Hot Water (20 page)

'This afternoon.'

Packy began to regain his proper form. The one thing he must avoid, he recognized, was the display of anything that might suggest a guilty conscience. After all, things were not so bad as they might have been. Fortunately, he had his boat as an alibi. There was no reason why she should ever know that he had not been living on the
Flying Cloud ever
since his arrival.

His manner, though still not assured, became easier.

'How fine that you were able to come over. I hoped you would when I wrote and told you I was coming here. But I was afraid you might be tied up at your father's for weeks. How was the house-party, by the way?'

'Quite nice.'

'Lots of interesting people there?'

'Quite a number.'

'And how is everybody at home?'

'Quite well.'

'How's your father?'

'Quite well.'

'How's your mother?'

'Quite well.'

'How's your aunt Gwendolyn?'

This detailed solicitude, instead of touching Lady Beatrice Bracken, seemed to make her rather restless.

'Wouldn't it save time,' she said, 'if you simply accepted my assurance that
everybody
at Worbles is quite well?'

Packy recognized the reasonableness of the suggestion.

'Well, it's wonderful your having been able to get over here,' he said, abandoning the theme. 'I suppose you had some difficulty finding me, as I wasn't at any of the hotels. You see, I came over on a boat. You remember my saying I might charter... or did I tell you in my letter?'

'No. In your letter you simply mentioned that you were leaving for St Rocque.'

'Well, I chartered a yawl. She's lying in the harbour now.'

'Are you living on board?'

'That's right. Yes. Living on board.'

'Oh?' said Beatrice. 'I understood you were at this Château, passing yourself off as the Vicomte de Blissac.'

Once again, Packy experienced the sensation of having been punched on the nose. It seemed to him, moreover, that his unseen assailant, not satisfied with this buffet, had also brought his right up with a swing and got home on the point of the jaw. Through an enveloping mist he heard Beatrice continue.

'I happen to know that the Vicomte de Blissac is staying at his mother's Château with some Americans named Gedge. And I met an old man just now who told me that you were the Vicomte de Blissac and that you were engaged to his daughter. Don't you think, perhaps, that you had better explain?'

One of the drawbacks to Life is that it contains moments when one is compelled to tell the truth. Such a moment, Packy realized, had arrived now There were few things he would not have preferred to telling the truth, but it seemed unavoidable.

'I'll tell you all about that.'

'I am longing to hear.'

'That old man was Senator Opal.'

'So you are engaged to Miss Opal?'

'No, no, no! He only thinks I am.'

'From what he told me, you seem to have given him very good reason to think so.'

'Senator Opal wrote a letter.'

'A curious coincidence. I have just written a letter.'

'It was a compromising letter, and Mrs Gedge got hold of it and talks of giving it to the papers, so he wants to get it back. I happened to meet his daughter...'

'How was that?'

'Well, it's a long story. I was cutting the old man's hair...'

'Doing what?'

'I can't go into that now. But while I was cutting his hair I met his daughter and she told me about this letter, so naturally I offered to get it back for her. And this, of course, gave old Opal the idea that I was Blair Eggleston.'

'What!'

Packy paused to marshal his thoughts. He felt he was not making this as clear as he should.

'When I say he thought I was Blair Eggleston, I mean that Jane...'

'Jane!'

'Her name is Jane. He thought I was the man to whom Miss Opal was engaged. She's really engaged to Blair Eggleston.'

'She certainly isn't. Mr Eggleston didn't say a word to me about it when I met him in London.'

'Naturally not. You see, it's a dead secret.'

'Well, go on.'

'Well, that's why he thinks we're engaged.'

Beatrice tapped her foot on the carpet, always a bad sign.

'Up to the present, all I have understood is that this Senator Opal wrote a letter and that Miss Opal wishes you to get it back.'

'Well, that's all there is to it.'

'Not quite. Isn't it rather a risky business, stealing this letter from Mrs Gedge?'

'You bet it's risky!'

'It might lead to your getting into serious trouble.'

