Pelham Wodehouse - Spring Fever

"Stanwood!" she said severely. "What do you mean by yelling like that?"

"I was whispering," said Stanwood, aggrieved.

"Well, whisper a bit more piano. Come and sit on the sofa and murmur in my ear."

Stanwood tripped over a rug and upset a small table and came to rest at her side.

"Everything okay?" he murmured hoarsely.

"Yes, wonderful," said Terry, with shining eyes.

Stanwood was well pleased. The success or non-success of the expedition could not affect him personally, but it had had his sympathy and support.

"That's good. Then Augustus brought home the bacon all right?"

"What?"

"He got the stamp?"

"Oh, the stamp?" It came to Stanwood as a passing thought that his companion seemed a little distrait. "No, he didn't. There was a hitch."

"A hitch?"

"Yes: You see that broken window? Mr. Robb threw his tools through it, and they are now at the bottom of the moat."

Stanwood inspected the window. He had been thinking he felt a draft, but had put it down to his imagination.

"What made him do that?" he asked, interested.

"Fretfulness. Mike spoke crossly to him, and it hurt his feelings."

"Gee! He must have been sozzled."

"He was."

"I wish I'd seen him."

"It was a very impressive spectacle."

Stanwood found a variety of emotions competing for precedence within him—pity for Lord Shortlands, who had not got his stamp; regret that he himself should have come too late to see Augustus Robb with so spectacular a bun on; but principally bewilderment. He could not square this record of failure with the speaker's ecstatic mood and her statement that conditions were wonderful.

"But you said everything was okay."

"So it is. Have you ever felt that you were floating on a pink cloud over an ocean of bliss?"

"Sure," said Stanwood. This illusion had come to him twice in his life: once when Eileen Stoker, knocking the ash off her cigarette, had told him that she would be his, and once, a few years earlier, on the occasion when his inspired place kick had enabled his university to beat Notre Dame 7-6 in the last half minute.

"Well, that's how I'm feeling. I'm going to marry Mike, Stanwood."

"You are? But I thought—"

"So did I. But I changed my mind."

"Good for you."

"You're pleased?"

"You betcher."

There was silence. Terry, floating on that pink cloud, was thinking her own thoughts with a light in her eyes and a smile on her parted lips, and Stanwood was experiencing once again the surge of relief which had swept over him on the morning when Augustus Robb had first revealed Mike Cardinal's love for a girl who was not Eileen Stoker. As then, he felt that a great weight had been removed from his mind.

"I'm tickled to death," he said, resuming the conversation after time out for silent rejoicing. "And I'll tell you why. This removes old Mike from circulation. Great relief, that is."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, you know how it is when a guy that's as good-looking as he is is knocking around. You get uneasy."

"Why?"

"Well, you never know what may not happen, I had the idea that he was making a play for Eileen."

The pink cloud failed to support Terry. It shredded away beneath her, and she plunged into the ocean. And it was not, as she had supposed, an ocean of bliss, but a cold, stinging ocean, full of horrible creatures which were driving poisoned darts into her.

"Don't be an idiot," she said, and her voice sounded strange and unfamiliar in her ears.

Stanwood proceeded. He was feeling fine.

"It was at that party of mine that I first got thinking that way. I gave a party for Eileen when she hit London, and Mike was there with his hair in a braid, and he seemed to me to be giving her quite a rush. I don't know if you've ever noticed that way he's got of looking at girls? I'd call it a sort of melting look ...Yes?"

"Nothing."

"I thought you spoke."

"No."

"Well, he seemed to me to be giving her that look a good deal during the doings, and I didn't like it much. Of coarse he had known her in Hollywood—"

"Were they great friends?"

"Oh, sure. Well, that was that, and when she sprang that thing on me—"

"What thing?" said Terry dully.

"Didn't I tell you about that? Why, no, of course, I didn't get the chance. She suddenly told me she wasn't going to marry me unless I could get me some money. Said she'd tried it before, marrying guys with no money, and it hadn't worked out so good. So it was all off, she said, if I couldn't deliver. Well, that sounded straight enough, but tonight, as I was dropping off to sleep, it suddenly struck me that maybe it was just a bit of boloney."

"Boloney?"

"The old army game," explained Stanwood. "I thought she might be simply playing me up. You see, I remembered her and Mike at that party, and I knew what Mike's like with girls, and I sort of wondered if they mightn't have fallen for each other and this was just her way of easing me out. That's why it's so great to hear that you and he have fixed it up. Because if he's that way with you, he can't be that way with her, can he?"

Terry found herself unable to subscribe to this simple creed. It appeared to satisfy Stanwood, who had an honest and guileless mind, but she shivered. There had risen before her eyes the wraith of Geoffrey Harvest, that inconstant juvenile. He, though ostensibly "that way" with her, had never experienced the slightest difficulty in being "that way" with others. Something seemed to stab at her heart, and with a little cry she buried her face in her hands.

"Here! Hey!" said Stanwood. "What goes on?"

The minds of men like Stanwood Cobbold run on conventional lines. Certain actions automatically produce in them certain responses. When, for instance, they find themselves in the society of an old crony of the opposite sex and that crony suddenly gives a gurgle like a dying duck and buries her face in her hands, the Stanwood Cobbolds know what to do. They say "Here! Hey! What goes on?," and place their arm in a brotherly fashion about her waist.

It was as Stanwood was adjusting this brotherly arm that a voice spoke in his rear.

"Mr. ROSSITER!"

Lady Adela Topping was standing in the doorway, surveying the scene with what was only too plainly a disapproving eye.

When a woman of strict views comes into her library at half-past two in the morning to inspect the damage created there by a supposedly inebriated father and finds her youngest sister, towards whom she has always felt like a mother, seated on the sofa in pajamas and a kimono with a young man in pajamas and a dressing gown; and when this young man has his arm, if not actually around her waist, as nearly so as makes no matter, it is understandable that she should speak like Mrs. Grundy at her most censorious. It was thus that Lady Adela had spoken, and Stanwood, who until her voice rang out had been unaware that she was a pleasant visitor, rose from his seat as if a charge of trinitrotoluol had been touched off under him.

"Gosh!" he exclaimed.

It was a favorite monosyllable of his, but never had he spoken it with such a wealth of emphasis. His emotions were almost identical with those which he had experienced one November afternoon when an opposing linesman, noticing that the referee was looking the other way, had driven a quick fist into his solar plexus. For an instant he was incapable of further speech, or even of connected thought. Then, his brain clearing, he saw what he had to do.

In the code of the Stanwood Cobbolds of this world there is a commandment which stands out above all others, written in large letters, and those letters of gold. It is the one that enacts that if by his ill-considered actions the man of honour has compromised a lady he must at once proceed, no matter what the cost, to de-compromise her.