Eggs, Beans and Crumpets Page 2

  “Well,” said Oofy, beaming, “this will certainly be something to tell my grandchildren. I mean, that I once lunched with a member of the Drones Club and didn’t get stuck with the bill. Listen, Bingo, I’d like to do something for you in return.”

  Bingo felt like some great actor who has received his cue. He leaned forward and relighted Oofy’s cigar with a loving hand. He also flicked a speck of dust off his coat-sleeve.

  “And what I’m going to do is this. I’m going to give you a tip. On these races this afternoon. Back Spotted Dog for the Prix Honore Sauvan. A sure winner.”

  “Thanks, Oofy, old man,” said Bingo. “That’s splendid news. If you will lend me a tenner, then, Oofy, old boy, I’ll put it on.”

  “What do you want me to lend you a tenner for?”

  “Because, after I’ve paid the lunch bill, Oofy, old chap, I shan’t have any money.”

  “You won’t need any money,” said Oofy, and Bingo wondered how many more people were going to make this blithering remark to him. “My London bookie is staying here. He will accommodate you in credit, seeing that you are a friend of mine.”

  “But doesn’t it seem a pity to bother him with a lot of extra book-keeping, Oofy, old fellow?” said Bingo, flicking another speck of dust off Oofy’s other coat-sleeve. “Much better if you would just lend me a tenner.”

  “Joking aside,” said Oofy, “I think I’ll have another kummel.”

  And it was at this moment, when the conversation appeared to have reached a deadlock and there seemed no hope of finding a formula, that a stout, benevolent-looking man approached their table. From the fact that he and Oofy at once began to talk odds and figures, Bingo deduced that this must be the bookie from London.

  “And my friend, Mr. Little,” said Oofy, in conclusion, “wants a tenner on Spotted Dog for the Prix Honore Sauvan”

  And Bingo was just about to shake his head and say that he didn’t think his wife would like him to bet, when the glorious Riviera sunshine, streaming in through the window by which they sat, lit up Oofy’s face and he saw that it was a perfect mass of spots. A moment later, he perceived that the bookie had a pink spot on his nose and the waiter, who was now bringing the bill, a bountifully spotted forehead. A thrill shot through him. These things, he knew, are sent to us for a purpose.

  “Right ho,” he said. “A tenner at the current odds.”

  And then they all went off to the races. The Prix Honore Sauvan was the three o’clock. A horse called Lilium won it. Kerry second, Maubourget third, Ironside fourth, Irresistible fifth, Sweet and Lovely sixth, Spotted Dog seventh. Seven ran. So there was Bingo owing ten quid to this bookie and not a chance of a happy ending unless the fellow would consent to let the settlement stand over for a bit.

  So he buttonholed the bookie and suggested this, and the bookie said “Certainly.”

  “Certainly,” said the bookie. He put his hand on Bingo’s shoulder and patted it. “I like you, Mr. Little,” he said.

  “Do you?” said Bingo, putting his hand on the bookie’s and patting that. “Do you, old pal?”

  “I do indeed,” said the bookie. “You remind me of my little boy Percy, who took the knock the year Worcester Sauce won the Jubilee Handicap. Bronchial trouble. So when you ask me to wait for my money, I say of course I’ll wait for my money. Suppose we say till next Friday?”

  Bingo blenched a bit. The period he had had in mind had been something more along the lines of a year or- eighteen months.

  “Well,” he said, “I’ll try to brass up then … but you know how it is … you mustn’t be disappointed if… this world-wide money shortage … circumstances over which I have no control …”

  “You think you may not be able to settle?”

  “I’m a bit doubtful.”

  The bookie pursed his lips.

  “I do hope you will,” he said, “and I’ll tell you why. It’s silly to be superstitious, I know, but I can’t help remembering that every single bloke that’s ever done me down for money has had a nasty accident occur to him. Time after time, I’ve seen it happen.”

  “Have you?” said Bingo, beginning to exhibit symptoms of bronchial trouble, like the late Percy.

