Laughing Gas Page 6

  'Of course he's feeling all right. Why wouldn't he be?'

  B. K. Burwash said that he always felt a certain anxiety after giving gas. This seemed to stir her up further.

  'Pah! Stuff and nonsense! Gas, indeed. When I was a child nobody ever gave me gas. When I was a child, my father used to tie a string to me and fasten it to the barn door and slam it. And it didn't get into the papers, either. All this fuss about a tiny little tooth, which wouldn't ever have started aching if he hadn't been eating candy on the sly, though knowing perfectly well what Clause B. (2) in his contract says. I intend to get to the bottom of this candy business. Somebody is bootlegging it to him, and I mean to find out who it is. He's as artful as a barrel-load of monkeys —'

  I was conscious of a growing annoyance. I had fallen into a reverie and was once more endeavouring to grapple with the problems confronting me, and her voice interrupted my meditations. It was a harsh, rasping voice, in its timbre not unlike a sawmill.

  I shushed her down with a gesture.

  'Don't talk so much,' I said curtly.

  'What did you say?'

  'I said "Don't talk so much". How can I think with all this gabble going on? For heaven's sake, woman, put a sock in it and let me concentrate.'

  This got a fair snicker out of B. K. Burwash, though I hadn't intended to strike the humorous note. It caused Miss Brinkmeyer to pinken and breathe heavily.

  'I'd like to put you across my knee and give you a good Spanking.'

  I raised a hand.

  'No horse-play, if you please,' I said distantly.

  And then something occurred to me, and the whole situation seemed to brighten. I had just remembered what the kid Cooley had said when sketching out his plans for what he was going to do when he was big enough.

  Well, goodness knew he was big enough for anything now. My branch of the family has always run to beef a bit, myself not least. When I boxed for Cambridge, I weighed fourteen stone in the nude.

  I gave a hearty chuckle, the first I had felt like emitting for some considerable time.

  'Woman,' I said, 'you would do better, instead of threatening violence to others, to look out for yourself. You don't know it, but you are in a very sticky spot. The avenger is on your track. When the blow will fall, we cannot say, but some day, in some place, you are going to get a poke in the snoot. This is official.'

  B. K. Burwash became graver. He seemed troubled.

  'I hope I did not overdo that gas,' he mused. 'I don't like this. It sounds like delirium. The little fellow's manner has been strange ever since he came to.'

  La Brinkmeyer scouted this theory.

  'Stuff and nonsense! He isn't delirious. He's talking that way just to be aggravating.'

  'You think so?'

  'Of course. Have you ever had to look after a sassy, swollen-headed, wisecracking child star who thinks he's everybody just because a lot of fool women crowd to see him on the screen and say doesn't he look cute and sweet and innocent?'

  B. K. Burwash said no, he had not had this experience.

  'Well, I've been doing it for a year, and I know his ways.'

  This seemed to reassure the dubious dentist. 'You feel, then, that there is no cause for anxiety?' 'Of course there isn't.'

  'You relieve me. I was afraid he was not quite himself.' 'He's himself, worse luck.'

  'Hal' I exclaimed, smiling a bit, for this struck me as

  quaint. Ironical, you might say. 'Funny you should say that. Because myself, in a nutshell, is precisely what I'm bally well not.'

  It seemed an admirable opportunity to issue that statement. The topic could not have been more neatly introduced.

  'Madam,' I began, 'and you, B. K. Burwash, prepare yourselves for a bit of a surprise. Unless I am very much mistaken, this is going to make you sit up a trifle.'

  'Oh, be quiet.'

  'The poet Shakespeare has well said that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy. One of these has just broken loose in this very room. You will doubtless be interested to learn that owing to an unforeseen crossing of the wires in the fourth dimension —'

  'Stop this nonsense and come along.'

  'But I wish to issue a statement. Briefly, then, owing, as I say, to funny work in the fourth dimension... mark you, I call it the fourth, but it may quite easily be the fifth ... I'm a bit shaky on dimensions —'

  'You'll be shaky if I start shaking you, as I shall in a minute, I know I shall. I've no patience with you. Will you come along?'