'It certainly might,' said Packy, charmed by her solicitude.

Beatrice's lips tightened.

'And yet,' she said, in that soft, silky voice which women so often employ and which has never yet done any man any good, 'you were apparently quite prepared to take the risk for Miss Opal's sake. A girl who means nothing to you.'

Too late, Packy saw the quagmire into which she had led him. He felt some of the helpless desperation which comes to nervous witnesses when trapped by cross-examining counsel.

'Yes, but don't you see...'

'I think I see perfectly. To me, the inference is obvious. You are evidently infatuated with this girl. I think you had better take this letter and read it. It will save a lot of unnecessary talk.'

'But you don't understand.'

'Don't I?'

'I went into this business simply for the fun of it.'

'What
is
the fun of it?'

'Well, I mean... the spirit of adventure ...'

The spirit of absolute idiocy. It seems to me that you have not only been making love to this Miss Opal behind my back but are also a perfect half-wit. And it is quite plain to me that you are not the man I want to spend the rest of my life with. I thought I could make something of you, but evidently it's hopeless, and we might as well recognize it at once. Just glance at that letter, will you, when you have a spare moment. It says everything. Good-bye.'

'But listen...'

The objection to holding these intimate heart-to-heart talks in a public spot is that your movements are hampered by the necessity of observing the conventions. Even in France you cannot chivvy girls across the lobby of a hotel. Beatrice had begun to make for the door at a pace so brisk that Packy's only alternative to letting her go was to pursue her at a gallop. He let her go.

The envelope crackled in his hand. He opened it dully. He did not anticipate that it would add much to his existing information. After those last words of hers, so characteristically lucid, he presumed it to be the bird or raspberry in written form.

He had guessed correctly. The letter ran to three pages and a little over, but its gist could have been condensed into that poignant phrase so familiar to lovers of melodrama –
Those wedding-bells shall not ring out.

The marriage which had been arranged between Lady Beatrice Bracken (who is, of course, the daughter of the Earl of Stableford) and Patrick B. Franklyn (who is, of course, the well-known young American millionaire and sportsman) would not take place.

Statisticians, who have gone carefully into the figures – the name of Schwertfeger of Berlin is one that springs to the mind – inform us that of young men who have just received a negative answer to a proposal of marriage (and with these must, of course, be grouped those whose engagements have been broken off) 6.08 per cent clench their hands and stare silently before them, 12.02 take the next train to the Rocky Mountains and shoot grizzlies, while 11.07 sit down at their desks and become modern novelists.

The first impulse of the remainder – and these, it will be seen, constitute a large majority- is to nip off round the corner and get a good, stiff drink. Into this class Packy fell. The imperious urge to put something cold and stimulating inside him swept over him within ten seconds of his perusal of the opening sentences of Beatrice's letter. Two minutes later he was in the cocktail bar entreating the kindly Gustave to come to the aid of the party. And it was while the latter was reaching for bottles and doing musical things with ice that he observed Senator Opal bearing down on him.

He was not surprised to see Senator Opal. To the other's thin story about having come to the Hotel des Etrangers to dispatch a cable he had attached little credence. He was perfectly aware that if he entered the cocktail bar one of the first sights which met his eye would be the great Dry legislator with his foot on the rail and his head back, restoring his tissues. All he felt on perceiving him now was merely that well-marked sensation of nausea which comes to broken-hearted young men who see would-be conversationalists making in their direction. He had no wish to chat with the Senator, and only the intense desire to get outside a Gustave Special immediately held him where he stood.

Before proceeding to the more vital agenda, Senator Opal had a word of warning to impart.

There was a girl out there just now, asking about you,' he said. 'I stalled her all right, but better keep out of the way.'

Packy's Gustave Special had arrived. He drained it without replying and asked for another. The kindly Gustave, who could read faces, had foreseen the repeat order. He filled it instantaneously, and Packy snatched at the glass like a frightened child reaching for its mother's hand.

'I don't know who she was. She knew you all right. But I told her you were the Vicomte de Blissac, and she went off quite satisfied. You go out by this door here, and she'll never see you.'

