Pelham Wodehouse - Something New

Aline nodded.

"You will? That will be splendid! Now I'll go and pack and break it to my host that I must leave him. I expect, it will be news to him to learn that I am here. I doubt if he knows me by sight."

Aline stood where he had left her, leaning on the balustrade. In the fullness of time there came to her the recollection she had promised Freddie that shortly after luncheon she would sit with him.

The Honorable Freddie, draped in purple pyjamas and propped up with many pillows, was lying in bed, reading Gridley Quayle, Investigator. Aline's entrance occurred at a peculiarly poignant moment in the story and gave him a feeling of having been brought violently to earth from a flight in the clouds. It is not often an author has the good fortune to grip a reader as the author of Gridley Quayle gripped Freddie.

One of the results of his absorbed mood was that he greeted Aline with a stare of an even glassier quality than usual. His eyes were by nature a trifle prominent; and to Aline, in the overstrung condition in which her talk with George Emerson had left her, they seemed to bulge at her like a snail's. A man seldom looks his best in bed, and to Aline, seeing him for the first time at this disadvantage, the Honorable Freddie seemed quite repulsive. It was with a feeling of positive panic that she wondered whether he would want her to kiss him.

Freddie made no such demand. He was not one of your demonstrative lovers. He contented himself with rolling over in bed and dropping his lower jaw.

"Hello, Aline!"

Aline sat down on the edge of the bed.

"Well, Freddie?"

Her betrothed improved his appearance a little by hitching up his jaw. As though feeling that would be too extreme a measure, he did not close his mouth altogether; but he diminished the abyss. The Honorable Freddie belonged to the class of persons who move through life with their mouths always restfully open.

It seemed to Aline that on this particular afternoon a strange dumbness had descended on her. She had been unable to speak to George and now she could not think of anything to say to Freddie. She looked at him and he looked at her; and the clock on the mantel-piece went on ticking.

"It was that bally cat of Aunt Ann's," said Freddie at length, essaying light conversation. "It came legging it up the stairs and I took the most frightful toss. I hate cats! Do you hate cats? I knew a fellow in London who couldn't stand cats."

Aline began to wonder whether there was not something permanently wrong with her organs of speech. It should have been a simple matter to develop the cat theme, but she found herself unable to do so. Her mind was concentrated, to the exclusion of all else, on the repellent nature of the spectacle provided by her loved one in pyjamas. Freddie resumed the conversation.

"I was just reading a corking book. Have you ever read these things? They come out every month, and they're corking. The fellow who writes them must be a corker. It beats me how he thinks of these things. They are about a detective—a chap called Gridley Quayle. Frightfully exciting!"

An obvious remedy for dumbness struck Aline.

"Shall I read to you, Freddie?"

"Right-ho! Good scheme! I've got to the top of this page."

Aline took the paper-covered book.

"'Seven guns covered him with deadly precision.' Did you get as far as that?"

"Yes; just beyond. It's a bit thick, don't you know! This chappie Quayle has been trapped in a lonely house, thinking he was going to see a pal in distress; and instead of the pal there pop out a whole squad of masked blighters with guns. I don't see how he's going to get out of it, myself; but I'll bet he does. He's a corker!"

If anybody could have pitied Aline more than she pitied herself, as she waded through the adventures of Mr. Quayle, it would have been Ashe Marson. He had writhed as he wrote the words and she writhed as she read them. The Honorable Freddie also writhed, but with tense excitement.

"What's the matter? Don't stop!" he cried as Aline's voice ceased.

"I'm getting hoarse, Freddie."

Freddie hesitated. The desire to remain on the trail with Gridley struggled with rudimentary politeness.

"How would it be—Would you mind if I just took a look at the rest of it myself? We could talk afterward, you know. I shan't be long."

"Of course! Do read if you want to. But do you really like this sort of thing, Freddie?"

"Me? Rather! Why—don't you?"

"I don't know. It seems a little—I don't know."

Freddie had become absorbed in his story. Aline did not attempt further analysis of her attitude toward Mr. Quayle; she relapsed into silence.

It was a silence pregnant with thought. For the first time in their relations, she was trying to visualize to herself exactly what marriage with this young man would mean. Hitherto, it struck her, she had really seen so little of Freddie that she had scarcely had a chance of examining him. In the crowded world outside he had always seemed a tolerable enough person. To-day, somehow, he was different. Everything was different to-day.

This, she took it, was a fair sample of what she might expect after marriage. Marriage meant—to come to essentials—that two people were very often and for lengthy periods alone together, dependent on each other for mutual entertainment. What exactly would it be like, being alone often and for lengthy periods with Freddie? Well, it would, she assumed, be like this.

"It's all right," said Freddie without looking up. "He did get out! He had a bomb on him, and he threatened to drop it and blow the place to pieces unless the blighters let him go. So they cheesed it. I knew he had something up his sleeve."

Like this! Aline drew a deep breath. It would be like this—forever and ever and ever—until she died. She bent forward and stared at him.

"Freddie," she said, "do you love me?" There was no reply. "Freddie, do you love me? Am I a part of you? If you hadn't me would it be like trying to go on living without breathing?"

The Honorable Freddie raised a flushed face and gazed at her with an absent eye.

"Eh? What?" he said. "Do I—Oh; yes, rather! I say, one of the blighters has just loosed a rattlesnake into Gridley Quayle's bedroom through the transom!"

Aline rose from her seat and left the room softly. The Honorable Freddie read on, unheeding.

Ashe Marson had not fallen far short of the truth in his estimate of the probable effect on Mr. Peters of the information that his precious scarab had once more been removed by alien hands and was now farther from his grasp than ever. A drawback to success in life is that failure, when it does come, acquires an exaggerated importance. Success had made Mr. Peters, in certain aspects of his character, a spoiled child.

At the moment when Ashe broke the news he would have parted with half his fortune to recover the scarab. Its recovery had become a point of honor. He saw it as the prize of a contest between his will and that of whatever malignant powers there might be ranged against him in the effort to show him that there were limits to what he could achieve. He felt as he had felt in the old days when people sneaked up on him in Wall Street and tried to loosen his grip on a railroad or a pet stock. He was suffering from that form of paranoia which makes men multimillionaires. Nobody would be foolish enough to become a multimillionaire if it were not for the desire to prove himself irresistible.

Mr. Peters obtained a small relief for his feelings by doubling the existing reward, and Ashe went off in search of Joan, hoping that this new stimulus, acting on their joint brains, might develop inspiration.

"Have any fresh ideas been vouchsafed to you?" he asked. "You may look on me as baffled."