  I came along. And if you feel that this was weak of me, I can only say that the Albert Memorial would have come along in precisely the same manner, had Miss Beulah Brinkmeyer attached herself to its wrist and pulled. I left the chair like a cork emerging from a bottle under the ministrations of a sinewy butler.

  'Oh, all right,' I said, resigning myself to the inev. 'Pip-pip, Burwash.'

  As a matter of fact, I was not sorry I had been interrupted in the issuing of my statement, for Reason had suddenly returned to her throne and I perceived that I had been on the point of making an ass of myself.

  I mean to say, the one lesson one learns from these stories about coves getting switched into other coves' bodies is that on such occasions statements are no good. No use whatever. Just a waste of breath. The chaps in the stories always try to make them, and nobody ever believes a word. I resolved that from now on I would be cold and taciturn and refrain from all attempts to put myself right with the public. However irksome it might be to remain silent on a topic concerning which I had so much to say, a complete reserve was, I saw, the wiser policy.

  Contenting myself, accordingly, with a word of warning to the effect that if she shook me I should be sick, I accompanied Miss Brinkmeyer to the door. My demeanour as I did so was not jaunty, for I was, I must confess, apprehensive and ill at ease. I was asking myself how I was going to render supportable a life spent in the society of this decidedly frightful old geezer. In comparing her to Simon Legree, the Cooley child had shown himself an astute judge of character. She seemed also to possess many of the less agreeable qualities of the late Captain Bligh of the Bounty.

  In the street a sumptuous automobile awaited us, and presently we were rolling along, she sniffing at intervals as if my company gave her the pip and self leaning back against the cushions with a meditative frown. And after a while the car turned in at a drive gate and pulled up in front of a large white house.

  Chapter 8

  CHEZ BRINKMEYER - at which I gathered that we had now arrived - was evidently one of the stately homes of Hollywood. The eye detected spacious lawns, tennis courts, swimming-pools, pergolas, bougainvillea, three gardeners, an iron deer, a ping-pong porch, and other indications of wealth. If further proof was required that its proprietor had got the stuff in sackfuls, it was supplied by the fact that the butler, who had opened the door in response to the chauffeur's tooting, was an English butler. You don't run to an English butler in Hollywood unless you are a pretty prominent nib. The small fry have to rub along with Japanese and Filipinos.

  The sight of this one did much to put new heart into me. He was like a breath from home, a large, moonfaced, gooseberry-eyed man of the fine old family butler brand and, drinking him in, I lost some of that feeling I had had of having fallen among savages. With him around, I felt, the agony of associating with Miss Brinkmeyer would be greatly diminished.

  However, I wasn't allowed much opportunity of feasting the eyes upon him at the moment, because my companion - or keeper or jailer or whatever she was - got hold of my hand again and whisked me in at a brisk pace, eventually fetching up in a long, low-ceilinged sort of drawing-room with French windows opening on a patio.

  Its only occupant was a stout, billowy bloke with hornrimmed spectacles. From the fact that he was wallowing on a sofa as if the place belonged to him, I took it that it did belong to him - that he was, in a word, my host, the Mr Brinkmeyer under whose personal eye I was now to reside.

  Once mor
e, the kid Cooley had shown himself a shrewd judge. He had told me this man was a pretty good sort of old stiff, and it was apparent from a glance that this was the case. I liked Mr Brinkmeyer's looks. Of course, after having been with his sister all this time, I was in no frame of mind to be fussy about other people's looks - practically anything would have seemed good to me just then, I mean - but he appeared to me kindly.

  Of this kindliness he gave evidence with his opening words.

  'Ah, here you are,' he said. 'Everything go off all right? Is he feeling quite well?'

  Miss Brinkmeyer clicked her tongue.

  'Now, for goodness' sake, don't you start. Of course he's feeling quite well. The way everybody talks, you'd think the child had been having a leg amputated or something. I've no patience with all this fuss.'

  'Did he make a fuss?'

  'I'm talking about the newspaper men. And all those fool women. Pah! Like a lot of hens.' 'They fussed over him?' 'Yes. In the most disgusting way.'

