Her long vigil had not helped to restore the girl’s equanimity. Since arriving at the studio she had had leisure to tap her foot three thousand, one hundred and forty-two times on the carpet, and the number of bitter smiles which had flitted across her face was nine hundred and eleven. She was about ready for the battle of the century.
She rose and faced him, all the woman in her flashing from her eyes.
‘Well, you Casanova!’ she said.
‘You who?’ said Lancelot.
‘Don’t say “Yoo-hoo!” to me!’ cried Gladys. ‘Keep that for your Brenda Carberry-Pirbrights. Yes, I know all about it, Lancelot Don Juan Henry the Eighth Mulliner! I saw you with her just now. I hear that you and she are inseparable. Bernard Worple says you said you were going to marry her.’
‘You mustn’t believe everything a neo-Vorticist sculptor tells you,’ quavered Lancelot.
‘I’ll bet you’re going back to dinner there to-night,’ said Gladys.
She had spoken at a venture, basing the charge purely on a possessive cock of the head which she had noticed in Brenda Carberry-Pirbright at their recent encounter. There, she had said to herself at the time, had gone a girl who was about to invite — or had just invited — Lancelot Mulliner to dine quietly and take her to the pictures afterwards. But the shot went home. Lancelot hung his head.
‘There was some talk of it,’ he admitted.
‘Ah!’ exclaimed Gladys.
Lancelot’s eyes were haggard.
‘I don’t want to go,’ he pleaded. ‘Honestly I don’t. But Webster insists.’
‘Webster!’
‘Yes, Webster. If I attempt to evade the appointment, he will sit in front of me and look at me.’
‘Tchah!’
‘Well, he will. Ask him for yourself.’
Gladys tapped her foot six times in rapid succession on the carpet, bringing the total to three thousand, one hundred and forty-eight. Her manner had changed and was now dangerously calm.
‘Lancelot Mulliner,’ she said, ‘you have your choice. Me, on the one hand, Brenda Carberry-Pirbright on the other. I offer you a home where you will be able to smoke in bed, spill the ashes on the floor, wear pyjamas and carpet-slippers all day and shave only on Sunday mornings. From her, what have you to hope? A house in South Kensington — possibly the Brompton Road — probably with her mother living with you. A life that will be one long round of stiff collars and tight shoes, of morning-coats and top hats.’
Lancelot quivered, but she went on remorselessly.
‘You will be at home on alternate Thursdays, and will be expected to hand the cucumber sandwiches. Every day you will air the dog, till you become a confirmed dog-airer. You will dine out in Bayswater and go for the summer to Bournemouth or Dinard. Choose well, Lancelot Mulliner! I will leave you to think it over. But one last word. If by seven-thirty on the dot you have not presented yourself at 6A, Garbidge Mews ready to take me out to dinner at the Ham and Beef, I shall know what to think and shall act accordingly.’
And brushing the cigarette ashes from her chin, the girl strode haughtily from the room.
‘Gladys!’ cried Lancelot.
But she had gone.
For some minutes Lancelot Mulliner remained where he was, stunned. Then, insistently, there came to him the recollection that he had not had that drink. He rushed to the cupboard and produced the bottle. He uncorked it, and was pouring out a lavish stream, when a movement on the floor below him attracted his attention.
Webster was standing there, looking up at him. And in his eyes was that familiar expression of quiet rebuke.
‘Scarcely what I have been accustomed to at the Deanery,’ he seemed to be saying.
Lancelot stood paralysed. The feeling of being bound hand and foot, of being caught in a snare from which there was no escape, had become more poignant than ever. The bottle fell from his nerveless fingers and rolled across the floor, spilling its contents in an amber river, but he was too heavy in spirit to notice it. With a gesture such as Job might have made on discovering a new boil, he crossed to the window and stood looking moodily out.
Then, turning with a sigh, he looked at Webster again — and, looking, stood spellbound.
The spectacle which he beheld was of a kind to stun a stronger man than Lancelot Mulliner. At first, he shrank from believing his eyes. Then, slowly, came the realization that what he saw was no mere figment of a disordered imagination. This unbelievable thing was actually happening.
