“This,” murmured the girl with closed eyes, “is divine.”
“What?” bellowed Lancelot, for the orchestra, in addition to ringing bells, had now begun to howl like wolves at dinnertime.
“Divine,” roared the girl. “You certainly are a beautiful dancer.”
“A beautiful what?”
“Dancer.”
“Who is?”
“You are.”
“Good egg!” shrieked Lancelot, rather wishing, though he was fond of music, that the orchestra would stop beating the floor with hammers.
“What did you say?”
“I said, ‘Good egg.’ ”
“Why?”
“Because the idea crossed my mind that, if you felt like that, you might care to marry me.”
There was a sudden lull in the storm. It was as if the audacity of his words had stricken the orchestra into a sort of paralysis. Dark-complexioned men who had been exploding bombs and touching off automobile hooters became abruptly immobile and sat rolling their eyeballs. One or two people left the floor, and plaster stopped falling from the ceiling.
“Marry you?” said the girl.
“I love you as no man has ever loved woman before.”
“Well, that’s always something. What would the name be?”
“Mulliner. Lancelot Mulliner.”
“It might be worse.” She looked at him with pensive eyes. “Well, why not?” she said. “It would be a crime to let a dancer like you go out of the family. On the other hand, my father will kick like a mule. Father is an Earl.”
“What Earl?”
“The Earl of Biddlecombe.”
“Well, earls aren’t everything,” said Lancelot with a touch of pique. “The Mulliners are an old and honourable family. A Sieur de Moulinières came over with the Conqueror.”
“Ah, but did a Sieur de Moulinières ever do down the common people for a few hundred thousand and salt it away in gilt-edged securities? That’s what’s going to count with the aged parent. What with taxes and supertaxes and death duties and falling land-values, there has of recent years been very, very little of the right stuff in the Biddlecombe sock. Shake the family money-box and you will hear but the faintest rattle. And I ought to tell you that at the Junior Lipstick Club seven to two is being freely offered on my marrying Slingsby Purvis, of Purvis’s Liquid Dinner Glue. Nothing is definitely decided yet, but you can take it as coming straight from the stable that, unless something happens to upset current form, she whom you now see before you is the future Ma Purvis.”
Lancelot stamped his foot defiantly, eliciting a howl of agony from a passing reveller.
“This shall not be,” he muttered.
“If you care to bet against it,” said the girl, producing a small notebook, “I can accommodate you at the current odds.”
“Purvis, forsooth!”
“I’m not saying it’s a pretty name. All I’m trying to point out is that at the present moment he heads the ‘All the above have arrived’ list. He is Our Newmarket Correspondent’s Five-Pound Special and Captain Coe’s final selection. What makes you think you can nose him out? Are you rich?”
“At present, only in love. But tomorrow I go to my uncle, who is immensely wealthy—”
“And touch him?”
“Not quite that. Nobody has touched Uncle Jeremiah since the early winter of 1885. But I shall get him to give me a job, and then we shall see.”
“Do,” said the girl, warmly. “And if you can stick the gaff into Purvis and work the Young Lochinvar business, I shall be the first to touch off red fire. On the other hand, it is only fair to inform you that at the Junior Lipstick all the girls look on the race as a walkover. None of the big punters will touch it.”
Lancelot returned to his rooms that night undiscouraged. He intended to sink his former prejudices and write a poem in praise of Briggs’s Breakfast Pickles which would mark a new era in commercial verse. This he would submit to his uncle; and, having stunned him with it, would agree to join the firm as chief poetry-writer. He tentatively pencilled down five thousand pounds a year as the salary which he would demand. With a long-term contract for five thousand a year in his pocket, he could approach Lord Biddlecombe and jerk a father’s blessing out of him in no time. It would be humiliating, of course, to lower his genius by writing poetry about pickles; but a lover must make sacrifices. He bought a quire of the best foolscap, brewed a quart of the strongest coffee, locked his door, disconnected his telephone, and sat down at his desk.
Genial old Jeremiah Briggs received him, when he called next day at his palatial house, the Villa Chutney, at Putney, with a bluff good-humour which showed that he still had a warm spot in his heart for the young rascal.
“Sit down, boy, and have a pickled onion,” said he, cheerily, slapping Lancelot on the shoulder. “You’ve come to tell me you’ve reconsidered your idiotic decision about not joining the business, eh? No doubt we thought it a little beneath our dignity to start at the bottom and work our way up? But, consider, my dear lad. We must learn to walk before we can run, and you could hardly expect me to make you chief cucumber buyer, or head of the vinegar-bottling department, before you have acquired hard-won experience.”
“If you will allow me to explain, uncle—”
“Eh?” Mr. Briggs’s geniality faded somewhat. “Am I to understand that you don’t want to come into the business?”
“Yes and no,” said Lancelot. “I still consider that slicing up cucumbers and dipping them in vinegar is a poor lifework for a man with the Promethean fire within him; but I propose to place at the disposal of the Briggs Breakfast Pickle my poetic gifts.”
“Well, that’s better than nothing. I’ve just been correcting the proofs of the last thing our man turned in. It’s really excellent. Listen:
“Soon, soon all human joys must end:
Grim Death