  'Great publicity,' suggested Mr Brinkmeyer, in a deferential sort of way. Miss Brinkmeyer sniffed. 'Very bad for him.' 'But good for the box-office.'

  'I don't care. It makes me sick. Simply encouraging him. As if his head wasn't swollen enough already.'

  Mr Brinkmeyer was examining me through his horn-rimmed glasses like a benevolent owl.

  'It's not so swollen as it was.'

  'Eh?'

  'I say the swelling seems to have gone.' 'Yes, thank goodness.'

  Hoping to establish an atmosphere of bonhomie and goodwill, I said it was kind of her to be pleased. She told me to be quiet.

  'No, he doesn't look like he'd gotten the mumps any more,' she continued. 'He'll be back to normalcy, I guess, in time for unveiling that statue.'

  'Yes,' said Mr Brinkmeyer. It seemed to me that he spoke rather gloomily. 'Yes, I guess he will.'

  Pursuing my policy of trying to put everybody at their ease, I asked what statue. She told me to be quiet.

  'And we won't have to cancel those Michigan Mothers.'

  'What Michigan Mothers?'

  For the third time she told me to be quiet. Not an easy woman to keep up a conversation with.

  'If he'd been looking like a hubbard squash, we'd have had to put them off, and goodness knows what they'd have said, after coming all this way. But the swelling's practically gone already, and he's sure to be all right tomorrow.' She mused a bit, and added: 'As right as he ever is, the little toad.'

  I could not pass this.

  'I consider that highly offensive,' I said.

  For the fourth time she told me to be quiet. Then, attaching herself to my wrist in the old familiar way, she lugged me out and up the stairs to a bedroom on the first floor. Pushing me in, she told me to lie down and go to sleep.

  I could scarcely believe that I had heard her aright. 'Sleep?'

  'You've got to have your afternoon sleep, haven't you?' 'But, dash it —'

  'Oh, be quiet,' she said - making five in all. She then buzzed off, locking the door behind her.

  I must say I laughed a shade mirthlessly. Sleep, That struck me as pretty good. Sleep, I mean to say, what? As if I had time for any rot like that. The immediate task confronting me, as I saw it, was to examine the situation and, if possible, ascertain what the hell was to be done about it. Because something would have to be done, and that with the minimum of delay. Avenues would have to be explored and stones not left unturned. What I had got to do was not sleep, but ponder. I sat down on the bed and started in.

  I don't know how long I pondered, but it was a fairish time, and I might have stuck at it indefinitely without getting a bite had I not in the course of my pondering risen from the bed and walked over to the window. The moment I got to the window, things suddenly clarified. I saw now what I ought to have seen at once, that my first move, before taking any other steps, must be to establish contact with the kid Cooley and call a conference.

  I didn't suppose that he would be able to suggest any practical solution of our little difficulty - not being an Egyptian sorcerer, I mean - but at least he could give me a few pointers which might be of use to me in this new life of mine. And the best chance I had of getting together with him, it seemed to me, was to go to my bungalow at the Garden of the Hesperides, and see if he had turned up there. I had told him that that was where I lived, and if he remembered my words he would presumably repair thither sooner or later.

  We Havershots are men of action, even when we have been turned into kids with golden curls smelling, I now perceived, of a rather offensive brand of brilliantine. There came over me a yearning to be out and about. I felt cramped and confined in this bedroom. Stifled is the word. A couple of feet below the window there was the roof of a sort of outhouse, and from this roof to the ground was a simple drop. Thirty seconds later I was down in the garden, and thirty seconds after that out of it and speeding for the old home.

  I don't know if I had actually expected to find the kid at the bungalow. At any rate, he wasn't there. The place was empty. Wherever Joey Cooley was, he was not thinking things over quietly in an arm-chair at the Garden of the Hesperides.

  This being so, there seemed nothing to do but to wait. So I sat down in the arm-chair myself and began to brood again.

