Young Men in Spats Read online

  If you’re a native, you hardly notice them. You just look over your shoulder and say ‘Oh, ah?’ and go on trying to get Los Angeles on the radio.

  But Freddie, being new to the place, was a little startled. Because you see, what happened was that just as they were sitting there, chatting of this and that, there was a sudden crash. The door of the hallway which opened on to the landing outside was burst open. And in surged an extraordinarily hefty bloke with a big moustache. He wore a bowler hat. Behind him came a couple of other birds, also hefty and similarly bowler-hatted.

  ‘Ah!’ said Bloke A, in a satisfied sort of voice.

  Freddie did a bit of gaping. He was a good deal on the nonplussed side. He supposed, as his head began to clear, that this was one of those cases of ‘Bandits Break Into Home and Rob Two’.

  ‘Seems to me,’ said the Bloke, addressing his associate Blokes, ‘this case is open and shut.’

  The other two nodded.

  ‘That’s right,’ said one.

  ‘Open and shut,’ said the other.

  ‘Yes,’ said the Bloke, summing up. ‘That’s about what it is. Open and shut.’

  Miss Jennings, who had been dusting the photograph of her mother, now appeared to notice for the first time that she had visitors. She spoke as follows:

  ‘What in the world do you think you’re doing?’

  The Bloke lit a cigar. So did his associates. Two cigars.

  ‘That’s all right, Mrs Silvers,’ he said.

  ‘Sure it’s all right,’ said the other two.

  ‘You boys are witnesses,’ said the Bloke.

  ‘Sure, we’re witnesses,’ said the other two.

  ‘You can give evidence that we found Mrs Silvers alone in her apartment with this pie-faced cluck.’

  ‘Sure, we can give evidence that we found her alone in her apartment with this pie-faced cluck.’

  ‘Then that’s all right,’ said the Bloke contentedly. ‘That is all her husband will want to know. It makes the thing open and shut.’

  And it came home to Freddie with a sickening thud that these fellows were not, as he had supposed, a hold-up gang, but detectives. He ought to have recognized them from the start, he tells me, by the bowler hats. What had misled him was the fact that at the outset they weren’t smoking cigars. When they started smoking cigars, the scales fell from his eyes.

  He gulped a bit. In fact, he gulped rather more than a bit. He realized now what his mistaken sense of knightly chivalry had made him stumble into. The soup, no less. With the best intentions, meaning only to scatter light and sweetness on every side, he had become a Sugar-Daddy Surprised In Love Nest.

  The female of the species, however, appeared unwilling to take this thing lying down. Her chin was up, her shoulders were squared, she had both feet on the ground, and she looked the troupe steadily in the eye through her spectacles.

  ‘Just for fun,’ she said, ‘tell me where you fellows think you are?’

  ‘Where do we think we are?’ said the Bloke. ‘That’s all right where we think we are. We’re in Flat 4A. And you’re Mrs Silvers. And I’m from the Alert Detective Agency. And I’m acting under instructions from your husband. Laugh that off!’

  ‘I will,’ said the girl. ‘I’m not Mrs Silvers. I haven’t a husband. And this isn’t Flat 4A, it’s Flat 4B.’

  The Bloke gasped. He reminded Freddie of his uncle Joseph, the time he swallowed the bad oyster. The same visible emotion.

  ‘Don’t tell me we’ve busted into the wrong flat?’ he said, pleadingly.

  ‘That’s just what I am telling you.’

  ‘The wrong flat?’

  ‘The wrong flat.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘I’ll tell you what it is,’ said one of the assistant blokes, a pretty acute chap, quick in the uptake. ‘We’ve been and busted into the wrong flat.’

  ‘That’s it,’ said the other. ‘The wrong flat.’

  Well, they were very decent about it, Freddie tells me. They didn’t take off their hats, and they went on smoking their cigars, but they paid for the door. And presently the party broke up, the Bloke protesting to the last that this was the first mistake he had made in twenty years.

  Having had a hearty laugh with the Jennings over the whole amusing episode, Freddie hopped into a taxi and started off for Forty-Sixth Street, for he was lunching with old Bodsham and Mavis at the Ritz-Carlton and a bit late already. All the way down there, he was chuckling to himself at the thought of what a capital story he had to tell them. Put him one up, he thought it would.