Webster sat crouched upon the floor beside the widening pool of whisky. But it was not horror and disgust that had caused him to crouch. He was crouched because, crouching, he could get nearer to the stuff and obtain crisper action. His tongue was moving in and out like a piston.
And then abruptly, for one fleeting instant, he stopped lapping and glanced up at Lancelot, and across his face there flitted a quick smile — so genial, so intimate, so full of jovial camaraderie, that the young man found himself automatically smiling back, and not only smiling but winking. And in answer to that wink Webster winked, too — a wholehearted, roguish wink that said as plainly as if he had spoken the words:
‘How long has this been going on?’
Then with a slight hiccough he turned back to the task of getting his quick before it soaked into the floor.
Into the murky soul of Lancelot Mulliner there poured a sudden flood of sunshine. It was as if a great burden had been lifted from his shoulders. The intolerable obsession of the last two weeks had ceased to oppress him, and he felt a free man. At the eleventh hour the reprieve had come. Webster, that seeming pillar of austere virtue, was one of the boys, after all. Never again would Lancelot quail beneath his eye. He had the goods on him.
Webster, like the stag at eve, had now drunk his fill. He had left the pool of alcohol and was walking round in slow, meditative circles. From time to time he mewed tentatively, as if he were trying to say ‘British Constitution’. His failure to articulate the syllables appeared to tickle him, for at the end of each attempt he would utter a slow, amused chuckle. It was at about this moment that he suddenly broke into a rhythmic dance, not unlike the old Saraband.
It was an interesting spectacle, and at any other time Lancelot would have watched it raptly. But now he was busy at his desk, writing a brief note to Mrs Carberry-Pirbright, the burden of which was that if she thought he was coming within a mile of her foul house that night or any other night she had vastly underrated the dodging powers of Lancelot Mulliner.
And what of Webster? The Demon Rum now had him in an iron grip. A lifetime of abstinence had rendered him a ready victim to the fatal fluid. He had now reached the stage when geniality gives way to belligerence. The rather foolish smile had gone from his face, and in its stead there lowered a fighting frown. For a few moments he stood on his hind legs, looking about him for a suitable adversary: then, losing all vestiges of self-control, he ran five times round the room at a high rate of speed and, falling foul of a small footstool, attacked it with the utmost ferocity, sparing neither tooth nor claw.
But Lancelot did not see him. Lancelot was not there. Lancelot was out in Bott Street, hailing a cab.
‘6 A, Garbidge Mews, Fulham,’ said Lancelot to the driver.
3 CATS WILL BE CATS
There had fallen upon the bar-parlour of the Angler’s Rest one of those soothing silences which from time to time punctuate the nightly feasts of Reason and flows of Soul in that cosy resort. It was broken by a Whisky and Splash.
‘I’ve been thinking a lot,’ said the Whisky and Splash, addressing Mr Mulliner, ‘about that cat of yours, that Webster.’
‘Has Mr Mulliner got a cat named Webster?’ asked a Small Port who had just rejoined our little circle after an absence of some days.
The Sage of the bar-parlour shook his head smilingly. ‘Webster,’ he said, ‘did not belong to me. He was the property of the Dean of Bolsover who, on being raised to a bishopric and sailing from England to take up his episcopal duties at his See
of Bongo-Bongo in West Africa, left the animal in the care of his nephew, my cousin Edward’s son Lancelot, the artist. I was telling these gentlemen the other evening how Webster for a time completely revolutionized Lancelot’s life. His early up-bringing at the Deanery had made him austere and censorious, and he exerted on my cousin’s son the full force of a powerful and bigoted personality. It was as if Savonarola or some minor prophet had suddenly been introduced into the carefree, Bohemian atmosphere of the studio.’
‘He stared at Lancelot and unnerved him,’ explained a Pint of Bitter.
‘He made him shave daily and knock off smoking,’ added a Lemon Sour.
‘He thought Lancelot’s fiancée, Gladys Bingley, worldly,’ said a Rum and Milk, ‘and tried to arrange a match between him and a girl called Brenda Carberry-Pirbright.’