  “I have, indeed,” said the bookie. “Time after time after time. It almost seems like some kind of fate. Only the other day there was a fellow with a ginger moustache named Watherspoon. Owed me fifty for Plumpton and pleaded the Gaming Act. And would you believe it, less than a week later he was found unconscious in the street—must have got into some unpleasantness of some kind —and had to have six stitches.”

  “Six!”

  “Seven. I was forgetting the one over his left eye. Makes you think, that sort of thing does. Hoy, Erbut,” he called.

  A frightful plugugly appeared from nowhere, as if he had been a Djinn and the bookie had rubbed a lamp.

  “Erbut,” said the bookie, “I want you to meet Mr. Little, Erbut. Take a good look at him. You’ll remember him again?”

  Herbert drank Bingo in. His eye was cold and grey, like a parrot’s.

  “Yus,” he said. “Yus, I won’t forget him.”

  “Good,” said the bookie. “That will be all, Erbut. Then about that money, Mr. Little, we’ll say Friday without fail, shall we?”

  Bingo tottered away and sought out Oofy.

  “Oofy, old man,” he said, “it is within your power to save a human life.”

  “Well, I’m jolly well not going to,” said Oofy, who had now got one of his dyspeptic headaches. “The more human lives that aren’t saved, the better I shall like it. I loathe the human race. Any time it wants to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel, it will be all right with me.”

  “If I don’t get a tenner by Friday, a fearful bounder named Erbut is going to beat me into a pulp.”

  “Good,” said Oofy, brightening a little. “Capital. Splendid. That’s fine.”

  Bingo then caught the. ‘bus back to Monte Carlo.

  That night he dressed for dinner moodily. He was unable to discern the bluebird. In three months from now he would be getting another quarter’s allowance, but a fat lot of good that would be. In far less than three months, if he had read aright the message in Erbufs eyes, he would be in some hospital or nursing home with stitches all over him. How many stitches, time alone could tell. He fell to musing on Watherspoon. Was it, he wondered, to be his fate to lower that ginger-moustached man’s melancholy record?

  His thoughts were still busy with the stitch outlook, when the telephone rang.

  “Hullo,” said a female voice. “Is that Rosie?”

  “No,” said Bingo, and might have added that the future was not either. “I’m Mr. Little.”

  “Oh, Mr. Little, this is Dora Spurgeon. Can I speak to Rosie?”

  “She isn’t here.”

  “Well, when she comes in, will you tell her that I’m just off to Corsica in some people’s yacht. We leave in an hour, so I shan’t have time to come over and see her, so will you give her my love and tell her I am sending the brooch back.”

  “Brooch?”

  “She leant me her brooch when I left London. I think it’s the one you gave her on her birthday. She told me to take special care of it, and I don’t feel it’s safe having it with me in Corsica—so many brigands about—so I am sending it by registered post to the Hotel de Paris. Good-bye, Mr. Little. I must rush.”

  Bingo hung up the receiver and sat down on the bed to think this over. Up to a point, of course, the situation was clear. Dora Spurgeon, a muddle-headed boob if ever there was one, obviously supposed that Mrs. Bingo had accompanied him to Monte Carlo. No doubt Mrs. Bingo had gone to some pains in her telephone call to make it thoroughly clear that she was remaining in London, but it was no good trying to drive things into a head like Dora Spurgeon’s by means of the spoken word. You needed a hammer. The result was that on the morrow that brooch which he had given Mrs. Bingo would arrive at the hotel.

  So far, as I say, Bingo found nothing to perplex him. But w
hat he could not make up his mind about was this—should he, after he had pawned the brooch, send the proceeds straight to that bookie? Or should he take the money and go and have a whack at the Casino?

  Far into the silent night he pondered without being able to reach a decision, but next morning everything seemed to clarify, as is so often the way after a night’s sleep, and he wondered how he could ever have been in doubt. Of course he must have a whack at the Casino.

  The catch about sending the money to the bookie was that, while this policy would remove from his future the dark shadow or Erbut, it would not make for contentment and happiness in the home. When Mrs. Bingo discovered that he had shoved her brooch up the spout in order to pay a racing debt, friction would ensue. He unquestionably had a moral claim on the brooch-bought with his hard-earned money—the thing, you might say, was really his to do what he liked with—nevertheless, something told him that friction would ensue.

