Pearls, Girls and Monty Bodkin Read online

  The Whisky Sour guffawed amusedly. ‘This is going to make you laugh.

  'Not me,' said the Screwdriver. 'Not this morning.'

  'It all started on board the liner Atlantic en route for New York. Gertrude Butterwick was there because she was going to America with the All England women's hockey team. Monty was there because he wanted to be with Gertrude. Reggie Tennyson was there because the family were shipping him off to some office job in Canada. All straight so far?'

  Those present agreed that, up to this point they had followed him.

  'And also among those sailing were Ivor Llewellyn, head of the Superba-Llewellyn, and his wife's sister Mabel Spence. That completes the cast of characters. You've got all that straight?'

  'Yes.'

  'Now here's where the plot thickens,’’ the Whisky Sour proceeded. 'All the above had come on board at Southampton with the exception of La Spence, who joined them at Cherbourg, having been in Paris whooping it up with Llewellyn's wife Grayce, and conceive Llewellyn's emotion when she told him she had brought with her a very valuable diamond thingummy, a purchase of Grayce's, and she, Grayce, wanted him, Llewellyn, to smuggle it through the New York Customs. It seems that she was a woman who held strong views on the foolishness of paying duty to the United States Government. They had more money already than was good for them, she used to say, and if you gave them any more they would only spend it. Am I making myself clear?'

  His audience said that he was.

  'This, as you can imagine, perturbed Llewellyn greatly. He had always had a horror of Customs inspectors. Even when his conscience was clear he shrank from the gaze of their fishy eyes. He quivered when they chewed gum at him. When they jerked silent thumbs at his cabin trunk, he opened it as if there was a body inside.’

  The Comfort-on-the-rocks said he understood that feeling, and had started to tell what promised to be a long story about the time he had tried to smuggle in a hundred cigarettes at Folkestone, when the Whisky Sour continued his narrative.

  'His impulse, of course, was to have nothing to do with the venture, but then the thought of what Grayce would have to say if he included himself out gave him pause. Customs inspectors terrified him, but not nearly so much as she did, and he had good reason for his tremors. In her professional days she had been one of the best-known panther women on the silver screen, and once a panther woman, always a panther woman. So he reached the conclusion that however unpleasant the alternative her wishes would have to be obeyed. But he didn't like the prospect.'

  ‘I’ll bet he didn't,' said the Gimlet.

  'The problem was—How to do the smuggling?'

  ‘I'll bet it was.'

  'That was what ruined his sleep at night.'

  ‘I’ll bet it did.’

  'And then one afternoon Reggie pointed the way.' 'Reggie Tennyson?'

  'Yes. I told you he was on board. In the days that had passed since the liner left Southampton he had become very matey with Mabel Spence, and she had confided in him all about Llewellyn's dilemma. And he went to Llewellyn and told him that the happy ending could be achieved quite simply by bringing Monty's mouse into the act. I must mention that in order to give her pleasure Monty had purchased at the ship's shop for Gertrude a brown plush Mickey Mouse whose head screwed off. You were supposed to put chocolates in it.'

  The Screwdriver shuddered strongly. He was in no condition to hear such things as chocolates referred to.

  'Monty and Gertrude had had one of those lovers' tiffs about something and she had returned the mouse to him, and Reggie pointed out to Llewellyn that it would be an easy task for him, Reggie, to insert the jewels in the mouse without telling Monty, and Monty would carry it ashore.'

  'Neat,' said the Gimlet.

  'Ingenious,' said the Comfort-on-the-rocks. 'And he got through all right?'

  'Without a hitch. And then, of course, Llewellyn had to tell him about the jewels, and he saw that he had been handed a good thing on a plate with watercress round it. This, he perceived, was where he got a job that would carry him along nicely for the necessary year. And the long and the short of it was that before they parted Llewellyn had given him a five-year contract as Adviser for Productions.'

  And he was reconciled to Gertrude Butterwick?'

  'Oh, yes. He's giving her lunch today at Barribault's.'

