THE SITUATION IN Germany had come up for discussion in the bar parlour of the Angler’s Rest, and it was generally agreed that Hitler was standing at the crossroads and would soon be compelled to do something definite. His present policy, said a Whisky and Splash, was mere shilly-shallying.
“He’ll have to let it grow or shave it off,” said the Whisky and Splash. “He can’t go on sitting on the fence like this. Either a man has a moustache or he has not. There can be no middle course.”
The thoughtful pause which followed these words was broken by a Small Bass.
“Talking of moustaches,” he said, “you don’t seem to see any nowadays, not what I call moustaches. What’s become of them?”
“I’ve often asked myself the same question,” said a Gin and Italian Vermouth. “Where, I’ve often asked myself, are the great sweeping moustaches of our boyhood? I’ve got a photograph of my grandfather as a young man in the album at home, and he’s just a pair of eyes staring over a sort of quickset hedge.”
“Special cups they used to have,” said the Small Bass, “to keep the vegetation out of their coffee. Ah, well, those days are gone for ever.”
Mr. Mulliner shook his head.
“Not entirely,” he said, stirring his hot Scotch and lemon. “I admit that they are rarer than they used to be, but in the remoter rural districts you will still find these curious growths flourishing. What causes them to survive is partly boredom and partly the good, clean spirit of amateur sport which has made us Englishmen what we are.”
The Small Bass said he did not quite get that.
“What I mean,” said Mr. Mulliner, “is that life has not much to offer in the way of excitement to men who are buried in the country all the year round, so for want of anything better to do they grow moustaches at one another.”
“Sort of competitively, as it were?”
“Exactly. One landowner will start to try to surpass his neighbour in luxuriance of moustache, and the neighbour, inflamed, fights right back at him. There is often a great deal of very intense feeling about these contests, with not a little wagering on the side. So, at least, my nephew Brancepeth, the artist, tells me. And he should know, for his present affluence and happiness are directly due to one of them.”
“Did he grow a moustache?”
“No. He was merely caught up in the whirlwind of the struggle for supremacy between Lord Bromborough, of Rumpling Hall, Lower Rumpling, Norfolk, and Sir Preston Potter, Bart., of Wapleigh Towers in the same county. Most of the vintage moustaches nowadays are to be found in Norfolk and Suffolk. I suppose the keen, moist sea air brings them on. Certainly it, or some equally stimulating agency, had brought on those of Lord Bromborough and Sir Preston Potter, for in the whole of England at that time there were probably no two finer specimens than the former’s Joyeuse and the latter’s Love in Idleness.”
It was Lord Bromborough’s daughter Muriel (said Mr. Mulliner) who had entitled these two moustaches in this manner. A poetic, imaginative girl, much addicted to reading old sagas and romances, she had adapted to modern conditions the practice of the ancient heroes of bestowing names on their favourite swords. King Arthur, you will remember, had his Excalibur, Charlemagne his Flamberge, Doolin of Mayence the famous Merveilleuse: and Muriel saw no reason why this custom should be allowed to die out. A pretty idea, she thought and I thought it a pretty idea when my nephew Brancepeth told me of it, and he thought it a pretty idea when told of it by Muriel.
For Muriel and Brancepeth had made one another’s acquaintance some time before this story opens. The girl, unlike her father, who never left the ancestral acres, came often to London, and on one of these visits my nephew was introduced to her.
With Brancepeth it seems to have been a case of love at first sight, and it was not long before Muriel admitted to returning his passion. She had been favourably attracted to him from the moment when she found that their dance steps fitted, and when some little while later he offered to paint her portrait for nothing there was a look in her eyes which it was impossible to mistake. As early as the middle of the first sitting he folded her in his arms, and she nestled against his waistcoat with a low, cooing gurgle. Both knew that in the other they had found a soul-mate.
Such, then, was the relationship of the young couple, when one summer morning Brancepeth’s telephone rang and, removing the receiver, he heard the voice of the girl he loved.
“Hey, cocky,” she was saying.
“What ho, reptile,” responded Brancepeth. “Where are you speaking from?”
“Rumpling. Listen, I’ve got a job for you.”
“What sort of job?”
“A commission. Father wants his portrait painted.”
“Oh yes?”
“Yes. His sinister design is to present it to the local Men’s Club. I don’t know what he’s got against them. A nasty jar it’ll be for the poor fellows when they learn of it.”
“Why, is the old dad a bit of a gargoyle?”
“You never spoke a truer word. All moustache and eyebrows. The former has to be seen to be believed.”