‘But one day,’ concluded Mr Mulliner, ‘Lancelot discovered that the animal, for all its apparently rigid principles, had feet of clay and was no better than the rest of us. He happened to drop a bottle of alcoholic liquor and the cat drank deeply of its contents and made a sorry exhibition of itself, with the result that the spell was, of course, instantly broken. What aspect of the story of Webster,’ he asked the Whisky and Splash, ‘has been engaging your thoughts?’
‘The psychological aspect,’ said the Whisky and Splash. ‘As I see it, there is a great psychological drama in this cat. I visualize his higher and lower selves warring. He has taken the first false step, and what will be the issue? Is this new, demoralizing atmosphere into which he has been plunged to neutralize the pious teachings of early kittenhood at the Deanery? Or will sound churchmanship prevail and keep him the cat he used to be?’
‘If,’ said Mr Mulliner, ‘I am right in supposing that you want to know what happened to Webster at the conclusion of the story I related the other evening, I can tell you. There was nothing that you could really call a war between his higher and lower selves. The lower self won hands down. From the moment when he went on that first majestic toot this once saintly cat became a Bohemian of Bohemians. His days started early and finished late, and were a mere welter of brawling and loose gallantry. As early as the end of the second week his left ear had been reduced through incessant gang-warfare to a mere tattered scenario and his battle-cry had become as familiar to the denizens of Bott Street, Chelsea, as the yodel of the morning milkman.’
The Whisky and Splash said it reminded him of some great Greek tragedy. Mr Mulliner said yes, there were points of resemblance.
‘And what,’ enquired the Rum and Milk, ‘did Lancelot think of all this?’
‘Lancelot,’ said Mr Mulliner, ‘had the easy live-and-let-live creed of the artist. He was indulgent towards the animal’s excesses. As he said to Gladys Bingley one evening, when she was bathing Webster’s right eye in a boric solution, cats will be cats. In fact, he would scarcely have given a thought to the matter had there not arrived one morning from his uncle a wireless message, dispatched in mid-ocean, announcing that he had resigned his bishopric for reasons of health and would shortly be back in England once more. The communication ended with the words: “All my best to Webster.”‘
If you recall the position of affairs between Lancelot and the Bishop of Bongo-Bongo, as I described them the other night (said Mr Mulliner), you will not need to be told how deeply this news affected the young man. It was a bomb-shell. Lancelot, though earning enough by his brush to support himself, had been relying on touching his uncle for that extra bit which would enable him to marry Gladys Bingley. And when he had been placed in loco parentis to Webster, he had considered this touch a certainty. Surely, he told himself, the most ordinary gratitude would be sufficient to cause his uncle to unbelt.
But now what?
‘You saw that wireless,’ said Lancelot, agitatedly discussing the matter with Gladys. ‘You remember the closing words: “All my best to Webster.” Uncle Theodore’s first act on landing in England will undoubtedly be to hurry here for a sacred reunion with this cat. And what will he find? A feline plug-ugly. A gangster. The Big Shot of Bott Street. Look at the animal now,’ said Lancelot, waving a distracted hand at the cushion where it lay. ‘Run your eye over him. I ask you!’
Certainly Webster was not a natty spectacle. Some tough cats from the public-house on the corner had recently been trying to muscle in on his personal dust-bin, and, though he had fought them off, the affair had left its mark upon him. A further section had been removed from his already abbreviated ear, and his once sleek flanks were short of several patches of hair. He looked like the late Legs Diamond after a social evening with a few old friends.
‘What,’ proceeded Lancelot, writhing visibly, ‘will Uncle Theodore say on beholding that wreck? He will put the entire blame on me. He will insist that it was I who dragged that fine spirit down into the mire. And phut will go any chance I ever had of getting into his ribs for a few hundred quid for honey-moon expenses.
Gladys Bingley struggled with a growing hopelessness.
‘You don’t think a good wig-maker could do something?’
‘A wig-maker might patch on a little extra fur,’ admitted :Lancelot, ‘but how about that ear?’
‘A facial surgeon?’ suggested Gladys.
Lancelot shook his head.