  You see, if there was a snag in the wholehearted joy of being engaged to Mavis Peasemarch, it was the fact that, when in the society of herself and father, he occasionally found the going a bit sticky as regarded conversation.

  Freddie, as you know, is a bird who, when the conditions are right, can be the life and soul of the party. Shoot a few stiffish cocktails into him and give him his head in the matter of sprightly anecdotes and the riper kind of Limerick, and he will hold you spellbound. But, cut off from these resources, he frequently found himself a trifle tongue-tied when taking a bite with old Bodsham.

  And, as no fellow likes to feel that his future father-in-law is beginning to regard him as a loony deaf-mute, he welcomed the opportunity of showing himself a gay and gifted raconteur.

  If the story of his morning’s adventure, told as he proposed to tell it, didn’t have the old boy hiccoughing and wiping the tears from his eyes, he would be jolly well dashed.

  And the same applied to Mavis.

  ‘Capital! Capital! Ah, Van Sprunt, this is my son-in-law-to-be, Frederick Widgeon. A most entertaining young fellow. Get him to tell you his story about the detectives in the wrong flat. You’ll die laughing. We all think very highly of Frederick Widgeon.’

  And all that sort of thing, I mean. What? I mean to say, you follow his reasoning.

  Well, he didn’t get a chance to spring the story over the melon and powdered ginger, because old Bodsham was rather holding the floor a bit on the subject of iniquitous Socialist attacks on the House of Lords. Then, with the côtelettes and mashed, Mavis started to haul up her slacks about the Soul of America. In fact, it wasn’t till the coffee had arrived that he secured a genuine opening.

  ‘I say,’ said Freddie, catching the Speaker’s eye at this juncture, ‘a most awfully funny thing happened to me this morning. Make you scream. You’ll burst your corsets.’

  And, lighting a carefree cigarette, he embarked upon the narrative.

  He told it well. Looking back, he says, he can’t remember when he has ever done more justice to a yarn, squeezed the last drop of juice out of it with a firmer hand, if you know what I mean. The grave, intent faces of his audience, he tells me, only spurred him on to further efforts. He approved of their self-restraint. He realized that they realized that a story like this was not the sort of story to fritter away with giggles. You saved yourself up for the big howl at the finish.

  And then suddenly – he couldn’t tell just when – there stole over him a sort of feeling that the conte wasn’t getting across quite so big as he had hoped. There seemed to him to be a certain definite something in the atmosphere. You know how it is when you strike a cold audience. Old Bodsham was looking a little like a codfish with something on its mind, and there was an odd kind of expression in Mavis’s eye.

  When he had finished, there was a longish silence. Mavis looked at old Bodsham. Old Bodsham looked at Mavis.

  ‘I don’t quite understand, Frederick,’ said Mavis at length.

  ‘You say this girl was a stranger?’

  ‘Why, yes,’ said Freddie.

  ‘And you accosted her in the street?’

  ‘Why, yes,’ said Freddie.

  ‘Oh?’ said Mavis.

  ‘I was sorry for her,’ said Freddie.

  ‘Oh?’ said Mavis.

  ‘In fact, you might say that my heart bled for her.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Mavis.

  Old Bodsh
am let his breath go in a sort of whistling sigh.

  ‘Is it your practice, may I ask,’ he said, ‘to scrape acquaintance in the public streets with young persons of the opposite sex?’

  ‘You must remember, Father,’ said Mavis, in a voice which would have had an Esquimaux slapping his ribs and calling for the steam-heat, ‘that this girl was probably very pretty. So many of these New York girls are. That would, of course, explain Frederick’s behaviour.’

  ‘She wasn’t!’ yipped Freddie. ‘She was a gargoyle.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Mavis.

  ‘Spectacled to bursting-point and utterly lacking in feminine allure.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Mavis.

  ‘And when I saw her frail form bowed down by that dashed great suitcase . . . I should have thought,’ said Freddie, injured, ‘that, having learned the salient facts, you would have fawned on me for my big-hearted chivalry.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Mavis.