“Pretty septic?”
“My dear! Suppurating. Well, are you on? I’ve told Father you’re the coming man.”
“So I am,” said Brancepeth. “I’m coming this afternoon.”
He was as good as his word. He caught the 3.15 train from Liverpool Street and at 7.20 alighted at the little station at Lower Rumpling, arriving at the Hall just in time to dress for dinner.
Always a rapid dresser, to-night Brancepeth excelled himself, for he yearned to see Muriel once more after their extended separation. Racing down to the drawing-room, however, tying his tie as he went, he found that his impetuosity had brought him there too early. The only occupant of the room at the moment of his entrance was a portly man whom, from the evidence submitted, he took to be his host. Except for a few outlying ears and the tip of a nose, the fellow was entirely moustache, and until he set eyes upon it, Brancepeth tells me, he had never really appreciated the full significance of those opening words of Longfellow’s Evangeline, “This is the forest primeval.”
He introduced himself courteously.
“How do you do, Lord Bromborough? My name is Mulliner.”
The other regarded him—over the zareba—with displeasure, it seemed to Brancepeth.
“What do you mean—Lord Bromborough?” he snapped curtly.
Brancepeth said he had meant Lord Bromborough.
“I’m not Lord Bromborough,” said the man.
Brancepeth was taken aback.
“Oh, aren’t you?” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m glad,” said the man. “Whatever gave you the silly idea that I was old Bromborough?”
“I was told that he had a very fine moustache.”
“Who told you that?”
“His daughter.”
The other snorted.
“You can’t go by what a man’s daughter says. She’s biased. Prejudiced. Blinded by filial love, and all that sort of thing. If I wanted an opinion on a moustache, I wouldn’t go to a man’s daughter. I’d go to somebody who knew about moustaches. ‘Mr. Walkinshaw,’ I’d say, or whatever the name might be. . . . Bromborough’s moustache a very fine moustache, indeed! Pshaw! Bromborough has a moustache—of a sort. He is not clean-shaven—I concede that . . . but fine? Pooh. Absurd. Ridiculous. Preposterous. Never heard such nonsense in my life.”
He turned pettishly away, and so hurt and offended was his manner that Brancepeth had no heart to continue the conversation. Muttering something about having forgotten his handkerchief, he sidled from the room and hung about on the landing outside. And presently Muriel came tripping down the stairs, looking more beautiful than ever.
She seemed delighted to see him.
“Hullo, Brancepeth, you old bounder,” she said cordially. “So you got here? What are you doing parked on the stairs? Why aren’t you in the drawing-room?”
Brancepeth shot a glance at the closed door and lowered his voice.
“There’s a hairy bird in there who wasn’t any too matey. I thought it must be your father and accosted him as such, and he got extraordinary peevish. He seemed to resent my saying that I had heard your father had a fine moustache.”
The girl laughed.
“Golly! You put your foot in it properly. Old Potter’s madly jealous of Father’s moustache. That was Sir Preston Potter, of Wapleigh Towers, one of our better-known local Barts. He and his son are staying here.” She broke off to address the butler, a kindly, silver-haired old man who at this moment mounted the stairs. “Hullo, Phipps, are you ambling up to announce the tea and shrimps? You’re a bit early. I don’t think Father and Mr. Potter are down yet. Ah, here’s Father,” she said, as a brilliantly moustached man of middle age appeared. “Father, this is Mr. Mulliner.”
Brancepeth eyed his host keenly as he shook hands and his heart sank a little. He saw that the task of committing this man to canvas was going to be a difficult one. The recent slurs of Sir Preston Potter had been entirely without justification. Lord Bromborough’s moustache was an extraordinarily fine one, fully as lush as that which barred the public from getting a square view of the Baronet. It seemed to Brancepeth, indeed, that the job before him was more one for a landscape artist than a portrait painter.
Sir Preston Potter, however, who now emerged from the drawing-room, clung stoutly to his opinion. He looked sneeringly at his rival.
“You been clipping your moustache, Bromborough?”
“Of course I have not been clipping my moustache,” replied Lord Bromborough shortly. It was only too plain that there was bad blood between the two men. “What the dooce would I clip my moustache for? What makes you think I’ve been clipping my moustache?”
“I thought it had shrunk,” said Sir Preston Potter. “It looks very small to me, very small. Perhaps the moth’s been at it.”
Lord Bromborough quivered beneath the coarse insult, but his patrician breeding checked the hot reply which rose to his lips. He was a host. Controlling himself with a strong effort, he turned the conversation to the subject of early man-gold-wurzels; and it was while he was speaking of these with eloquence and even fire that a young man with butter-coloured hair came hurrying down the stairs.