  Now, with all the wealth of material for brooding with which these recent disturbing happenings had provided me, it should, one would have thought, have been easy enough for me to keep my mind from straying from the main issue. But no. It strayed like the dickens. Before I had been sitting two minutes, I had switched right off from the items on the agenda paper and was meditating with a sort of hideous tenseness on ice-cream, doughnuts, pumpkin pie, custard pie, layer cake, chocolate cake, fudge, peanut clusters, and all-day suckers. I couldn't seem to get away from them. With a terrific effort I would wrench my mind away from ice-cream, and - bingo - in a flash I would be thinking of doughnuts. And no sooner had I thrust the vision of doughnuts from me than along would come the pumpkin pie and the all-day suckers.

  It was a totally new experience for me. I hadn't thought - in an emotional way - of this type of foodstuff for years and years. But now fudge and chocolate cake seemed to be dancing sarabands before my eyes, and I felt that I would have given anything for a good whack at them. Not since the distant days of my first private school had I been conscious of such a devastating hunger. Peckish is not the word. I felt like a homeless tapeworm.

  It came over me in a wave what a perfect ass I had been in my previous experience as Reginald, Lord Havershot, not to have laid in a stock of these things against some possible emergency like this. I ought to have told myself, I reflected, that you never know when you may not be going to be turned into a kid of twelve, and that, such an occurrence being always on the cards, it is simply loony not to have a little something handy in the ice-box.

  I was, in fact, beginning to feel pretty censorious about my former self, for I can't stand those woollen-headed, thriftless fellows who never think of the morrow, when I

  was brought up short by the sound of footsteps approaching the front door. 'Reggie,' someone called.

  I recognized the voice. It was that of my Cousin Egremont. I remembered that he had said he was coming to pay me a visit in order to sample my cellar, and I might have known he would not let the grass grow under his feet.

  'Reggie, old bird. Are you in, Reggie?'

  Well, you know how it is. There are moments when you don't want to meet people. You just don't feel in the mood. I was, as I had told Ann Bannister, extremely fond of old Eggy, and in the past - as, for example, on the occasion of that New Year's Eve party of which he had spoken - I had often been glad of his company; but now I found myself shrinking from it. I felt that he would be surprised at finding a golden-haired child where he had expected to find a carroty-haired cousin, and there would be all sorts of tedious questionings and probings, and I simply wasn't equal to it.

  So, to avoid the distasteful encounter, I just slid noiselessly from the chair and ducke
d down behind it, hoping that when he came in and saw nobody in the room he would go away again.

  A fat chance, of course. I should have known his psychology better. Eggy isn't the sort of chap who goes away from rooms in which there is Scotch whisky just because they are empty. Let the fixings be there, and he does not worry about missing hosts. He came right in and made for the sideboard like a homing pigeon. I couldn't see him, but I heard a musical plashing, then a gollup, then another musical plashing, then another gollup, then a third musical plashing, and I could read his actions like a book. He had had a couple quick, and was now preparing to have another at his leisure.

  Over this one he seemed disposed to linger a bit. The first fierce thirst was slaked, and he could now dally, so to speak and, as it were, roll the stuff round his tongue. I heard him wander across the room, and the crackle of a match and a wisp of smoke rising to the ceiling showed that he had found my cigars. A moment later, there happened what I might have known would happen. He came over to the arm-chair and sank into it with a luxurious whoof. It was the only comfortable chair in the room, so naturally he had made a bee-line for it.

  So there we were - he plainly all set for a cosy afternoon, and I crouching up against the wall, a bally prisoner. If I had been the Naval Treaty in a safe-deposit box at the Admiralty, I couldn't have been more securely tucked away.

  It was one of those situations which make a chap wrinkle the brow and wonder how to act for the best, and I was engaged in doing this when there was a knocking at the front door.

  Apparently someone stood without

  Chapter 8

  'COME in,' called Eggy.

  I couldn't see, of course, who it was who entered in response to this invitation, but from the fact that he now rose I gathered that the new arrival must be a girl of sorts. You don't get old Eggy hoisting himself out of arm-chairs just to greet the male sex. The voice that spoke told me I was right. It was a crisp, authoritative voice, but definitely female.