  By going and playing his system he would avoid all unpleasantness. It was simply a matter of strolling into the Rooms and taking the stuff away.

  And, as it turned out, he couldn’t have paid off Erbut’s bookie, anyway, because the local pop-shop would only give him a fiver on the brooch. He pleaded passionately for more, but the cove behind the counter was adamant. So, taking the fiver, he lunched sparingly at a pub up the hill, and shortly after two o’clock was in the arena, doing his stuff.

  I have never been able to quite get the hang of that system of Bingo’s. He has explained it to me a dozen times, but it remains vague. However, the basis of it, the thing that made it so frightfully ingenious, was that instead of doubling your stake when you lost, as in all these other systems, you doubled it when you won. It involved a lot of fancy work with a pencil and a bit of paper, because you had to write down figures and add figures and scratch figures out, but that, I gathered, was the nub of the thing—you doubled up when you won, thus increasing your profits by leaps and bounds and making the authorities look pretty sick.

  The only snag about it was that in order to do this you first had to win, which Bingo didn’t.

  I don’t suppose there is anything—not even Oofy Prosser—that has a nastier disposition than the wheel at Monte Carlo. It seems to take a sinister pleasure in doing down the common people. You can play mentally by the hour and never get a losing spin, but once you put real money up the whole aspect of things alters. Poor old Bingo hadn’t been able to put a foot wrong so long as he stuck to paper punting, but he now found himself in the soup from the start.

  There he stood, straining like a greyhound at the leash, waiting for his chance of doubling up, only to see all his little capital raked in except one solitary hundred-franc chip. And when with a weary gesture he bunged this on Black, up came Zero and it was swept away.

  And scarcely had he passed through this gruelling spiritual experience, when a voice behind him said, “Oh there you are!” and, turning, he found himself face to face with Mrs. Bingo.

  He stood gaping at her, his heart bounding about inside him like an adagio dancer with nettlerash. For an instant, he tells me, he was under the impression that this was no flesh and blood creature that stood before him, but a phantasm. He thought that she must have been run over by a ‘bus or something in London and that this was her spectre looking in to report, as spectres do.

  “You!” he said, like someone in a play.

  “I’ve just arrived,” said Mrs. Bingo, very merry and bright.

  “I—I didn’t know you were coming.”

  “I thought I would surprise you,” said Mrs. Bingo, still bubbling over with joyous animation. “You see, what happened was that I was talking to Millie Pringle about my book, and she said that it was no use getting local colour about the Rooms, because a man like Lord Peter Shipbourne would never go to the Rooms—he would do all his playing at the Sporting Club. And I was just going to wire you to go there, when Mrs. Carrie Melrose Bopp trod on a banana-skin in the street and sprained her ankle, and the luncheon was postponed, so there was nothing to prevent me “coming over, so I came. Oh, Bingo, darling, isn’t this jolly!”

  Bingo quivered from cravat to socks. The adjective “jolly” was not the one he would have selected. And it was at this point that Mrs. Bingo appeared to observe for the first time that her loved one was looking like a corpse that has been left out in the rain for a day or two.

  “Bingo!” she cried. “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing,” said Bingo. “Nothing. Matter? How do you mean?”

  “You look …” A wifely suspicion shot through Mrs. Bingo. She eyed him narrowly. “You haven’t been gambling?”

  “No, no,” said Bingo. He is a fellow who is rather exact in his speech, and the word “gambling”, to his mind, implied that a chap had a chance of winning. All that he had done, he felt, had been to take his little bit of money and give it to the Administration. You couldn’t describe that as gambling. More like making a donation to a charity. “No, no,” he said. “Rather not”

  “I’m so glad. Oh, by the way, I found a letter from Dora Spurgeon at the hotel. She said she was sending my brooch. I suppose it will arrive this afternoon.”

