Hot Water Page 3

'No, sir. Do you know what?'

  'What?'

  'When she told me this morning, you could have knocked me down with a feather. What do you think?'

  'What?'

  'You'll never guess.'

  'What?'

  'Do you know what she told me this morning?'

  'How the hell should I know what she told you this morning?' said Mr Slattery, momentary irritation causing him to deviate from his policy of courtliness. 'Do you think I was hiding under the bed?'

  'She told me I've got to be American Ambassador to France.'

  Mr Slattery considered this.

  'You won't like that.'

  'I know darned well I won't like it. Ambassadors have to wear uniforms and knickerbockers... the sissies.'

  And cocked hats.'

  'Cocked hats?'

  'Sure. I've seen them in the news-reels. And they get kissed all the time by Frenchmen.'

  It had been Mr Gedge's belief until he heard these words that he had explored to their ultimate depths the drawbacks to representing his country in an ambassadorial capacity. He now perceived that the last and most hideous of them had escaped his notice. He sat for a moment paralysed. Then words poured from him in a frenzied tumult.

  'I won't do it! I just won't do it. No, sir! I'll get me a little capital, enough to start again on, and then I'll defy her. Yessir, that's what I'll do – defy her. I'm very fond of my dear wife, but I'll walk right up to her and defy her. Here's what I'll say: "Look-ut!" I'll say, "I've got enough to start again on now, and I'm independent, see? And I don't intend to be Ambassador to France," I'll say. "The quicker you forget that Ambassador stuff, the better, because it's all wet. And what's more, talking of France," I'll say, "I'm getting out of it on the next boat and going back to California, that's what I'm doing. If you want to stick on in France, stick on," I'll say. "But I'm going right back to Glendale. Yessir!"'

  Mr Slattery, though not an unkindly man, was practical. It is his type that discourages dreamers.

  'Where,' he asked, 'are you going to get your capital?'

  In the exhilaration of building air-castles Mr Gedge had overlooked this point. The fire faded from his eye.

  'You couldn't lend me a little, could you?'

  Mr Slattery said he could not.

  'I shouldn't want more than ten thousand. If I could lay my hands on ten thousand, I could get back everything I lost.'

  Mr Slattery said that if he ever saw ten thousand dollars he would take each individual bill singly and kiss it.

  A mad rebellion at Fate's unkindness seemed to sting Mr Gedge.

  'It's so unjust!'

  'What's unjust?'

  'Why, well, look. Do you know what?'

  Mr Slattery begged his companion not to keep asking him if he knew what.

  'Well, do you know what? When I married Mrs Gedge I was a rich man....'

  'You told me that.'

  'Yes, but I didn't tell you this. I covered that woman with jewels. Well, when I say covered her... Anyway, I gave her a darned lot. Sixty thousand dollars' worth, at least.'

  Mr Slattery was impressed. Sixty grand, he agreed, was pretty good gravy.

  'Think what those sixty thousand fish would mean to me now! Think what I could do with them!'

  'Ah.'

  'I tell you,' said Mr Gedge, trembling with self-pity, 'when I see Mrs Gedge swanking around in those jewels I can understand how men become cynics.'

  For an instant the significance of the remark did not seem to penetrate to Mr Slattery's consciousness. He said Ah' again in rather an absent voice, and refreshed himself from his glass. Then, suddenly, he jumped as if something hot had touched him.

  'Swanking around? Do you mean she's got them with her?'

  'Yessir.'

  'Right there at the Chatty-o?'

  'Yessir.'

  There was a pause.

  'Keeps them in a safe, I suppose?' asked Mr Slattery casually.

  'When she isn't wearing them.'

  Mr Slattery fell into a rueful silence. He was thinking of what might have been. If only his lost Julia were with him now, he mused, how swiftly she would think up some plan for getting into this Château and working the inside stand. Lacking her gentle aid, it seemed to him that he was helpless.

  Of course, there was Oily. Oily had expressed himself willing to do the inside work. But how was he to make Mr Gedge's acquaintance and so qualify for an invitation to the Chatty-o? It was the difficulty of establishing that first link that saddened Mr Slattery. He could scarcely introduce Gordon Carlisle to Mr Gedge. He was not a very intelligent man, but even he could see that a prospective visitor to the Château Blissac would require better credentials than an introduction from a stick-up man and expert safe-blower.

