we were going to do after we were married. He wanted to live in London, and me, my career being in good old Dottyville-on-the-Pacific, naturally I wanted to go there. Well, sir, we argued back and forth and didn't get nowheres. Ambrose is about as pig-headed as they come, and there aren't many mules that couldn't pick up hints from me once I've made up my mind to a thing, so there we were, and in the end I got mad and said: "Oh, hell, let's call it all off," and we did. And then suddenly along comes Ikey Llewellyn with this offer of his and everything was hotsy-totsy.'

  Miss Blossom fell to powdering her nose. Monty coughed. He looked at her like a hostess collecting eyes at the end of a dinner-party. Had it been simply a matter of enjoying listening to her, he would have been well content to prolong this interview, for he found her conversation replete with interest. But that fear of his would not be stilled, that haunting fear that Albert Peasemarch might prove to have been an unreliable judge of form where pure, sweet English girls were concerned.

  'Er - well -' he said.

  That time,' resumed Miss Blossom, studying her nose in her mirror and giving it a final touch, 'things did look kind of serious. Yessir. But what's happened now is nothing. In about half an hour he'll be folding me in his arms and saying can I ever forgive him, and I'll be saying: "Oh, Ambrose!" and he'll be saying that it isn't only the thought of having hurt me that hurts him, though that hurts him a lot, but that why he's really hurt is because he knows it hurts me to feel that he has hurt himself by hurting me. I have to laugh when I think of him out in that corridor just now. He's a scream, that boy, and I love him to bits. You never saw anything so haughty. "Good morning," he said, and he just drew himself up and gave me one look and irised out. What nuts men are! There ought to be a law.' Monty coughed again.

  'Quite,' he said. 'And now, as I expect you've all sorts of things to do this morning -' ‘Oh, that's all right'

  'Engagements here and engagements there -’ 'No, I've no dates.'

  Monty was reluctantly compelled to make himself plainer. 'Don't you think,' he suggested deferentially, 'that it might be as well if you were pushing along now, what?' 'Pushing along?' 'Beetling off,' explained Monty.

  Lottie Blossom looked at him, surprised. This attitude was new to her. Men, as a sex, were inclined rather to court her society, than to endeav
our to deprive themselves of it. Indeed, in the case of Spaniards at Biarritz it had sometimes seemed to her that it would be necessary to keep them off with a stick.

  'But we're just beginning to take our hair down and have a real good gossip. Am I boring you, neighbour Bodkin?'

  ‘No, no.'

  Then what's biting you?’ Monty picked at the coverlet.

  'Well... it's like this ... it occurred to me ... it crossed my mind ... as a possibility, don't you know ... that - er -Gertrude-'

  ‘Who's Gertrude?'

  ‘My fiancee ... Itstruck me that Gertrude might possibly take it into her head to look in here to see if I was awake... In which event -'

  'I didn't know you were engaged.'

  ‘I am. To be absolutely frank, yes, I am.'

  'Would that be the girl I met in here that first day?'

  'Yes.'

  'Seemed a nice girl.’ 'Oh, rather. She is.'

  'Gertrude, did you say?’ ‘That's right. Gertrude.'

  Miss Blossom's eyebrows contracted thoughtfully.

  'Gertrude? I'm not sure I like the name Gertrude much.’ ‘Of course, there's Gertrude Lawrence -'

  'Quite,' said Monty. 'But it isn't Gertrude Lawrence I want to stress so much, if you see what I mean, at this juncture, as Gertrude Butterwick.'

  Miss Blossom laughed that hearty laugh of hers.

  'Is that her name? Butterwick?'

  ‘Yes.’

  'What a scream!'

  ‘I don't like it much myself,' agreed Monty. 'It always reminds me of J. G. Butterwick, her father, of Butterwick, Price & Mandelbaum, Export and Import Merchants. But that isn't the point. The point is -’

  'You think she'd be sore if she found me in here?'

  'I don't think she'd be any too pleased. She wasn't last time. In fact, I don't mind telling you that you took quite a bit of explaining away.'

  Miss Blossom pursed her lips. She seemed to disapprove.