Pelham Wodehouse - Spring Fever

"You've got a hell of a nerve, reading people's letters."

"Language. There's a habit you want to break yourself of. Let your Yea be Yea and your Nay be Nay, as the Good Book says. I've a tract in my room that bears on that. I'll fetch it along. Yus, pleading with her to be his, this letter was. Very well expressed, I thought, as far as he'd got, and so I told him."

A sudden spasm of pain contorted Stanwood's homely features, and the comment he had been about to make died on his lips. The telephone at his side had rung with a shattering abruptness.

"Gimme," said Augustus Robb. "I'll answer it. 'Ullo? Yus? Oh, 'ullo, Mr. Cardinal, we was just talking about you. Yus, cocky, I'll tell him. It's Mr. Cardinal. Says not to forget you're giving him lunch at Barribault's Hotel today."

"Lunch?" Stanwood quivered. "Tell him it's off. Tell him I'm dead."

"I won't do no such thing. You can't evade your social obligations. Yus, that's all right, chum. One-fifteen pip emma in the small bar. Right. Goo'bye. What I'd advise," said Augustus Robb, replacing the receiver, "is a nice Turkish bath. That'll bring the roses back to your cheeks, and Gawd knows they need 'em. You look more like a blinkin' corpse than anything 'uman. Well, I can't stand here all day chinning with you, cocky. Got my work to do. 'Ullo, the front doorbell. Wonder who that is."

"If it's anyone for me, don't let them in."

"Unless it's the undertaker, eh? Haw, haw, haw," laughed Augustus Robb, and exited trilling.

Left alone, Stanwood gave himself up to his thoughts, and very pleasant thoughts they were, too, though interrupted at intervals by the activities of some unseen person who appeared to be driving white-hot rivets into his skull. The news about Mike Cardinal and Terry Cobbold had taken a great weight off his mind and, his being a mind not constructed to bear heavy weights, the relief was enormous.

For obviously, he reasoned, if Mike Cardinal was that way about young Terry, he could scarcely be making surreptitious passes at Eileen Stoker.

Or could he?

Surely not?

No, definitely not, Stanwood decided. What he had witnessed at last night's supper party must have been merely the routine civilities of a conscientious guest making himself agreeable to his host's future bride. Odd, of course, that Mike had said nothing to him about Terry. But then, if things were not going too well, no doubt, as Augustus Robb had pointed out, he wouldn't.

Too bad, felt Stanwood, that the course of true love was not batting .400. Inexplicable, moreover. To him, Mike Cardinal seemed to have everything: looks, personality and, seeing that he was a partner in one of Hollywood's most prosperous firms of motion-picture agents, money, of course, to burn. Difficult to see why Terry shoald be giving him the run-around.

He grieved for Mike Cardinal. Mike was his best friend, and he wished him well. He had, besides, during the month or two which she had spent in London as a member of the chorus of a popular musical comedy, conceived a solid affection for Terry. They had lunched together a good deal, and he had told her about his love for Eileen Stoker and she had told him about her life at home and the motives which had led her to run away from that home and try to earn her living.

A peach of a girl, was Stanwood's view, pretty and cheerful and abounding in pep. Just, in short, the sort for Mike. Nothing would have given Stanwood more pleasure than to have seen the young couple fading out on the clinch.

Still, that was the way things went, he supposed, and he turned his thoughts to the more agreeable subject of Eileen Stoker and the big times they were going to have together, now that she had hit London. So soothing was the effect of these meditations that he fell asleep.

His slumber was not long-lived. "Hoy!" roared a voice almost before he had closed his eyes, and he saw that Augustus Robb was with him once more.

"Now what?" he said wearily.

Augustus Robb was brandishing a document.

"Cable from your pop," he announced. "I'll read it and give you the gist."

He removed his spectacles, fished in his pocket, produced a case, opened it, took out another pair of spectacles, placed these on his nose, put the first pair in the case and the case in his pocket and cleared his throat with a sound like the backfiring of a motor truck, causing Stanwood, who had sat up, to sag down again as if he had been hit over the head with a blunt instrument.

"Here's the substance, chum. He says—"

"Is it money?"

"Yus, he's cabled a thousand dollars to your account, if you must know, but you think too much of money, cocky. Money is but dross, and the sooner you get that clearly into your nut, the 'appier you'll be. But that's only the start. There's a lot more. He says ... 'Ullo, what's this?"

"What?"

"Well, well, well!"

"What is it?"

"Well, well, well, well! Quite a coincidence, I'd call that. Your pop," said Augustus Robb, becoming less cryptic, "says you're to proceed immediately to Beevor Castle—"

It was foreign to Stanwood's policy to keep sitting up, for the process accentuated the unpleasant illusion that somebody was driving white-hot rivets into his skull, but in his emotion he did so now.

"What's that?"

"You 'eard. You're to proceed immediately to Beevor Castle and stay there till he blows the All Clear. You can guess what's happened, of course. He's been apprised that this Stoker jane of yours has come to London, and he's took steps. But you see what I meant about it being a coincidence. Beevor Castle's where this little number of Mr. Cardinal's lives that we was talking about."

Stanwood was still endeavouring to grasp the appalling news.

"Leave London and go to some darned castle?"

"I shall enjoy a breath of country air. Do you good, too. It's what you need, cocky. Fresh air, milk and new-laid eggs."

Stanwood struggled for utterance.

"I'm not going anywhere near any darned castle."

"That's what you say. Cloth-headed remark to make, if you ask me. You've got to do what your pop tells you, or he'll cut off supplies, and then where'll you be? It's like in the Good Book, where the feller said 'Go' and they goeth and 'Come' and they cometh. Or, putting it another way, when Father says Turn,' we all turn. It's an am-parce."

Even to Stanwood, clouded though his mind was at the moment, the truth of this was evident. With a hollow groan he buried his face in the pillow.

"Oh, gosh!"

Fruitless now those dreams of sitting beside Eileen Stoker with her little hand in his and pouring into her little ear all the good stuff he had been storing up for so many weeks. Goodbye to all that. She would be in London, pursuing her art, and he would be at this blasted castle. As so often occurred in the pictures in which she appeared, two young hearts in springtime had been torn asunder.

"Beevor Castle," said Augustus Robb, seeming to roll the words round his tongue like some priceless wine. No more fervent worshipper of the aristocracy than he existed among London's millions. He read all the society columns, and the only episode of his burglarious past to which in his present saved condition he could look back with real pleasure was the occasion when he had got in through a scullery window belonging to a countess in her own right and had been bitten in the seat of his trousers by what virtually amounted to a titled wirehaired terrier. "Come to think of it, I've seen Beevor Castle. Cycled there once when I was a lad. Took sandwiches. Nice

place. Romantic. One of those stately homes of England they talk about. Who'd have thought I'd of ever got inside of it? It just shows, don't it? What I mean is, you never know. And now, cocky, you'd better hop out of that bed and go and have your Turkish bath. I'll be putting out your things. The blue suit with a heliotrope shirt and similarly coloured socks will be about the ticket, I think," said Augustus Robb, who had an eye for the rare and the beautiful.