Having disposed of this minor matter, Senator Opal came straight to that other which was nearest his heart.

'Well, have you fixed everything up?'

Packy, now dealing with his third Gustave Special, stared with no human sparkle in his eye. The Senator's choler, always near the surface, began to rise.

'What the devil,' he demanded, 'are you goggling like a fish for?' A faint mauve, the first beginning of that royal purple which was wont to suffuse it in his Berserk moments, came into his face. 'Are you doped?' he asked sharply. 'Can't you talk? You went up half an hour ago to arrange things with that man of yours. What happened?'

With an effort, Packy contrived to bring his mind to bear on the question. The strain of this made him feel as if the top of his head had worked loose. But something told him that only when he had supplied the desired information would he be permitted to return to his sorrow unmolested.

'Oh, that's all off,' he said.

The Senator was now completely purple.

'All off?'

'Yes. He says he won't do it.'

'Why not? He's a burglar, isn't he?'

'Yes. But apparently when he was doing some burgling the other night you planted him out on a window-sill and he didn't like it.'

'Goosh!' The Senator paused for a moment, aghast. 'You don't mean that was the fellow?'

'Yes.'

'And he's sore?'

'Very sore. He says if you're drowning he'll throw you a flat-iron, but outside of that he doesn't want anything to do with you.'

Senator Opal fermented silently. How true it is, he was feeling, that we never know how devastating the results of our most trivial actions may be. Just because he had done an ordinary everyday thing like putting a burglar on a window-sill, the sort of thing one does and forgets about next minute, ruin stared him in the face. He mourned, as many a stout fellow had mourned before him, over the irrevocability of the past.

Packy welcomed his silence. It enabled him to turn his mind to his own troubles. He was brooding on these, when an insistent noise at his side brought him to earth and with considerable annoyance he saw that the Senator was still there. And not only that, but he had begun to ask questions again.

'But what'll we do?'

'I don't know,' said Packy. He was relieved to find the conundrum so simple and easy to answer.

The Senator appeared dissatisfied. Observing that his young friend had fallen in some sort of a trance or day-dream, he secured his attention by the simple expedient of kicking him sharply on the right ankle.

'Ouch!' said Packy, and ceased to dream.

'We must do something,' said the Senator fretfully. 'We've got to have that letter.'

'Oh, the letter?' Packy could put this straight, and he did so. 'I got that.'

'You
got
it?'

'Yes.'

'When?'

'Just now.'

'My letter?'

'No, not your letter. Beatrice's letter.'

The Senator moaned a little.

'Are you mad?'

'I'm not any too well pleased,' admitted Packy. 'You see, it's the bird.'

'What's a bird?'

'The letter.'

It was possibly his presence of mind in clutching his temples at this point that prevented Senator Opal's head coming apart. He snatched at the vanishing skirts of sanity.

'Somebody's got to open that safe,' he said, returning to the one aspect of the matter about which there could be no argument or misunderstanding. 'Can't you open a safe?'

'No.'

'Why not?' said the Senator querulously, as if it were one of the things which every young man ought to know.

'It's a very complicated business, opening safes,' said Packy. 'Keesters and pressure-bolts and all that sort of thing enter into it. You have to have dynamite and gauze and thick things and thin things... all very complicated.'

'Goosh!'

'Unless it's the other kind of safe.'

'What other kind of safe?'

'The kind Mrs Gedge has. Then it's easy.'

'Easy?'

'Oh, very easy. Perfect pie. All you have to do is find out the combination.'

'And do you know how to do that?'

'Me?' Packy looked at him in mild surprise. 'Oh, no. I haven't the remotest idea.'

The Senator's hopefulness faded. Packy's attention wandered again.

'Then do you mean to say there's nothing to be done?'

'Eh?'

'Is there nothing to be done?'

Absolutely nothing. She says she thought at one time that she might make something out of me, but she sees now it's hopeless.'

Senator Opal's goggling stare was almost Gedge-like.