‘Uh, huh!’ he says, too busy to blink.
‘Do some of those fancy steps of yours. We need them in our business.’
And the way that boy worked—it was astonishing!
Out of the corner of my eye I could see Izzy Baermann, and he wasn’t looking happy. He was nerving himself for one of those quick referee’s decisions—the sort you make and then duck under the ropes, and run five miles, to avoid the incensed populace. It was this kind of thing happening every now and then that prevented his job being perfect. Mabel Francis told me that one night when Izzy declared her the winner of the great sporting contest, it was such raw work that she thought there’d have been a riot. It looked pretty much as if he was afraid the same thing was going to happen now. There wasn’t a doubt which of us two couples was the one that the customers wanted to see win that Love-r-ly Silver Cup. It was a walk-over for Mrs Charlie, and Charlie and I were simply among those present.
But Izzy had his duty to do, and drew a salary for doing it, so he moistened his lips, looked round to see that his strategic railways weren’t blocked, swallowed twice, and said in a husky voice:
‘Num-bah ten, please re-tiah!’
I stopped at once.
‘Come along,’ said I to Charlie. ‘That’s our exit cue.’
And we walked off the floor amidst applause.
‘Well,’ says Charlie, taking out his handkerchief and attending to his brow, which was like the village blacksmith’s, ‘we didn’t do so bad, did we? We didn’t do so bad, I guess! We—’
And he looked up at the balcony, expecting to see the dear little wife, draped over the rail, worshipping him; when, just as his eye is moving up, it gets caught by the sight of her a whole heap lower down than he had expected—on the floor, in fact.
She wasn’t doing much in the worshipping line just at that moment. She was too busy.
It was a regular triumphal progress for the kid. She and her partner were doing one or two rounds now for exhibition purposes, like the winning couple always do at Geisenheimer’s, and the room was fairly rising at them. You’d have thought from the way they were clapping that they had been betting all their spare cash on her.
Charlie gets her well focused, then he lets his jaw drop, till he pretty near bumped it against the floor.
‘But—but—but—’ he begins.
‘I know,’ I said. ‘It begins to look as if she could dance well enough for the city after all. It begins to look as if she had sort of put one over on somebody, don’t it? It begins to look as if it were a pity you didn’t think of dancing with her yourself.’
‘I—I—I—’
‘You come along and have a nice cold drink,’ I said, ‘and you’ll soon pick up.’
He tottered after me to a table, looking as if he had been hit by a street-car. He had got his.
I was so busy looking after Charlie, flapping the towel and working on him with the oxygen, that, if you’ll believe me, it wasn’t for quite a time that I thought of glancing around to see how the thing had struck Izzy Baermann.
If you can imagine a fond father whose only son has hit him with a brick, jumped on his stomach, and then gone off with all his money, you have a pretty good notion of how poor old Izzy looked. He was staring at me across the room, and talking to himself and jerking his hands about. Whether he thought he was talking to me, or whether he was rehearsing the scene where he broke it to the boss that a mere stranger had got away with his Love-r-ly Silver Cup, I don’t know. Whichever it was, he was being mighty eloquent.
I gave him a nod, as much as to say that it would all come right in the future, and then I turned to Charlie again. He was beginning to pick up.
‘She won the cup!’ he said in a dazed voice, looking at me as if I could do something about it.
‘You bet she did!’
‘But—well, what do you know about that?’
I saw that the moment had come to put it straight to him. ‘I’ll tell you what I know about it,’ I said. ‘If you take my advice, you’ll hustle that kid straight back to Ashley—or wherever it is that you said you poison the natives by making up the wrong prescriptions—before she gets New York into her system. When I was talking to her upstairs, she was telling me about a fellow in her village who got it in the neck just the same as you’re apt to do.’
He started. ‘She was telling you about Jack Tyson?’
‘That was his name—Jack Tyson. He lost his wife through letting her have too much New York. Don’t you think it’s funny she should have mentioned him if she hadn’t had some idea that she might act just the same as his wife did?’
He turned quite green.
‘You don’t think she would do that?’
‘Well, if you’d heard her—She couldn’t talk of anything except this Tyson, and what his wife did to him. She talked of it sort of sad, kind of regretful, as if she was sorry, but felt that it had to be. I could see she had been thinking about it a whole lot.’
Charlie stiffened in his seat, and then began to melt with pure fright. He took up his empty glass with a shaking hand and drank a long drink out of it. It didn’t take much observation to see that he had had the jolt he wanted, and was going to be a whole heap less jaunty and metropolitan from now on. In fact, the way he looked, I should say he had finished with metropolitan jauntiness for the rest of his life.
‘I’ll take her home tomorrow,’ he said. ‘But—will she come?’
‘That’s up to you. If you can persuade her—Here she is now. I should start at once.’