  He drew in a deep breath. The thing seemed cold, after all.

  He was aroused from his meditations by a stirring in the seat opposite. Mr Gedge was making preparations for departure.

  'You going?'

  'Yes sir. Got to get back.'

  'What's your hurry?'

  'Well, I'll tell you. Mrs Gedge is off to England to-day on the afternoon boat, and there'll be a lot of things she'll be wanting to talk to me about. Goodbye, Mr Slattery. Pleased to have met you.'

  Mr Slattery did not reply. Although his granite face did not show it, inwardly he was tingling with rapture. It was as if there had been a belt of fog hiding the Promised Land from him and Mr Gedge had ripped it apart and brought the sun smiling through.

  Historians relate of the mathematician Archimedes that on a certain occasion, having solved some intricate problem, he leaped from the bath in which he was sitting and ran through the streets crying 'Eureka! Eureka!' Mr Slattery was not in his bath, but if he had been he would certainly have left it now, and it is highly probable that, if he had known what it meant, he would have shouted 'Eureka!' For he had found the way.

  A moment later he was out in the street, hurrying towards the Hotel des Etrangers.

  6

  Mr Carlisle was still in the cocktail bar. Mr Slattery made for his table.

  'Oily,' he said, 'we're sitting pretty. The thing's in the bag!' Mr Carlisle sat up alertly. His friend, he knew, was no idle talker. Seldom, too, was he as emotional as this. Strong and silent were the adjectives which sprang to the lips when describing Soup Slattery. If Mr Slattery was excited, it meant something.

  'What thing? What we were talking about?'

  'Sure. That Chatty-o. I've just run into the guy that lives there.'

  Mr Carlisle's animation increased.

  'How did you do that?'

  'We happened to meet,' said Mr Slattery with a touch of embarrassment. 'And we got chummy and had a drink. And he says Mrs Gedge don't keep her ice at no bank. She's got it right there with her. In a safe she keeps it. Well, say! Show me the pete I can't open with my eye-teeth and a pin, and I'll eat it. And when I say that,' added Mr Slattery with justifiable pride, 'I'm not handing myself a thing.'

  'But...'

  'I know. The inside stand. How are we going to work it? I'll tell you. This Gedge dame is sailing for England this afternoon.'

  He paused to allow the momentous information to sink in. A glance at his companion's face told him that he had not overestimated the agility of the other's mind. Mr Carlisle took his meaning instantly.

  'I go on the boat and get acquainted?'

  'That's right.'

  'Easy.'

  'You'd best tell her you're one of these French titled guys with lots of pull with the fellows that run the French Government. On account she wants her old man to be Ambassador to France, and she'll think you can help.'

  'I'll string the beads till she thinks I own the French Government.'

  'We're on a big thing, Oily, if you can work it. This Gedge tells me that ice of hers runs as high as sixty grand.'

  Mr Carlisle licked his lips. A dreamy look had come into his face. Like Mr Slattery a short while before, he seemed to be gazing upon the Promised Land.
/>   'If I'm not inside that Château in five days,' he said, I'm not the worker I used to be.'

  CHAPTER 2

  1

  THE glorious weather which was making St Rocque's summer season such a success was equally glorious across the English Channel. Sunshine had flooded the grounds of the Château Blissac, and sunshine shortly after four o'clock on the following afternoon was flooding the streets of London. It turned the pavements to gold. It lit up omnibuses and the fruit-barrows of costermongers. It illuminated with its merry beams the faces of pedestrians, dray-horses and policemen.

  Only Waterloo Station, that austere cavern, would have none of it. Wrapped in its customary decent gloom, it continued to resemble a cathedral whose acolytes fill in their time with a bit of steam-fitting on the side. And to-day the sombre note was intensified by the presence of large crowds of moist adults, accompanied for the most part by children with spades and buckets. For it was the beginning of what the papers call the Holiday Rush. London and its young, like Xenophon's Ten Thousand, were making for the sea.

