Pelham Wodehouse - Three Men and a Maid

"I'm going to bed," said Sam brusquely.

"All right. I'll tell you while you're undressing."

"I don't want to listen."

"A week ago," said Eustace Hignett, "I will ask you to picture me seated after some difficulty in a carriage in a New York subway; I got into conversation with a girl with an elephant gun."

Sam revised his private commination service in order to include the elephant gun.

"She was my soul-mate," proceeded Eustace with quiet determination. "I didn't know it at the time, but she was. She had grave brown eyes, a wonderful personality, and this elephant gun. She was bringing the gun away from the down-town place where she had taken it to be mended."

"Did she shoot you with it?"

"Shoot me? What do you mean? Why, no!"

"The girl must have been a fool!" said Sam bitterly. "The chance of a life-time and she missed it. Where are my pyjamas?"

"I haven't seen your pyjamas. She talked to me about this elephant gun, and explained its mechanism. You can imagine how she soothed my aching heart. My heart, if you recollect, was aching at the moment—quite unnecessarily if I had only known—because it was only a couple of days since my engagement to Wilhelmina Bennett had been broken off. Well, we parted at Sixty-sixth Street, and, strange as it may seem, I forgot all about her."

"Do it again!"

"Tell it again?"

"Good heavens, no! Forget all about her again."

"Nothing," said Eustace Hignett gravely, "could make me do that. Our souls have blended. Our beings have called to one another from their deepest depths, saying … There are your pyjamas, over in the corner … saying, 'You are mine!' How could I forget her after that? Well, as I was saying, we parted. Little did I know that she was sailing on this very boat! But just now she came to me as I writhed on deck…."

"Did you writhe?" asked Sam with a flicker of moody interest.

"I certainly did."

"That's good!"

"But not for long."

"That's bad!"

"She came to me and healed me. Sam, that girl is an angel."

"Switch off the light when you've finished."

"She seemed to understand without a word how I was feeling. There are some situations which do not need words. She went away and returned with a mixture of some kind in a glass.

"I don't know what it was. It had Worcester sauce in it. She put it to my lips. She made me drink it. She said it was what her father always used in Africa for bull-calves with the staggers. Well, believe me or believe me not … Are you asleep?"

"Yes."

"Believe me or believe me not, in under two minutes I was not merely freed from the nausea caused by your cigar. I was smoking myself! I was walking the deck with her without the slightest qualm. I was even able to look over the side from time to time and comment on the beauty of the moon on the water … I have said some mordant things about women since I came on board this boat. I withdraw them unreservedly. They still apply to girls like Wilhelmina Bennett, but I have ceased to include the whole sex in my remarks. Jane Hubbard has restored my faith in woman. Sam! Sam!"

"What?"

"I said that Jane Hubbard had restored my faith in woman."

"Oh, all right."

Eustace Hignett finished undressing and got into bed. With a soft smile on his face he switched off the light. There was a long silence, broken only by the distant purring of engines. At about twelve-thirty a voice came from the lower berth.

"Sam!"

"What is it now?"

"There is a sweet womanly strength about her, Sam. She was telling me she once killed a panther with a hat-pin."

Sam groaned and tossed on his mattress.

Silence fell again.

"At least I think it was a panther," said Eustace Hignett, at a quarter past one. "Either a panther or a puma."

A week after the liner Atlantic had docked at Southampton, Sam Marlowe might have been observed—and was observed by various of the residents—sitting on a bench on the esplanade of that repellent watering-place, Bingley-on-the-Sea, in Sussex. All watering-places on the South Coast of England are blots on the landscape, but, though I am aware that by saying it I shall offend the civic pride of some of the others, none are so peculiarly foul as Bingley-on-the-Sea. The asphalt on the Bingley esplanade is several degrees more depressing than the asphalt on other esplanades. The Swiss waiters at the Hotel Magnificent, where Sam was stopping, are in a class of bungling incompetence by themselves, the envy and despair of all the other Swiss waiters at all the other Hotels Magnificent along the coast. For dreariness of aspect Bingley-on-the-Sea stands alone. The very waves that break on the shingle seem to creep up the beach reluctantly, as if it revolted them to come to such a place.

Why, then, was Sam Marlowe visiting this ozone-swept Gehenna? Why, with all the rest of England at his disposal, had he chosen to spend a week at breezy, blighted Bingley?

Simply because he had been disappointed in love. He had sought relief by slinking off alone to the most benighted spot he knew, in the same spirit as other men in similar circumstances had gone off to the Rockies to shoot grizzly-bears.

To a certain extent the experiment had proved successful. If the Hotel Magnificent had not cured his agony, the service and the cooking there had at least done much to take his mind off it. His heart still ached, but he felt equal to going to London and seeing his father, which, of course, he ought to have done immediately upon his arrival in England.

He rose from his bench, and, going back to the hotel to enquire about trains, observed a familiar figure in the lobby. Eustace Hignett was leaning over the counter, in conversation with the desk-clerk.

"Hullo, Eustace!" said Sam.

"Hullo, Sam!" said Eustace.

There was a brief silence. The conversational opening had been a little unfortunately chosen, for it reminded both men of a painful episode in their recent lives.

"What are you doing here?" asked Eustace.

"What are you doing here?" asked Sam.

"I came to see you," said Eustace, leading his cousin out of the lobby and onto the bleak esplanade. A fine rain had begun to fall, and Bingley looked, if possible, worse than ever. "I asked for you at your club, and they told me you had come down here."

"What did you want to see me about?"

"The fact is, old man, I'm in a bit of a hole."

"What's the matter?"

"It's rather a long story," said Eustace deprecatingly.

"Go ahead."

"I don't know where to begin."

"Have a dash at starting at the beginning."

Eustace stared gloomily at a stranded crab on the beach below. The crab stared gloomily back.

"Well, you remember my telling you about the girl I met on the boat?"

"Jane Something?"

"Jane Hubbard," said Eustace reverently. "Sam, I love that girl."

"I know. You told me."

"But I didn't tell her . I tried to muster up the nerve, but we got to Southampton without my having clicked. What a dashed difficult thing a proposal is to bring off, isn't it! I didn't bring it off, and it began to look to me as though I was in the soup. And then she told me something which gave me an idea. She said the Bennetts had invited her to stay with them in the country when she got to England, Old Mr. Bennett and his pal Mortimer, Bream's father, were trying to get a house somewhere which they could share. Only so far they hadn't managed to find the house they wanted. When I heard that, I said 'Ha!'"

"You said what?" asked Sam.

"I said 'Ha!'"

"Why?"

"Because I had an idea. Don't interrupt, old man, or you'll get me muddled. Where was I?"

"I don't know."

"I remember. I'd just got the idea. I happened to know, you see, that Bennett and Mortimer were both frightfully keen on getting Windles for the summer, but my mother wouldn't hear of it and gave them both the miss-in-baulk. It suddenly occurred to me that mother was going to be away in America all the summer, so why shouldn't I make a private deal, let them the house, and make it a stipulation that I was to stay there to look after things? And, to cut a long story short, that's what I did."