Pelham Wodehouse - Spring Fever

Lady teresa Cobbold was considerably better worth looking at than the Lady Clare, her sister. The latter took after her father in appearance, which was an unfortunate thing for any girl to do, for it has already been stressed that the fifth Earl of Shortlands, though a worthy soul and no thicker in the head than the average member of the House of Peers, presented to the eye the facade of an Eric Blore rather than that of a Robert Taylor. Terry had had the good sense to resemble her late mother, who had been in her day one of the prettiest debutantes in London. Slim, blue-eyed, fair-haired and bearing Youth like a banner, she was the sort of girl at the sight of whom strong men quiver and straighten their ties.

"Good morning, Shorty," she said. "Many happy returns, darling."

"Thank you, my dear."

"Here's my little gift. Only a pipe, I'm afraid."

"It's a jolly good pipe," said Lord Shortlands stoutly. "Just what I wanted. There was a fellow on the phone for you just now."

"Name of Cardinal?"

"Yes. Seemed to know me, but I couldn't place him."

"You wouldn't. It's years since you saw him. Well, never mind young Mike Cardinal," said Terry, perching herself on the end of the battered sofa. "How have you come out on the takings? Did the others do their bit?"

Lord Shortlands' face clouded. He had had a lean birthday.

"Adela gave me a couple of ties. Desborough gave me a book called Murder at some dashed placed or other. Clare—"

"No cash?"

"Not a penny."

"What a shame. I was hoping we could have slunk up to London and had lunch somewhere. How much have you got?"

"Two and eightpence. How much have you?"

"Three bob."

"You see. That's how it goes."

"That's how it goes, Shorty."

"Yes, that's how it goes," said Lord Shortlands, and fell into a moody silence.

These times in which we live are not good times for earls. Theirs was a great racket while it lasted, but the boom days are over. A scattered few may still have a pittance, but the majority, after they have paid their income tax and their land tax and all their other taxes and invested in one or two of the get-rich-quick schemes thrown together for their benefit by bright-eyed gentlemen in the City, are generally pretty close to the bread line. Lord Shortlands, with two and eightpence in his pocket, was more happily situated than most.

But even he cannot be considered affluent. There had been a time, for he had seen better days, when he had thought nothing of walking into his club and ordering a bottle of the best. We find him now reduced to malted milk and dependent for the necessities of life on the bounty of his daughter Adela, that levelheaded girl who had had the intelligence to marry into Bradstreet.

Dependence in itself was not a state of being which would have grated on the fifth earl. He had always preferred not to have to pay for things. But it was another matter to be dependent on a daughter who checked his expenditure so closely; who so consistently refused to loosen up—as it might be when a fellow wanted two hundred pounds in order to marry the cook; and, above all, who was so devoted to the ancestral home that she insisted on staying in it all the year round.

Why anyone with the money to live elsewhere should elect to live at Beevor Castle, which was stuffy in summer and cold in winter, was one of the mysteries which Lord Shortlands knew that he would never solve.

"Do you realize, Terry," he said, his thoughts during the lull in the conversation having turned to his perennial grievance, "that the last time I was away from this place for even a couple of hours was when those Americans took it last summer? And then Adela made me go with her to Harrogate, of all loathsome holes. Some nonsense about Desborough's lumbago. I offered to rough it at my club, but she said she couldn't trust me alone in London."

"I suppose you aren't the sort of man who can be trusted alone in London."

"I suppose not," said Lord Shortlands with modest pride.

"You used to paint it red in the old days, didn't you?"

"Reddish," admitted Lord Shortlands. "And since then I've not been out of the damned place. I'm just a bird in a gilded cage."

"Would you call it a gilded cage?"

"Well, a bird in a bally mausoleum."

"Poor old Shorty. You don't like Ye Olde much, do you?"

"And this infernal feeling of dependence. 'Adela, could I have a shilling?' 'What do you want a shilling for?' 'For tobacco.' 'I thought you had tobacco.' 'I've smoked it.' 'Oh? Well, here you are. But you smoke a great deal too much.' It oifends one's manly pride. I can't tell you how much I admired your spirited behavior, Terry, in breaking away as you did. It thrilled me to the core. A bold bid for freedom. I wish I had the nerve to do it, too."

"Perhaps the mistake we made was in not going away together and working as a team. We might have got bookings in vaudeville as a cross-talk act."

"What on earth made you come back?"

"Hunger, my angel. The show I was in collapsed, and I couldn't get another job. Have you ever tried not eating, Shorty?"

"Do you mean you didn't get enough to eat?"

"If it hadn't been for one faithful friend, who was a perfect lamb, I should have starved. He used to take me out to lunch and tell me about the girl he was in love with. His father had sent him to England to get him out of her way. He was an American, and, oddly enough, his name was the same as mine."

"What, Cobbold?"

"Well, you didn't think I meant Teresa?"

Lord Shortlands was interested. Since seven that morning the name Cob-bold had been graven on his heart.

"I wonder if he was any relation of that lunatic of mine. There's a borderline case in New York named Ellery Cobbold who keeps writing me letters and sending me cables. And this morning he incited some blasted friend of his to ring me up on the telephone and howl into my ear a lot of dashed rot about 'Happy birthday.' At seven! Seven sharp. The stable clock was just striking when the beastly outrage occurred."

"I should imagine Stanwood is his son. He told me his father lived in New York, or somewhere just outside. Well, he kept me alive, though growing thinner every day, but I found I couldn't take it, Shorty, so I came back."

"Why couldn't you get another job? I should have thought a girl as pretty as you could have walked into something."

"I couldn't even crawl. And I couldn't afford to wait."

"No cash?"

"No cash."

Lord Shortlands nodded.

"Yes, that's it. The problem of cash. One comes up against it at every turn. Look at me. If I had two hundred pounds, I could strike off the shackles. Mrs. Punter still sticks rigidly to her terms."

"I know. She told me."

"She will only marry a man who can set her up in a pub in London. Wants to chuck service and settle down. Enjoy the evening of her life, and all that. One can understand it, of course. Women must have the little home with their own sticks of furniture about them. But it makes it dashed awkward. I don't see how I can raise the money, and there's Spink piling it up hand over fist. I saw that chap Blair slip him a quid the other day. It nearly made me sick. And who knows what those Rossiters may not have tipped him last summer? Spink must be getting very near the goal by now."

"But he bets."

"Yes, and suppose one of these days he strikes a long-priced winner."

"According to Mrs. Punter, he loses all the time, and it prejudices her against him. She wants a steady husband."

"Did she tell you that?"

"Yes, that comes straight from the horse's mouth. I went to her just before she left for her holiday, and pleaded your cause. It seems that she once had a sad experience in her life. She didn't tell me what it was, but I gathered that some man had let her down pretty badly, and now she's looking for someone she can rely on."