“I’d give a shilling,” said Biffy, wistfully, “to know the name of that hotel.”
“You can owe it me. Hotel Avenida, Rue du Colisée.”
“Bertie! This is uncanny. How the deuce did you know?”
“That was the address you left with Jeeves this morning.”
“So it was. I had forgotten.”
“Well, come along and have a drink, and then I’ll put you in a cab and send you home. I’m engaged for lunch, but I’ve plenty of time.”
We drifted to one of the eleven cafés which jostled each other along the street and I ordered restoratives.
“What on earth are you doing in Paris?” I asked.
“Bertie, old man,” said Biffy, solemnly, “I came here to try and forget.”
“Well, you’ve certainly succeeded.”
“You don’t understand. The fact is, Bertie, old lad, my heart is broken. I’ll tell you the whole story.”
“No, I say!” I protested. But he was off.
“Last year,” said Biffy, “I buzzed over to Canada to do a bit of salmon fishing.”
I ordered another. If this was going to be a fish-story, I needed stimulants.
“On the liner going to New York I met a girl.” Biffy made a sort of curious gulping noise not unlike a bulldog trying to swallow half a cutlet in a hurry so as to be ready for the other half. “Bertie, old man, I can’t describe her. I simply can’t describe her.”
This was all to the good.
“She was wonderful! We used to walk on the boat-deck after dinner. She was on the stage. At least, sort of.”
“How do you mean, sort of?”
“Well, she had worked with a concert party and posed for artists and been a mannequin in a big dressmaker’s and all that sort of thing, don’t you know,” said Biffy, vaguely. “Anyway, she had saved up a few pounds and was on her way to see if she could get a job in New York. She told me all about herself. Her father ran a milk-walk in Clapham. Or it may have been Cricklewood. At least, it was either a milk-walk or a boot-shop.”
“Easily confused.”
“What I’m trying to make you understand,” said Biffy, “is that she came of good, sturdy, respectable middle-class stock. Nothing flashy about her. The sort of wife any man might have been proud of.”
“Well, whose wife was she?”
“Nobody’s. That’s the whole point of the story. I wanted her to be mine, and I lost her.”
“Had a quarrel, you mean?”
“No, I don’t mean we had a quarrel. I mean I literally lost her. The last I ever saw of her was in the Customs sheds at New York. We were behind a pile of trunks, and I had just asked her to be my wife, and she had just said she would and everything was perfectly splendid, when a most offensive blighter in a peaked cap came up to talk about some cigarettes which he had found at the bottom of my trunk and which I had forgotten to declare. It was getting pretty late by then, for we hadn’t docked till about ten-thirty, so I told Mabel to go on to her hotel and I would come round next day and take her to lunch. And since then I haven’t set eyes on her.”
“You mean she wasn’t at the hotel?”
“Probably she was. But—”
“You don’t mean you never turned up?”
“Bertie, old man,” said Biffy, in an overwrought kind of way, “for Heaven’s sake don’t keep trying to tell me what I mean and what I don’t mean! Let me tell this my own way, or I shall get all mixed up and have to go back to the beginning.”
“Tell it your own way,” I said, hastily.
“Well, then, to put it in a word, Bertie, I forgot the name of the hotel. By the time I’d done half an hour’s heavy explaining about those cigarettes my mind was a blank. I had an idea I had written the name down somewhere, but I couldn’t have done, for it wasn’t on any of the papers in my pocket. No, it was no good. She was gone.”
“Why didn’t you make inquiries?”
“Well, the fact is, Bertie, I had forgotten her name.”
“Oh, no, dash it!” I said. This seemed a bit too thick even for Biffy. “How could you forget her name? Besides, you told it me a moment ago. Muriel or something.”
“Mabel,” corrected Biffy, coldly. “It was her surname I’d forgotten. So I gave it up and went to Canada.”
“But half a second,” I said. “You must have told her your name. I mean, if you couldn’t trace her, she could trace you.”
“Exactly. That’s what makes it all seem so infernally hopeless. She knows my name and where I live and everything, but I haven’t heard a word from her. I suppose, when I didn’t turn up at the hotel, she took it that that was my way of hinting delicately that I had changed my mind and wanted to call the thing off.”
“I suppose so,” I said. There didn’t seem anything else to suppose. “Well, the only thing to do is to whizz around and try to heal the wound, what? How about dinner tonight, winding up at the Abbaye, or one of those places?”
Biffy shook his head.
“It wouldn’t be any good. I’ve tried it. Besides, I’m leaving on the four o’clock train. I have a dinner engagement tomorrow with a man who’s nibbling at that house of mine in Herefordshire.”
“Oh, are you trying to sell that place? I thought you liked it.”
“I did. But the idea of going on living in that great, lonely barn of a house after what has happened appals me, Bertie. So when Sir Roderick Glossop came along—”
“Sir Roderick Glossop! You don’t mean the loony-doctor?”
“The great nerve specialist, yes. Why, do you know him?”
It was a warm day, but I shivered.
“I was engaged to his daughter for a week or two,” I said, in a hushed voice. The memory of that narrow squeak always made me feel faint.
“Has he a daughter?” said