  The Screwdriver said it was a waste of money. Sooner or later, he predicted, Gertrude Butterwick would let him down, and he would be out the price of a lunch.

  'What makes you say that?' asked the Whisky Sour,

  'She plays hockey,' said the Screwdriver.

  2

  As Monty sat in the lobby of Barribault's world-famous hotel, his eyes constantly swivelling towards the revolving door through which Gertrude Butterwick would at any moment enter, his emotions, though coming under the general head of ecstatic, were nevertheless tinged with a certain uneasiness. Granted that he was on to a good thing and one which it would be a pleasure to push along, he could not but reflect that it was a year since he had seen Gertrude, and a year gave a girl plenty of time to think things over and change her mind, especially if she had a father who made no attempt to conceal that he was allergic to Bodkins and would certainly not have refrained from those parental cracks which can do so much to influence a devoted daughter.

  True, she had agreed to this luncheon tryst without apparent hesitation, but had it been with the old fire and enthusiasm? That was what he was asking himself as he sat there, and that was what was preventing him from being in the frame of mind which the French call bien être. His spirits alternately rose and sank, and it was just as he had succeeded in raising them and convincing himself that his fears were groundless that there came through the door, which so far had revolved to admit only Indian Maharajahs and Texan millionaires, an elderly man with a face like a horse whom he had no difficulty in recognizing as Mr. J. B. Butterwick of Butterwick, Price and Mandelbaum, Import and Export merchants. And Mr. Butterwick, advancing to where he was sitting, sniffed at him in a marked manner and uttered these appalling words:

  'Good morning, Mr. Bodkin. Gertrude will not be lunching with you today.’

  One of the things which render his task so arduous for the teller of the tale of lovers long parted—sundered hearts as one might say—is that so often, just as he has got all set to start writing the big reunion scene, he finds that it is not going to take place owing to the failure to appear of one of the two principals. And if a mere chronicler in these circumstances has a feeling of bafflement and frustration, as though he had raced to catch a train on Saturday morning and found on arrival at the station that it was Sundays Only, how much more poignant must be the discomfiture of one who had been expecting to play a leading part in such a scene. The emotions of a young lover who has planned to lunch with the girl he adores and gets her father instead are more readily imagined than described. It is enough to say that Monty had them all and, had he not been seated in one of Barribault's deep arm-chairs, would have reeled and perhaps fallen.

  Mr. Butterwick was looking like a horse about to start in the two-thirty at Kempton Park or Catterick Bridge, and not a very attractive horse at that, but it was not this that caused Monty to gaze at him as if at a snake in his path. It was with difficulty that he found speech.

  'What!' he cried.

  'Not?' he added.

  'Rot!' he concluded, summing up. 'Of course she will be lunching with me. We fixed it up last night over the telephone.'

  'True.’ said Mr. Butterwick. 'But since then I have talked with her and made her see that it would be better if I took her place.’

  The interpretation Monty placed on these words was that the old Gawd-help-us was expecting to touch him for a lunch, and his whole soul revolted at the idea. Mr. Butterwick, however, reassured him.

  'I do not mean at the luncheon table.’ he said with a sketchy beginning of a wintry smile. 'You will, after you hear what I have to say, prefer to be alone, and in any case I am lunching at my usual h
ealth restaurant. I merely mean that as Gertrude is a sensitive girl and it would upset her to be compelled to give you pain, it would be better if I, and not she, broke the news to you.’

  Monty could make nothing of this. Mr. Butterwick had left his hat with the hat-check girl, but had it been on his head he would have accused him of talking through it.

  ‘I don't get your drift.’ he said.

  'I will make myself clearer.’ responded Mr. Butterwick. A less austere man might have said 'I will continue snowing'. 'I have decided that you and my daughter must not see each other again.'

  Barribault's Hotel is solidly built, and there is no record of the ceiling of its lobby ever having fallen on a customer's head. This, however, was what for an instant Monty was convinced had occurred, and he was amazed that the Maharajahs and Texan millionaires dotted about at their little tables were taking it so calmly. Then reason returned to its throne, and he fixed his companion with an incredulous eye.

