Pelham Wodehouse - Spring Fever

"Tell me about these girls."

"There's nothing to tell. I used to go dancing with them."

"Ah!"

"You needn't say 'Ah!' If you want to dance, you've got to provide yourself with a girl, haven't you? How long do you think it would take the management at the Trocadero to bounce a fellow who started pirouetting all over the floor by himself? They're extraordinarily strict about that sort of thing."

"What's the Trocadero?"

"A Hollywood haunt of pleasure."

"Where you took your harem?"

"Don't call them my harem! They were mere acquaintances; some merer than others, of course, but all of them very mere. I wish you would expunge Stanwood's whole story from your mind."

"Well, I can't. I think perhaps I had better tell you something."

"More delirium?"

"No, not this time. It's something that may make you understand why I'm like this. You asked me yesterday what I had got against men who were too good-looking, and I said I mistrusted them. I will now tell you why. I was once engaged to one."

"Good Lord! When?"

"Not so long ago. When I was in that musical comedy. He was the juvenile. Geoffrey Harvest."

Mike uttered a revolted cry.

"My God! That heel? That worm? That oleaginous louse? Whenever I went to the show, I used to long to leap across the footlights and crown him."

"You can't deny that he was handsome."

"In a certain ghastly, greasy, nausea-promoting way, perhaps."

"Well, that's the point I'm trying to make. I thought him wonderful."

"You ought to be ashamed of yourself."

"I am."

"A juvenile! You fell for a juvenile! And not one of those song-and-hoofing juveniles, whom you can respect, but the kind that looks noble and sings tenor. I am shocked and horrified, young Terry. Whatever made you go and do a fatheaded thing like that?"

"I told you. His beauty ensnared me. But the scales fell from my eyes. He turned out to be a flippertygibbet."

"A what was that once again?"

"Shorty's word, not mine."

"Where does Shorty pick up these expressions?"

"It means a man who can't resist a pretty face. After I had caught him not resisting a few, I broke off the engagement. And I made up my mind that I would never, never, never let myself be swept off my feet by good looks again. So now you understand."

Mike was struggling with complex emotions.

"But what earthly right have you coolly to assume that I'm like that?"

"Just a woman's intuition."

"You're all wrong."

"Perhaps. But there it is. I can't risk it. I couldn't go through it all again. I simply couldn't. You've no idea how a girl feels when she falls in love with a man who lets her down. It's horrible. You surfer torments, and all the while you're calling yourself a fool for minding. It's like being skinned alive in front of an amused audience."

"I wouldn't let you down."

"I wonder."

"Terry! Come on. Take a chance."

"You speak as if it were a sort of game. I'm afraid I'm rather Victorian and earnest about marriage. I don't look on it as just a lark."

"Nor do I."

"You seem to."

"Why do you say that?"

"Well, don't you think yourself that your attitude all through has been a little on the flippant side?"

Mike beat his breast, like the Wedding Guest.

"There you are! That's it! I felt all along that that was the trouble. You think I'm not sincere, because I clown. I knew it. All the time I was saying to myself 'Lay off it, you poor sap! Change the record,' but I couldn't. I had to clown. It was a kind of protective armour against shyness."

"You aren't telling me you're shy?"

"Of course I'm shy. Every man's shy when he's really in love. For God's sake don't think I'm not serious. I love you. I've always loved you. I loved you the first time I saw you. Terry, darling, do please believe me. This is life and death."

Terry's heart gave a leap. Her citadel of defence was crumbling.

"If you had talked like that before—"

"Well, it's not too late, is it? Terry, say it's not too late. Because it will be, if you turn me down now. This is my last chance."

"What do you mean?"

"I've got to go."

"Go?"

"Back to Hollywood."

A cold hand seemed to clutch at Terry's heart. She stared at him dumbly. He had been striding about the room, but now he was at her side, bending over her.

"Oh, Mike," she whispered.

"Next week at the latest. I found a cable waiting for me in London this afternoon. They want me at the office. The head man's ill, and I've got to go back at once. We shall be six thousand miles apart, and not a chance of ever getting together again."

"Oh, Mike," said Terry.

Into Mike's mind there flashed a recent remark of Augustus Robb's. Turning the conversation to the affairs of him, Mike, and what he described as "this little party," Augustus Robb had asked the pertinent question "Ever tried kissing her?", adding the words "I've known that to answer."

True, Augustus Robb had been considerably more than one over the eight when he had thrown out this obiter dictum, but that did not in any way detract from the value of the pronouncement. Many a man's brain gives of its best and most constructive only when it has been pepped up with creme de menthe, and something seemed to tell Mike that in so speaking the fellow had been right.

"Terry, darling!"

He took Terry in his arms and kissed her, and it was even as Augustus Robb had said.

It answered.

Stanwood Cobbold sat up in bed and switched on the light. He looked at his watch. The hour was some minutes after two.

Stanwood was a young man whom prolonged association with football coaches had trained to obey orders, and when Mike had told him to go to bed and stay there he had done so without demur. It had pained him to be excluded from the night's doings, but he was fair-minded and could quite appreciate the justice of his friend's statement that, if permitted to be present, he would infallibly gum the game. Looking back on his past, he realized that he always had gummed such games as he had taken part in, and there seemed no reason to suppose that he would not gum this one.

But now that he had woken at this particular moment, he could see no possible harm in getting up and stepping along to the library in order to ascertain if all had gone according to plan. By now, if they had run to schedule, the operations must be concluded, and he was consumed with curiosity as to how it had all come out. He also wanted to get a flash of Augustus Robb. A lit-up Augustus Robb should, he considered, provide a spectacle which nobody ought to miss.

He knew where the library was. It was thither that the little guy with the nose glasses had taken him after dinner to talk about stamps. Slipping on a dressing gown, he made his way down a flight of stairs and along a passage. A chink of light beneath the door told him that the room was still occupied, and he entered expecting to find a full gathering—a little apprehensive, too. lest that full gathering might turn on him and give him hell for intruding. His mental attitude, as he went in, resembled that of a large, wet dog which steals into a drawing room, unable to resist the gregarious urge to join the party but none too sure of its welcome.

He was relieved to find only Terry present. She was sitting in a deep chair, apparently wrapped in thought.

"Hiya," he said in what, if questioned, he would have described as a cautious whisper.

Terry came out of her meditations with a leap and a squeak. She had stayed on after Mike had left to take the basin and plate back to the kitchen.

She had promised him that she would go to bed immediately, but she had not done so, for she was loathe to break the magic spell which was upon her. Stanwood's voice, which was like the sudden blaring of a radio when you turn the knob too far, gave her a painful shock.