  Bingo’s gallant spirit was broken. It seemed to him that this was the end. It was all over, he felt, except the composition of the speech in which he must confess everything. And he was just I running over in his mind a few opening remarks, beginning with the words “Listen, darling,” when his eye fell on the table, and there on Black was a pile of chips, worth in all no less than three ‘thousand, two hundred francs—or, looking at it from another angle, about forty quid at that date. And as he gazed at them, wondering which of the lucky stiffs seated round the board had got ahead of the game to that extent, the croupier at the bottom of the table caught his eye and smirked congratulatingly, as croupiers do when somebody has won a parcel and they think that there is going to be something in it for them in the way of largess.

  And Bingo, tottering on his base, suddenly realized that this piled up wealth belonged to him. It was the increment accruing from that last hundred francs of his.

  What he had forgotten, you see, was that though, when Zero turns up, those who have betted on numbers, columns, and what not get it in the neck, stakes on the even chances aren’t scooped up—they are what is called put in prison. I mean, they just withdraw into the background for the moment, awaiting the result of the next spin. And, if that wins, out they come again.

  Bingo’s hundred francs had been on Black, so Zero had put it in prison. And then, presumably, Black must have turned up, getting it out again. And, as he hadn’t taken it off, it had, of course, stayed on Black. And then, while he was immersed in conversation with Mrs. Bingo about brooches, the wheel, from being a sort of mechanical Oofy Prosser, had suddenly turned into a Santa Claus.

  Seven more times it had come up Black, putting Bingo in the Position in which that system of his ought to have put him, viz., of doubling up when he won. And the result, as I say, was that he loot now amounted to the colossal sum of forty quid, more than double what he required in order to be able to pay off all his obligations and look the world in the eye again.

  The relief was so terrific that Bingo tells me he came within a toucher of swooning. And it was only as he was about to snatch the stuff up and trouser it and live happily ever after—he had, indeed, actually poised himself for the spring—that he suddenly saw that there was a catch. To wit, that if he did, all must be discovered. Mrs. Bingo would know that he had been gambling, she would speedily ascertain the source whence had proceeded the money he had been gambling with, and the home, if not actually wrecked, would unquestionably become about as hot for him as the inside of a baked potato.

  And yet, if he left the doubloons where they were, the next spin might see them all go down the drain.

  I expect you know the expression “A man’s cross-roads”. Those were what Bingo was at at this juncture.

  There seemed just one hope—to make a face at the croupie
r and do it with such consummate skill that the other would see that he wanted those thirty-two hundred francs taken off the board and put on one side till he was at liberty to come and collect. So he threw his whole soul into a face, and the croupier nodded intelligently and left the money on. Bingo, he saw, was signalling to rum to let the works ride for another spin, and he admired his sporting spirit. He said something to the other croupier in an undertone—no doubt “Quel homme!” or “Epatant!” or something of that kind.

  And the wheel, which now appeared definitely to have accepted the role of Bingo’s rich uncle from Australia, fetched up another Black.

  Mrs. Bingo was studying the gamesters. She didn’t seem to think much of them.

  “What dreadful faces these people have,” she said. Bingo did not reply. His own face at this moment was nothing to write home about, resembling more than anything else that of an anxious fiend in Hell. He was watching the wheel revolve

  It came up Black again, bringing his total to twelve thousand, eight hundred.

  And now at last it seemed that his tortured spirit was to be at rest. The croupier, having shot another smirk in his direction, was leaning forward to the pile of chips and had started scooping. Yes, all was well. At the eleventh hour the silly ass had divined the message of that face of his and was doing the needful.

  Bingo drew a deep, shuddering breath. He felt like one who had passed through the furnace and, though a bit charred in spots, can once more take up the burden of life with an easy mind. Twelve thousand, eight hundred francs … Gosh! It was over a hundred and fifty quid, more than he had ever possessed at one time since the Christmas, three years ago, when his Uncle Wilberforce had come over all Dickensy as the result of lemon punch and had given him a cheque on which next day he had vainly tried to stop payment. There was a frowst in the Rooms which you could have cut with a knife, but he drew it into his lungs as if it had been the finest ozone. Birds seemed to be twittering from the ceiling and soft music playing everywhere.