“Buck up, Edwin,” said Muriel impatiently. “What’s the idea of keeping us all waiting like this?”
“Oh, sorry,” said the young man.
“So you ought to be. Well, now you’re here, I’d like to introduce you to Mr. Mulliner. He’s come to paint Father’s portrait. Mr. Mulliner . . . Mr. Edwin Potter, my fiancé.”
“Dinner is served,” said Phipps the butler.
It was in a sort of trance that my nephew Brancepeth sat through the meal which followed. He toyed listlessly with his food and contributed so little to the conversation that a casual observer entering the room would have supposed him to be a deaf-mute who was on a diet. Nor can we fairly blame him for this, for he had had a severe shock. Few things are more calculated to jar an ardent lover and upset his poise than the sudden announcement by the girl he loves that she is engaged to somebody else, and Muriel’s words had been like a kick in the stomach from an army mule. And in addition to suffering the keenest mental anguish, Brancepeth was completely bewildered.
It was not as if this Edwin Potter had been Clark Gable or somebody. Studying him closely, Brancepeth was unable to discern in him any of those qualities which win girls’ hearts. He had an ordinary, meaningless face, disfigured by an eyeglass, and was plainly a boob of the first water. Brancepeth could make nothing of it. He resolved at the earliest possible moment to get hold of Muriel and institute a probe.
It was not until next day before luncheon that he found an opportunity of doing so. His morning had been spent in making preliminary sketches of her father. This task concluded, he came out into the garden and saw her reclining in a hammock slung between two trees at the edge of the large lawn.
He made his way towards her with quick, nervous strides. He was feeling jaded and irritated. His first impressions of Lord Bromborough had not misled him. Painting his portrait, he saw, was going to prove, as he had feared it would prove, a severe test of his courage and strength. There seemed so little about Lord Bromborough’s face for an artist to get hold of. It was as if he had been commissioned to depict a client who, for reasons of his own, insisted on lying hid behind a haystack.
His emotions lent acerbity to his voice. It was with a sharp intonation that he uttered the preliminary “Hoy!”
The girl sat up.
“Oh, hullo,” she said.
“Oh, hullo, yourself, with knobs on,” retorted Brancepeth. “Never mind the ‘Oh, hullo.’ I want an explanation.”
“What’s puzzling you?”
“This engagement of yours.”
“Oh, that?”
“Yes, that. A nice surprise that was to spring on a chap, was it not? A jolly way of saying ‘Welcome to Rumpling Hall,’ I don’t think.” Brancepeth choked. “I came here thinking that you loved me. . . .”
“So I do.”
“What?”
“Madly. Devotedly.”
“Then why the dickens do I find you betrothed to this blighted Potter?”
Muriel sighed.
“It’s the old, old story.”
“What’s the old, old story?”
“This is. It’s all so simple, if you’d only understand. I don’t suppose any girl ever worshipped a man as I worship you, Brancepeth, but Father hasn’t a bean . . . you know what it’s like owning land nowadays. Between ourselves, while we’re on the subject, I’d stipulate for a bit down in advance on that portrait, if I were you. . . .”
Brancepeth understood.
“Is this Potter rotter rich?”
“Rolling. Sir Preston was Potter’s Potted Table Delicacies.”
There was a silence.
“H’m,” said Brancepeth.
“Exactly. You see now. Oh, Brancepeth,” said the girl, her voice trembling, “why haven’t you money? If you only had the merest pittance—enough for a flat in Mayfair and a little week-end place in the country somewhere and a couple of good cars and a villa in the South of France and a bit of trout fishing on some decent river, I would risk all for love. But as it is. . . .”
Another silence fell.
“What you ought to do,” said Muriel, “is invent some good animal for the movies. That’s where the money is. Look at Walt Disney.”
Brancepeth started. It was as if she had read his thoughts. Like all young artists nowadays, he had always held before him as a goal of his ambition the invention of some new comic animal for the motion pictures. What he burned to do, as Velasquez would have burned to do if he had lived to-day, was to think of another Mickey Mouse and then give up work and just sit back and watch the money roll in.
“It isn’t so easy,” he said sadly.
“Have you tried?”
“Of course I’ve tried. For years I have followed the gleam. I thought I had something with Hilda the Hen and Bertie the Bandicoot, but nobody would look at them. I see now that they were lifeless, uninspired. I am a man who needs the direct inspiration.”