  Outside the gates behind which the management keeps the 4.21 express to Yeovil and points west, there stood a young man whose appearance did something to raise the lowered tone of the place. If not strictly handsome, he looked extraordinarily fit and healthy, and there was in his demeanour a cheerful contentment which marked him off from the droves of worried fathers who were so obviously wishing that they had remained bachelors. All this was new and entertaining to him. He had been in England only a few months, and he enjoyed every manifestation of English life. As he now detached two children, Ralph and Flossie, from his legs and handed them back to their parents, there was nothing of impatience in his manner, only a kindly solicitude. And if he would have preferred that another child, named Rupert, had selected somebody else's trousers as a strop for his all-day sucker, he gave no outward evidence of the fact.

  As to his identity, if you read your Society Gossip, you will recall that the engagement was recently announced between Lady Beatrice Bracken (who is, of course, the daughter of the Earl of Stableford) and Patrick B. Franklyn (who is, of course, the well-known young American millionaire and sportsman). This was Packy. Beatrice was leaving London to-day for her father's seat, Worbles, in Dorsetshire, and he had come to Waterloo to see her off.

  She came in view now, walking disdainfully through the crowd like a princess among the Jacquerie, a girl so spectacularly beautiful that you would have thought that even some of these perspiring parents with five children to look after might have spared her a glance. Beatrice's was a comeliness which had lent lustre to Biddlecombe Hunt Balls, where comeliness is comeliness, and never failed to attract attention even in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot or among the throng which parades Lord's Cricket Ground during the luncheon interval of the Eton and Harrow match.

  Mary Mayfair, who conducts the page entitled 'A Little Bird in Society' in Fireside Chatter, had said of Lady Beatrice Bracken in a recent issue that at the last reception at the Spanish Embassy she had been facile princeps and nonplus ultra, showing to superb advantage in a dress of the new opaline crêpe royale with the bias cut to stress the natural line of the figure. And Mary was right.

  At the moment, nervous irritation was preventing her from looking quite her best. If there was one thing she disliked, it was having to travel by train during the tripper season; and if it was really necessary that she should revisit the ancestral home to help her father entertain his house-party, she thought he might have sent the car for her. But with petrol at its current price, the level-headed old man had been too smart for that.

  A girl who seldom smiled, she greeted Packy with the merest twitch of the upper lip which had come out so well in the Lazlo portrait.

  'What a mob!' she said disgustedly.

  'I like it,' said Packy. All this is helping me to understand the spirit which has made England what it is. I can see now what they mean when they talk of the bulldog breed. There was one fellow came navigating by here just now with an infant in each hand and attached to each infant, mark you, a Sealyham on a string. The last I saw of them, the port-side child had got tangled up with the starboard Sealyham and the port-side Sealyham with the starboard child, and, take it for all in all, it was beginning to look like a big day for Dad. In my opinion, good clean fun, gratifyingly free from all this modern sugges-tiveness. By the way, how about your baggage?'

  'Parker is looking after it.'

  And reading matter? Would you like me to race to the newsstand and get you something? There's just time.'

  'No, thanks. I have a book.'

  'She has a book. What is it?'

  'Blair Eggleston's Worm i'the Root!

  'Blair Eggleston? Why does that name seem familiar? Have I met him somewhere?'

  'I introduced you to him at the Young Artists Exhibition in Dover Street a week ago.'

  'Of course, yes. I remember. A gosh-awful pill with side whiskers.'

  The remark was one of those unfortunate remarks. It had the effect of increasing Beatrice's irritation.

  'Don't talk like that,' she said in the voice which, much as he worshipped the girl, sometimes made Packy think that she must have governess blood in her. 'Everybody whose opinion matters regards Mr Eggleston as one of the leaders of the younger school of novelists.'

  'Well, it's no good him going about boasting that I read him, because I don't.'

  'You never read anything.'

  'I've read all Edgar Wallace.'

  'Well, you'd better read all Blair Eggleston. I do wish you wouldn't be like this. What on earth is the use of my taking all this trouble over you – trying to make you appreciate good books and pictures and so on, if you are going to talk like a Yahoo?'