‘It isn’t merely his appearance,’ he said. ‘It’s his entire personality. The poorest reader of character, meeting Webster now, would recognize him for what he is — a hard egg and a bad citizen.’
‘When do you expect your uncle?’ asked Gladys, after a pause.
‘At any moment. He must have landed by this time. I can’t understand why he has not turned up.
At this moment there sounded from the passage outside the p/op of a letter falling into the box attached to the front door. Lancelot went listlessly out. A few moments later Gladys heard him utter a surprised exclamation, and he came hurrying back, a sheet of note-paper in his hand.
‘Listen to this,’ he said. ‘From Uncle Theodore.’
‘Is he in London?’
‘No. Down in Hampshire, at a place called Widdrington Manor. And the great point is that he does not want to see Webster yet.’
‘Why not?’
‘I’ll read you what he says.
And Lancelot proceeded to do so, as follows:
‘Widdrington Manor,
‘Bottleby-in-the-Vale,
‘Hants.
‘MY DEAR LANCELOT,
‘You will doubtless be surprised that I have not hastened to greet you immediately upon my return to these shores. The explanation is that I am being entertained at the above address by Lady Widdrington, widow of the late Sir George Widdrington, C.B.E., and her mother, Mrs Pulteney-Banks, whose acquaintance I made on shipboard during my voyage home.
‘I find our English countryside charming after the somewhat desolate environment of Bongo-Bongo, and am enjoying a pleasant and restful visit. Both Lady Widdrington and her mother are kindness itself, especially the former, who is my constant companion on every country ramble. We have a strong bond in our mutual love of cats.
‘And this, my dear boy, brings me to the subject of Webster. As you can readily imagine, I am keenly desirous of seeing him once more and noting all the evidences of the loving care which, I have no doubt, you have lavished upon him in my absence, but I do not wish you to forward him to me here. The fact is, Lady Widdrington, though a charming woman, seems entirely lacking in discrimination in the matter of cats. She owns and is devoted to a quite impossible orange-coloured animal of the name of Percy, whose society could not but prove distasteful to one of Webster’s high principles. When I tell you that only last night this Percy was engaging in personal combat — quite obviously from the worst motives — with a large tortoiseshell beneath my very window, you will understand what I mean.
‘My refusal to allow Webster to join me here is, I fear, puzzling my kind hostess, who knows how greatly I miss him, but I must be firm.
‘Keep him, therefore, my dear Lancelot, until I cal
l in person when I shall remove him to the quiet rural retreat where I plan to spend the evening of my life.
‘With every good wish to you both,
‘Your affectionate uncle,
‘THEODORE.
Gladys Bingley had listened intently to this letter, an as Lancelot came to the end of it she breathed a sigh c relief.
‘Well, that gives us a bit of time,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ agreed Lancelot. ‘Time to see if we can’t awake in this animal some faint eh of its old self-respect. From to-day Webster goes into monastic seclusion. I shall take him round to the vet’s, with instructions that he be forced to lead the simple life. In those pure surroundings, with no temptations, no late nights, plain food and a strict milk diet, he may become himself again.’
‘“The Man Who Came Back”,’ said Gladys.
‘Exactly,’ said Lancelot.
And so for perhaps two weeks something approaching tranquillity reigned once more in my cousin Edward’s sons studio in Bott Street, Chelsea. The veterinary surgeon issued encouraging reports. He claimed a distinct improvement in Webster’s character and appearance, though he added that he would still not care to meet him at night in a lonely alley. And then one morning there arrived from his Uncle Theodore a telegram which caused the young man to knit his brows in bewilderment.
It ran thus:
‘On receipt of this come immediately Widdrington Manor prepared for indefinite visit period Circumstances comma I regret to say comma necessitate innocent deception semicolon so will you state on arrival that you are my legal representative and have come to discuss important family matters with me period Will explain fully when see you comma but rest assured comma my dear boy comma that would not ask this were it not absolutely essential period Do not fail me period Regards to Webster.’
Lancelot finished reading this mysterious communication, and looked at Gladys with raised eyebrows. There is unfortunately in most artists a material streak which leads them to place an unpleasant interpretation on telegrams like this. Lancelot was no exception to the rule.