“Doesn’t Father suggest anything to you?”
Brancepeth shook his head.
“No. I have studied your father, alert for the slightest hint. . . .”
“Walter the Walrus?”
“No. Lord Bromborough looks like a walrus, yes, but unfortunately not a funny walrus. That moustache of his is majestic rather than diverting. It arouses in the beholder a feeling of awe, such as one gets on first seeing the pyramids. One senses the terrific effort behind it. I suppose it must have taken a lifetime of incessant toil to produce a cascade like that?”
“Oh, no. Father hadn’t a moustache at all a few years ago. It was only when Sir Preston began to grow one and rather flaunt it at him at District Council meetings that he buckled down to it. But why,” demanded the girl passionately, “are we wasting time talking about moustaches? Kiss me, Brancepeth. We have just time before lunch.”
Brancepeth did as directed, and the incident closed.
I do not propose (resumed Mr. Mulliner, who had broken off his narrative at this point to request Miss Postlethwaite, our able barmaid, to give him another hot Scotch and lemon) to dwell in detail on the agony of spirit endured by my nephew Brancepeth in the days that followed this poignant conversation. The spectacle of a sensitive artist soul on the rack is never a pleasant one. Suffice it to say that as each day came and went it left behind it an increased despair.
What with the brooding on his shattered romance and trying to paint Lord Bromborough’s portrait and having his nerves afflicted by the incessant bickering that went on between Lord Bromborough and Sir Preston Potter and watching Edwin Potter bleating round Muriel and not being able to think of a funny animal for the movies, it is little wonder that his normally healthy complexion began to shade off to a sallow pallor and that his eyes took on a haunted look. Before the end of the first week he had become an object to excite the pity of the tender-hearted.
Phipps the butler was tender-hearted, and had been since a boy. Brancepeth excited his pity, and he yearned to do something to ameliorate the young man’s lot. The method that suggested itself to him was to take a bottle of champagne to his room. It might prove a palliative rather than a cure, but he was convinced that it would, if only temporarily, bring the roses back to Brancepeth’s cheeks. So he took a bottle of champagne to his room on the fifth night of my nephew’s visit, and found him lying on his bed in striped pyjamas and a watered silk dressing-gown, staring at the ceiling.
The day that was now drawing to a close had been a particularly bad one for Brancepeth. The weather was unusually warm, and this had increased his despondency, so that he had found himself chafing beneath Lord Bromborough’s moustache in a spirit of sullen rebellion. Before the afternoon sitting was over, he had become conscious of a vivid feeling of hatred for the thing. He longed for the courage to get at it with a hatchet after the manner of a pioneer in some wild country hewing a clearing in the surrounding jungle. When Phipps found him, his fists were clenched and he was biting his lower lip.
“I have brought you a little champagne, sir,” said Phipps, in his kindly, silver-haired way. “It occurred to me that you might be in need of a restorative.”
Brancepeth was touched. He sat up, the hard glare in his eyes softening.
“That’s awfully good of you,” he said. “You are quite right. I could do with a drop or two from the old bin. I am feeling rather fagged. The weather, I suppose.”
A gentle smile played over the butler’s face as he watched the young man put away a couple, quick.
“No, sir. I do not think it is the weather. You may be quite frank with me, sir. I understand. It must be a very wearing task, painting his lordship. Several artists have had to give it up. There was a young fellow here in the spring of last year who had to be removed to the cottage hospital. His manner had been strange and moody for some days, and one night we found him on a ladder, in the nude, tearing and tearing away at the ivy on the west wall. His lordship’s moustache had been too much for him.”
Brancepeth groaned and refilled his glass. He knew just how his brother brush must have felt.
“The ironical thing,” continued the butler, “is that conditions would be just as bad, were the moustache non-existent. I have been in service at the Hall for a number of years, and I can assure you that his lordship was fully as hard on the eye when he was clean-shaven. Well, sir, when I tell you that I was actually relieved when he began to grow a moustache, you will understand.”
“Why, what was the matter with him?”
“He had a face like a fish, sir.”
“A fish?”
“Yes, sir.”
Something resembling an electric shock shot through Brancepeth, causing him to quiver in every limb.
“A funny fish?” he asked in a choking voice.
“Yes, sir. Extremely droll.”
Brancepeth was trembling like a saucepan of boiling milk at the height of its fever. A strange, wild thought had come into his mind. A funny fish . . .
There had never been a funny fish on the screen. Funny mice, funny cats, funny dogs . . . but not a funny fish. He stared before him with glowing eyes.