  'I'm sorry,' said Packy. 'You're quite right.'

  He was full of remorse. A nice way, he felt contritely, to behave to a girl who had gone to such pains to get behind his spiritual self and push.

  At Yale, where he had been educated, Packy Franklyn had been an All-American half-back, but he had tended, he fully realized, rather to under-nourish his spiritual self. He had given it the short end, and it was missing, he knew, on several cylinders. He was self-critic enough to be aware that, if there was a department in which he could safely be sold short, it was the department of the soul. How ill it became him, then, not to cooperate to the fullest extent with a girl who was trying to jack it up.

  Apart from her beauty, what had fascinated him from the first about Lady Beatrice Bracken was the loftiness of her ideals. When it came to ideals, she had unquestionably got something. And of this loftiness of ideals she was giving him the benefit. Already she had toned down his natural exuberance quite a good deal, and he was not half sure that if she spat on her hands and stuck to it she might not some day succeed in almost curing the slight nausea with which picture galleries and concerts now affected him.

  Yes, stiffish going though she might be at times, closely though her manner towards him might occasionally resemble that which, he felt, she probably employed when rebuking James, the footman, for bringing cold toast to the tea-table, she undeniably bore the banner with the strange device, Excelsior, and he writhed to think that he should have wounded her with his flippancy.

  'I'm quite wrong about Blair Eggleston,' he said, 'I must have been thinking of a couple of other fellows. Now that I recall our meeting, I remember that I was greatly struck with his quiet charm. I will start reading him to-morrow.'

  'I happened to meet him in Bond Street this morning,' said Beatrice. 'I told him that you would be at a loose end in London....'

  'But I shan't.'

  'What do you mean?'

  'Well, now that you're going to be away, there doesn't seem much point in sticking on in a city which appears to imagine that Nature intended it for a Turkish Bath. I thought of chartering a boat and pushing off somewhere. I saw an advertisement the other day,' said Packy, becoming lyrical, for in his native land he had been an enthusiastic yachtsman, 'of an auxiliary yawl, f
orty-five feet over all, thirty-nine on water line, thirteen foot beam, Marconi rig...'

  'I particularly want you to stay in London,' said Beatrice.

  Her tone was final, and Packy eyed her with dismay. He had been looking forward to that yachting trip.

  'But why?'

  'Well, for one thing...'

  She broke off, and stooped to rub an ankle which had just been kicked by a child named Ernie. And at the same instant there smote Packy vigorously between the shoulder-blades one of those hearty buffets which tell us we have found a friend. Turning, he perceived a lissom young man with green eyes and hair cut en brosse who beamed upon him fondly.

  For a moment he was at a loss. The other's face, like his manner, was familiar; but, unlike his manner, only vaguely so. Then memory awoke.

  'Veek!'

  'My old Packy!'

  It was eighteen months since Packy had last seen that effervescent young French aristocrat, the Vicomte de Blissac. Mingled with his delight at seeing him now was the feeling that he wished the reunion could have taken place a few minutes after the departure of Beatrice's train instead of a few minutes before. His friendship with the heir of the De Blissacs dated back to the brave old days in New York, and something told him that the other was going to start talking about them. And experience had taught Packy that where Beatrice was concerned it was better to keep the whole subject of the brave old days a sealed book.

  However, she had stopped rubbing her ankle, so there was nothing to do but present this ghost of his dead past.

  'Lady Beatrice Bracken. The Vicomte de Blissac.'

  Beatrice bowed. In her beautiful eyes, as she did so, there was a stony look. Packy read its message. She did not approve of the old Veek.

  It was not often that Lady Beatrice Bracken did approve of Packy's friends. It sometimes seemed to her that each was more repulsive and impossible than the last. She herself, except for a taste for the society of intellectuals, was exclusively County in her intimacies. Packy, on the other hand, as far as she had been able to gather, seemed to like everybody. You could never be sure when you met him that you would not find him hobnobbing with a prize-fighter or worse. The discovery that he was on cordial terms with this Vicomte de Blissac, of whom she had heard much from time to time, did nothing to diminish her already rather pronounced resemblance to a smartly-dressed iceberg.