  'What!' he cried.

  'Not?' he added.

  'Great Scott!' he concluded. 'You mean you're giving me the old heave-ho?'

  'The expression is new to me, but I gather its import. Yes that is what I am doing.'

  'But our agreement!'

  'I am coming to that. Ouch!'

  'It's no good saying Ouch. That's no answer.'

  ‘I used the ejaculation,' said Mr. Butterwick with dignity, 'because my indigestion gave me a momentary twinge. I suffer from indigestion.'

  Monty was aware of this, and the knowledge had always given him pleasure, though his gratification would have been increased if the malady had been bubonic plague.

  'Well, all right,’’ he said, yielding the point. 'If you wish to say "Ouch", by all means do so. But, returning to the res, you promised that if I earned my living for a year, you would refrain from bunging a spanner into my union with Gertrude. I thought it silly at the time, and I still think it silly, but I said to myself that it was no use arguing about it and I buckled down to do it and fulfilled your conditions faithfully. For the past year I have held the post of Adviser on Productions at the Superba-Llewellyn motion picture studio at Llewellyn City, Southern California, and if that isn't earning my living, what is? Are you under the impression that the Superba-Llewellyn doesn't pay its production advisers? Each Friday I got my little envelope with a thousand dollars in it. And you have the nerve to assert that our agreement is null and void. At least you haven't actually asserted it, but you were just going to. Well really, J. B. Butterwick, if behaviour like yours is common form in the circles in which you move, heaven help the import and export business. Men with a higher standard than yours would describe it as welshing.’

  'Have you finished, Mr. Bodkin?'

  'No.'

  'Nevertheless, will, you postpone any further observations and give me the opportunity to speak?'

  'If you have anything to say.'

  'I have plenty to say.’

  'And provided is it not mere gibbering.’

  'It is not. You claim that you have fulfilled the conditions of our agreement faithfully. I dispute this.’

  'You aren't trying to suggest that I wasn't at Llewellyn City for a year? You're cuckoo, Butterwick. Drop a line to Miss Alexandra Miller at the studio and ask her. She'll tell you. She was my secretary. We were closeted together daily.’

  'No, I am not trying to suggest that, Mr. Bodkin. What I am saying is that your sojourn there, as far as our agreement is concerned, does not count.'

  'Not count?'

  'No. Because it was based on fraud. You obtained your position by means of ... I was about to say a trick, but perhaps blackmail is a better word. You forced Mr. Llewellyn to employ you by threatening, if he refused, to withhold from him the brown plush Mickey Mouse containing his wife's jewellery. Naturally when I made our agreement I never considered the possibility of such behaviour on your part. I assumed that if you found employment, it would be through the ordinary channels through which young men do become employed. And so, as I say, your year at the Superba-Llewellyn studio does not count.'

  He ceased, and once more Monty had the illusion that a large portion of Barribault's Hotel had parted from its moorings and fallen on his head. His manner, which had been belligerent, lost its fire and took on something of the embarrassment of a bag-snatcher at a railway terminus detected in the act of sneaking off with a suitcase. Mingled with this discomposure was unwilling awe. He had never suspected Mr. Butterwick of being clairvoyant, but it had now become plain that he was equipped beyond the ordinary with psychometry and the sixth sense and all that sort of thing, and one cannot but admire these qualities in a man, however much you may think that wiser parents than his would have drowned him in a bucket at birth.

  'How did you know that?' he asked feebly.

  'From my daughter.'

  'You mean to say she told you?'

  'She tells me everything.'

  Monty was appalled. That any girl should have behaved so recklessly seemed to him incredible. His normal attitude towards Gertrude had always been that the queen could do no wrong, but now he found himself in critical vein, and words that must inevitably have given offence—for no father likes to hear his daughter described as a halfwitted fathead—sprang to his lips.

  He choked them back. They would have relieved him, but they would have been injudicious, for he had not altogether lost the hope that with the exercise of suavity and tact a peaceful settlement might be arrived at.

