Pelham Wodehouse - The Coming of Bill

"Steve!"

The door opened.

"Hello, Kirk. That you? Come along in. You're just in time for the main performance."

He caught sight of Mamie standing beside Kirk.

"Who's that?" he cried. For a moment he thought it was Ruth, and his honest heart leaped at the thought that his scheme had worked already and brought Kirk and her together again.

"It's me, Steve," said Mamie in her small voice. And Steve, as he heard it, was seized with the first real qualm he had had since he had embarked upon his great adventure.

As Kirk had endeavoured temporarily to forget Ruth, so had he tried not to think of Mamie. It was the only thing he was ashamed of in the whole affair, the shock he must have given her.

"Hello, Mamie," he said sheepishly, and paused. Words did not come readily to him.

Mamie entered the house without speaking. It seemed to Steve that invective would have been better than this ominous silence. He looked ruefully at her retreating back and turned to greet Kirk.

"You're mighty late," he said.

"I only got your telegram toward the end of the afternoon. I had been away all day. I came here as fast as I could hit it up directly I read it. We had a blow-out, and that delayed us."

Steve ventured a question.

"Say, Kirk, why 'us,' while we're talking of it? How does Mamie come to be here?"

"She insisted on coming. It seems that everybody in the house was away to-day, so she tells me, so she came round to me with your note."

"I guess this has put me in pretty bad with Mamie," observed Steve regretfully. "Has she been knocking me on the trip?"

"Not a word."

Steve brightened, but became subdued again next moment.

"I guess she's just saving it," he said resignedly.

"Steve, what made you do it?"

"Oh, I reckoned you could do with having the kid to yourself for a spell," said Steve awkwardly.

"You're all right, Steve. But how did you manage it? I shouldn't have thought it possible."

"Oh, it wasn't so hard, that part. I just hid in the house, and—but say, let's forget it; it makes me feel kind of mean, somehow. It seems to me I may have lost Mamie her job. It's mighty hard to do the right thing by every one in this world, ain't it? Come along in and see the kid. He's great. Are you feeling ready for supper? Him and me was just going to start."

It occurred to Kirk for the first time that he was hungry.

"Have you got anything to eat, Steve?"

Steve brightened again.

"Have we?" he said. "We've got everything there is in Connecticut! Why, say, we're celebrating. This is our big day. Know what's happened? Why—"

He stopped short, as if somebody had choked him. They had gone into the sitting-room while he was speaking. The table was laid for supper. A chafing-dish stood at one end, and the remainder of the available space was filled with a collection of foods, from cold chicken to candy, which did credit to Steve's imagination.

But it was not the sight of these that checked his flow of speech. It was the look on Mamie's face as he caught sight of it in the lamplight. The White Hope was sitting at the table in the attitude of one who has heard the gong and is anxious to begin; while Mamie, bending over him, raised her head as the two men entered and fixed Steve with a baleful stare.

"What have you been doing to the poor mite?" she demanded fiercely, "to get his face scratched this way?"

There was no doubt about the scratch. It was a long, angry red line running from temple to chin. The White Hope, becoming conscious of the fact that the attention of the public was upon him, and diagnosing the cause, volunteered an explanation.

"Bad boy," he said, and looked meaningly again at the candy.

"What does he mean by 'bad boy'?"

"Just what he says, Mamie, honest. Gee! you don't think I done it, do you?"

"Have you been letting the precious lamb fight ?" cried Mamie, her eyes two circles of blue indignation.

Steve's enthusiasm overcame his sense of guilt. He uttered a whoop.

" Letting him! Gee! Listen to her! Why, say, that kid don't have to be let! He's a scrapper from Swatville-on-the-Bingle. Honest! That's what all this food is about. We're celebrating. This is a little supper given in his honour by a few of his admirers and backers, meaning me. Why, say, Kirk, that kid of yours is just the greatest thing that ever happened. Get that chafing-dish going and I'll tell you all about it."

"How did he come by that scratch?" said Mamie, coldly sticking to her point.

"I'll tell you quick enough. But let's start in on the eats first. You wouldn't keep a coming champ waiting for his grub, would you? Look how he's lamping that candy."

"Were you going to let the poor mite stuff himself with candy, Steve Dingle?"

"Sure. Whatever he says goes. He owns the joint after this afternoon."

Mamie swiftly removed the unwholesome delicacy.

"The idea!"

Kirk was busying himself with the chafing-dish.

"What have you got in here, Steve?"

"Lobster, colonel. I had to do thirty miles to get it, too."

Mamie looked at him fixedly.

"Were you going to feed lobster to this child?" she asked with ominous calm. "Were you intending to put him to bed full of broiled lobster and marshmallows?"

"Nix on the rough stuff, Mamie," pleaded the embarrassed pugilist. "How was I to know what kids feed on? And maybe he would have passed up the lobster at that and stuck to the sardines."

"Sardines!"

"Ain't kids allowed sardines?" said Steve anxiously. "The guy at the store told me they were wholesome and nourishing. It looked to me as if that ought to hit young Fitzsimmons about right. What's the matter with them?"

"A little bread-and-milk is all that he ever has before he goes to bed."

Steve detected a flaw in this and hastened to make his point.

"Sure," he said, "but he don't win the bantam-weight champeenship of Connecticut every night."

"Is that what he's done to-day, Steve?" asked Kirk.

"It certainly is. Ain't I telling you?"

"That's the trouble. You're not. You and Mamie seem to be having a discussion about the nourishing properties of sardines and lobster. What has been happening this afternoon?"

"Bad boy," remarked William Bannister with his mouth full.

"That's right," said Steve. "That's it in a nutshell. Say, it was this way. It seemed to me that, having no kid of his own age to play around with, his nibs was apt to get lonesome, so I asked about and found that there was a guy of the name of Whiting living near here who had a kid of the same age or thereabouts. Maybe you remember him? He used to fight at the feather-weight limit some time back. Called himself Young O'Brien. He was a pretty good scrapper in his time, and now he's up here looking after some gent's prize dogs.

"Well, I goes to him and borrows his kid. He's a scrappy sort of kid at that and weighs ten pounds more than his nibs; but I reckoned he'd have to do, and I thought I could stay around and part 'em if they got to mixing it."

Mamie uttered an indignant exclamation, but Kirk's eyes were gleaming proudly.

"Well?" he said.

Steve swallowed lobster and resumed.

"Well, you know how it is. You meet a guy who's been in the same line of business as yourself and you find you've got a heap to talk about. I'd never happened across the gink Whiting, but I knew of him, and, of course, he'd heard of me, and we got to discussing things. I seen him lose on a foul to Tommy King in the eighteenth round out in Los Angeles, and that kept us busy talking, him having it that he hadn't gone within a mile of fouling Tommy and me saying I'd been in a ring-seat and had the goods on him same as if I'd taken a snap-shot. Well, we was both getting pretty hot under the collar about it when suddenly there's the blazes of a noise behind us, and there's the two kids scrapping all over the lot. The Whiting kid had started it, mind you, and him ten pounds heavier than Bill, and tough, too."