  There was another silence.

  ‘I must be going, Father,’ said Mavis. ‘I have some shopping to do.’

  ‘Shall I come with you?’ said Freddie.

  ‘I would prefer to be alone,’ said Mavis.

  ‘I must be going,’ said old Bodsham. ‘I have some thinking to do.’

  ‘Thinking?’ said Freddie.

  ‘Thinking,’ said old Bodsham. ‘Some serious thinking. Some extremely serious thinking. Some very serious thinking indeed.’

  ‘We will leave Frederick to finish his cigarette,’ said Mavis.

  ‘Yes,’ said old Bodsham. ‘We will leave Frederick to finish his cigarette.’

  ‘But listen,’ bleated Freddie. ‘I give you my honest word she looked like something employed by the Government for scaring crows in the cornfields of Minnesota.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Mavis.

  ‘Oh?’ said old Bodsham.

  ‘Come, Father,’ said Mavis.

  And old Freddie found himself alone, and not feeling so frightfully good.

  Now, it was Freddie’s practice – and a very prudent practice, too – to carry on his person, concealed in his hip pocket, a small but serviceable flask full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene. Friends whom he had made since his arrival in New York had advocated this policy, pointing out that you never knew when it would come in useful. His first act, accordingly, after the two Vice-Presidents of the Knickerbocker Ice Company had left him and he had begun to thaw out a bit, was to produce this flask and take a quick, sharp snort.

  The effect was instantaneous. His numbed brain began to work. And presently, after a couple more swift ones, he saw daylight.

  The whole nub of the thing, he perceived clearly, was the personal appearance of the girl Jennings. In the matter of her loved one’s acts of chivalry towards damsels in distress, a fiancée holds certain definite views. If the damsels he assists are plain, he is a good chap and deserves credit. If they are pretty, he is a low hound who jolly well gets his ring and letters back by the first post.

  Obviously, then, his only course was to return to Sixty-Ninth Street, dig up the Jennings, and parade her before Mavis. Her mere appearance, he was convinced, would clear him completely.

  Of course, the thing would have to be done delicately. I mean to say, you can’t just go to a comparatively strange female and ask her to trot round to see a friend of yours so that the latter can ascertain at first hand what a repellently unattractive girl she is. But Freddie, now full of the juice, fancied he could work it all right. All it wanted was just a little tact.

  ‘Yoicks!’ said Freddie to himself. ‘Hark for’ard!’ And, in his opinion, that about summed it up.

  It was a lovely afternoon as Freddie got into his taxi outside the Ritz and tooled off up town. Alighting at Sixty-Ninth Street, he braced himself with a visible effort and started the long climb up the four flights of stairs. And presently he was outside the door of Flat 4B and tootling on the bell.

  Nothing happened. He tootled again. He knocked. He even went so far as to kick the door. But there were no signs of human occupation, and after a bit he was reluctantly forced to the conclusion that the Jennings was out.

  Freddie had not foreseen this possibility, and he leaned against the wall for a space, thinking out his next move. He had just come to the conclusion that the only thing to do was to edge away for the nonce and have another pop later on, when a door opposite opened and a female appeared.

  ‘Hullo,’ said this bird.

  ‘Hullo,’ said Freddie.

  He spoke, he tells me, a little doubtfully, for a glance had shown him that this woman was not at all the kind of whom Mavis would have approved. A different species altogether. Her eyes were blue and totally free from spectacles. Her teeth were white and even. Her hair was a beautiful gold.

  Judging by her costume, she seemed to be a late riser. The hour was three-thirty, but she had not yet progressed beyond the negligee and slippers stage. That negligee, moreover, was a soft pink in colour and was decorated throughout with a series of fowls of some kind. Love-birds, Freddie tells me he thinks they were. And a man who is engaged to be married and who, already, is not any too popular with the bride-to-be, shrinks – automatically, as it were – from blue-eyed, golden-haired females in pink negligees picked out with ultramarine love-birds.

  However, a fellow has to be civil. So, having said ‘Hullo!’ he threw in a reserved, gentlemanly sort of smile for good measure.