  'Couldn't we talk this over?' he said.

  Mr. Butterwick said they were talking it over and that he would be glad if they could wind up the conversation as quickly as possible, as he was anxious to get to his health restaurant.

  'I mean in an atmosphere of the utmost cordiality, the way statesmen do at places like Geneva. I will begin by conceding that in the matter of Llewellyn and the brown plush Mickey Mouse I did let myself get carried away a bit and acted in a manner calculated to draw raised eyebrows from the bar of public opinion, but all I could think of was that here was an admirable opportunity of bending Llewellyn to my will, so I bent him.’

  'Disgraceful.’

  'Quite, quite. Now that you have shown me with such wonderful clearness where I went off the rails, I can see that it wasn't the right thing to do, and I shall know better next time.'

  'Next time? I do not understand you.'

  'You will if you will listen attentively for about half a jiffy. What I would suggest is that you put me on appro for another year, and if at the end of it I can prove that during that year I have earned my living and you are satisfied that there has been no hanky panky about the way I've done it, you will give your consent to my scooping in the girl I love—in other words Gertrude.’ said Monty, making his meaning clear. 'In short, that the Bishop and assistant clergy and the bridesmaids shall be encouraged to line up and do their stuff,' he added, making it clearer.

  Mr. Butterwick considered the suggestion frowningly. It was not to his way of thinking the ideal solution. He had hoped that the interview now in progress would have seen the end of any association between his daughter and this undesirable suitor, and the prospect of having him as a menace for another year was not an agreeable one. On the other hand, he was a fairminded man and recognised Monty's claims to consideration.

  'Very well.’ he said.

  'Fine.'

  'You will, of course, not see Gertrude.'

  'If you insist.'

  'I see no objections to occasional letters.'

  'Splendid. So now all that remains is to think of a suitable job. I suppose you wouldn't have an opening in your office?'

  Mr. Butterwick said he would not.

  'A pity. What actually do you do in the import and export business?'

  'We import and export.’

  'Yes, I thought that might be it. It would probably have suited me down to the ground. However, as you say you have nothing to offer me, I must look elsewhere. I shall have to think.’

  'I will
leave you to do so. Good morning, Mr. Bodkin.’

  'Eh? Oh, good morning, good morning.’ said Monty. He closed his eyes to assist thought, and shortly after he had done so a musical voice in his left ear said 'Hi', and looking up he saw that he had been joined by Alexandra (Sandy) Miller, the last person he had expected to see on this side of the Atlantic ocean.

  3

  He mentioned this to her.

  'Sandy,’’ he cried, 'What on earth are you doing here?' 'Lunching with you, I hope.'

  'I mean—'

  'Or are you waiting for someone? If not take me into the grill-room and fill me up. I'm starving.'

  'Cocktail?'

  'No, thanks. Just Food. Oh, Monty, it really has made my day, running into you like this. I thought I should have to search London for you with bloodhounds. Are you surprised to see me?'

  'Stunned. Why aren't you in Llewellyn City?'

  'All shall be explained over the luncheon table. If I don't faint from malnutrition before I get there. But what luck!'

  'Eh?'

  'I took it for granted that you would be entertaining some lovely female.'

  'Well, I am, aren't I?'

  'Thank you, kind sir.'

  'Not at all. Don't mention it.’

  Monty had spoken with all his wonted cheerfulness.

  As they made their way to their table, he was conscious of a marked lightening of the spirits which Mr. Butterwick had left at a low ebb. The agony of having Gertrude snatched from him was still there, but it had abated. Sandy might not be Gertrude, but she was unquestionably the next best thing. She was looking, he thought, particularly charming, and he was not surprised that as they passed his table a Texan millionaire had puckered up his lips as if about to whistle.

  A waiter appeared and took dictation. When the order was completed, Monty repeated his question.

  'What on earth are you doing in London?'

  'That's where my employer is, and my place is at her side. If you mean Why did I come to London, the answer is simple. I'm pursuing the man I love.'