“At eight, then.”
“Right. Thanks ever so much.”
She popped off, and I went upstairs to hand in my copy, as we boys of the Press call it. I found Aunt Dahlia immersed to the gills in papers of all descriptions.
I am not much of a lad for my relatives as a general thing, but I’ve always been very pally with Aunt Dahlia. She married my Uncle Thomas—between ourselves a bit of a squirt—the year Bluebottle won the Cambridgeshire; and they hadn’t got halfway down the aisle before I was saying to myself, “That woman is much too good for the old bird.” Aunt Dahlia is a large, genial soul, the sort you see in dozens on the hunting-field. As a matter of fact, until she married Uncle Thomas, she put in most of her time on horseback; but he won’t live in the country, so nowadays she expends her energy on this paper of hers.
She came to the surface as I entered, and flung a cheery book at my head.
“Hullo, Bertle! I say, have you really finished that article?”
“To the last comma.”
“Good boy! My gosh, I’ll bet it’s rotten.”
“On the contrary, it is extremely hot stuff, and most of it approved by Jeeves, what’s more. The bit about soft silk shirts got in amongst him a trifle; but you can take it from me, Aunt Dahlia, that they are the latest yodel and will be much seen at first nights and other occasions where Society assembles.”
“Your man Jeeves,” said Aunt Dahlia, flinging the article into a basket and skewering a few loose pieces of paper on a sort of meat-hook, “is a washout, and you can tell him I said so.”
“Oh, come,” I said. “He may not be sound on shirtings—”
“I’m not referring to that. As long as a week ago I asked him to get me a cook, and he hasn’t found one yet.”
“Great Scott! Is Jeeves a domestic employment agency? Mrs. Little wants him to find her a housemaid. I met her outside. She tells me she’s doing something for you.”
“Yes, thank goodness. I’m relying on it to bump the circulation up a bit. I can’t read her stuff myself, but women love it. Her name on the cover will mean a lot. And we need it.”
“Paper not doing well?”
“It’s doing all right really, but it’s got to be a slow job building up a circulation.”
“I suppose so.”
“I can get Tom to see that in his lucid moments,” said Aunt Dahlia, skewering a few more papers. “But just at present the poor fathead has got one of his pessimistic spells. It’s entirely due to that mechanic who calls herself a cook. A few more of her alleged dinners, and Tom will refuse to go on paying the printers’ bills.”
“You don’t mean that!”
“I do mean it. There was what she called a ris de veau à la financière last night which made him talk for three-quarters of an hour about good money going to waste and nothing to show for it.”
I quite understood, and I was dashed sorry for her. My Uncle Thomas is a cove who made a colossal pile of money out in the East, but in doing so put his digestion on the blink. This has made him a tricky proposition to handle. Many a time I’ve lunched with him and found him perfectly chirpy up to the fish, only to have him turn blue on me well before the cheese.
Who was that lad they used to try to make me read at Oxford? Ship—Shop—Schopenhauer. That’s the name. A grouch of the most pronounced description. Well, Uncle Thomas, when his gastric juices have been giving him the elbow, can make Schopenhauer look like Pollyanna. And the worst of it is, from Aunt Dahlia’s point of view, that on these occasions he always seems to think he’s on the brink of ruin and wants to start to economize.
“Pretty tough,” I said. “Well, anyway, he’ll get one good dinner tomorrow night at the Littles’.”
“Can you guarantee that, Bertie?” asked Aunt Dahlia, earnestly. “I simply daren’t risk unleashing him on anything at all wonky.”
“They’ve got a marvellous cook. I haven’t been round there for some time, but unless he’s lost his form of two months ago Uncle Thomas is going to have the treat of a lifetime.”
“It’ll only make it all the worse for him, coming back to our steak-incinerator,” said Aunt Dahlia, a bit on the Schopenhauer side herself.
The little nest where Bingo and his bride had settled themselves was up in St. John’s Wood; one of those rather jolly houses with a bit of garden. When I got there on the following night, I found that I was the last to weigh in. Aunt Dahlia was chatting with Rosie in a corner, while Uncle Thomas, standing by the mantelpiece with Bingo, sucked down a cocktail in a frowning, suspicious sort of manner, rather like a chappie having a short snort before dining with the Borgias; as if he were saying to himself that, even if this particular cocktail wasn’t poisoned, he was bound to cop it later on.
Well, I hadn’t expected anything in the nature of beaming joie de vivre from Uncle Thomas, so I didn’t pay much attention to him. What did surprise me was the extraordinary gloom of young Bingo. You may say what you like against Bingo, but nobody has ever found him a depressing host. Why, many a time in the days of his bachelorhood I’ve known him to start throwing bread before the soup course. Yet now he and Uncle Thomas were a pair. He looked haggard and careworn, like a Borgia who had suddenly remembered that he had forgotten to shove cyanide in the consommé, and the dinner-gong due any moment.
And the mystery wasn’t helped at all by the one remark he made to me before conversation became general. As he poured out my cocktail, he suddenly bent forward.
“Bertie,” he whispered, in a nasty, feverish