  He assures me that it was merely one of those aloof smiles which the Honorary Secretary of a Bible Class would have given the elderly aunt of a promising pupil: but it had the effect of encouraging the contents of the negligee to further conversation.

  ‘Looking for someone?’ she asked.

  ‘Why, yes,’ said Freddie. ‘I suppose you couldn’t tell me when Miss Jennings will be in?’

  ‘Miss Who?’

  ‘Jennings.’

  ‘What name?’

  ‘Jennings.’

  ‘How do you spell it?’

  ‘Oh, much in the usual way, I expect. Start off with a J and then a good many “n”s and “g”s and things.’

  ‘Miss Jennings, did you say?’

  ‘That’s right. Jennings.’

  ‘I’ll tell you something,’ said the female frankly. ‘I’ve never seen any Miss Jennings. I’ve never heard of any Miss Jennings. I don’t know who she is. She means literally nothing in my life. And I’ll tell you something else. I’ve been breaking my back for half an hour trying to open my living-room window, and do you think I can do it? No, sir! What do you advise?’

  ‘Leave it shut,’ said Freddie.

  ‘But it’s so warm. The weather, I mean.’

  ‘It is warm,’ agreed Freddie.

  ‘I’m just stifling. Yes, sir. That’s what I am. Stifling in my tracks.’

  At this point, undoubtedly, old Freddie should have said ‘Oh?’ or ‘Well, best o’ luck!’ or something of that order, and buzzed off. But once a fellow drops into the habit of doing acts of kindness, he tells me, it’s dashed difficult to pull up. The thing becomes second nature.

  So now, instead of hoofing it, he unshipped another of those polished smiles of his, and asked if there was anything he could do.

  ‘Well, it’s a shame to trouble you . . .’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘I hate to impose on you . . .’

  ‘Not – a – tall,’ said Freddie, becoming more preux every moment. ‘Only too pleased.’

  And he trotted after her into the flat.

  ‘There it is,’ said the female. ‘The window, I mean.’

  Freddie surveyed it carefully. He went over and gave it a shake. It certainly seemed pretty tightly stuck.

  ‘The way they build these joints nowadays,’ observed the female, with a certain amount of severity, ‘the windows either won’t open at all or else they drop out altogether.’

  ‘Well, that’s Life, isn’t it?’ said Freddie.

  The thing didn’t look any too good to him, but he buckled to like
a man, and for some moments nothing was to be heard in the room but his tense breathing.

  ‘How are you getting on?’ asked the female.

  ‘I’ve a sort of rummy buzzing in my head,’ said Freddie. ‘You don’t think it’s apoplexy or something?’

  ‘I’d take a rest if I was you,’ said his hostess. ‘You look warm.’

  ‘I am warm,’ said Freddie.

  ‘Take your coat off.’

  ‘May I? Thanks.’

  ‘Your collar, too, if you like.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  The removal of the upholstery made Freddie feel a little better.

  ‘I once knew a man who opened a window in a Pullman car,’ said the female.

  ‘No, really?’ said Freddie.

  ‘Ah, what a man!’ sighed the female wistfully. ‘They don’t make ’em like that nowadays.’

  I don’t suppose she actually intended anything in the way of a slur or innuendo, if you know what I mean, but Freddie tells me he felt a bit stung. It was as if his manly spirit had been challenged. Setting his teeth, he charged forward and had another go.

  ‘Try pulling it down from the top,’ said the female.

  Freddie tried pulling it down from the top, but nothing happened.

  ‘Try wiggling it sideways,’ said the female.

  Freddie tried wiggling it sideways, but his efforts were null and void.

  ‘Have a drink,’ said the female.

  This seemed to old Freddie by miles the best suggestion yet. He sank into a chair and let his tongue hang out. And presently a brimming glass stole into his hand, and he quaffed deeply.

  ‘That’s some stuff I brought away from home,’ said the female.

  ‘From where?’ said Freddie.

  ‘Home.’

  ‘But isn’t this your home?’

  ‘Well, it is now. But I used to live in Utica. Mr Silvers made this stuff. About the only good thing he ever did. Mr Silvers, I mean.’

  Freddie pondered a bit.