“Yes, sir, when his lordship began to grow a moustache, I was relieved. It seemed to me that it must be a change for the better. And so it was at first. But now . . . you know how it is, sir. . . . I often find myself wishing those old happy days were back again. We never know when we are well off, sir, do we?”
“You would be glad to see the last of Lord Bromborough’s moustache?”
“Yes, sir. Very glad.”
“Right,” said Brancepeth. “Then I’ll shave it off.”
In private life, butlers relax that impassive gravity which the rules of their union compel them to maintain in public. Spring something sensational on a butler when he is chatting with you in your bedroom, and he will leap and goggle like any ordinary man. Phipps did so now.
“Shave it off, sir?” he gasped, quaveringly.
“Shave it off,” said Brancepeth, pouring out the last of the champagne.
“Shave off his lordship’s moustache?”
“This very night. Leaving not a wrack behind.”
“But, sir . . .”
“Well?”
“The thought that crossed my mind, sir, was—how?”
Brancepeth clicked his tongue impatiently.
“Quite easy. I suppose he likes a little something last thing at night? Whisky or what not?”
“I always bring his lordship a glass of warm milk to the smoking-room.”
“Have you taken it to him yet?”
“Not yet, sir. I was about to do so when I left you.”
“And is there anything in the nature of a sleeping draught in the house?”
“Yes, sir. His lordship is a poor sleeper in the hot weather and generally takes a tablet of Slumberola in his milk.”
“Then, Phipps, if you are the pal I think you are, you will slip into his milk to-night not one tablet but four tablets.”
“But, sir. . . .”
“I know, I know. What you are trying to say, I presume, is—What is there in it for you? I will tell you, Phipps. There is a packet in it for you. If Lord Bromborough’s face in its stark fundamentals is as you describe it, I can guarantee that in less than no time I shall be bounding about the place trying to evade super-tax. In which event, rest assured that you will get your cut. You are sure of your facts? If I make a clearing in the tangled wildwood, I shall come down eventually to a face like a fish?”
“Yes, sir.”
“A fish with good comedy values?”
“Oh, yes, sir. Till it began to get me down, many is the laugh I have had at the sight of it.”
“That is all I wish to know. Right. Well, Phipps, can I count on your co-operation? I may add, before you speak, that this means my life’s happiness. Sit in, and I shall be able to marry the girl I adore. Refuse to do your bit, and I drift through the remainder of my life a soured, blighted bachelor.”
The butler was plainly moved. Always kindly and silver-haired, he looked kindlier and more silver-haired than ever before.
“It’s like that, is it, sir?”
“It is.”
“Well, sir, I wouldn’t wish to come between a young gentleman and his life’s happiness. I know what it means to love.”
“You do?”
“I do indeed, sir. It is not for me to boast, but there was a time when the girls used to call me Saucy George.”
“And so——?”
“I will do as you request, sir.”
“I knew it, Phipps,” said Brancepeth with emotion. “I knew that I could rely on you. All that remains, then, is for you to show me which is Lord Bromborough’s room.” He paused. A disturbing thought had struck him. “I say! Suppose he locks his door?”
“It is quite all right, sir,” the butler reassured him. “In the later summer months, when the nights are sultry, his lordship does not sleep in his room. He reposes in a hammock slung between two trees on the large lawn.”
“I know the hammock,” said Brancepeth tenderly. “Well, that’s fine, then. The thing’s in the bag, Phipps,” said Brancepeth, grasping his hand. “I don’t know how to express my gratitude. If everything develops as I expect it to; if Lord Bromborough’s face gives me the inspiration which I anticipate and I clean up big, you, I repeat, shall share my riches. In due season there will call at your pantry elephants laden with gold, and camels bearing precious stones and rare spices. Also apes, ivory and peacocks. And . . . you say your name is George?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then my eldest child shall be christened George. Or, if female, Georgiana.”
“Thank you very much, sir.”
“Not at all,” said Brancepeth. “A pleasure.”
Brancepeth’s first impression on waking next morning was that he had had a strange and beautiful dream. It was a vivid, lovely thing, all about stealing out of the house in striped pyjamas and a watered silk dressing-gown, armed with a pair of scissors, and stooping over the hammock where Lord Bromborough lay and razing his great moustache Joyeuse to its foundations. And he was just heaving a wistful sigh and wishing it were true, when he found that it was. It all came back to him—the furtive sneak downstairs, the wary passage of the lawn, the snip-snip-snip of the scissors blending with a strong man’s snores in the silent night. It was no dream. The thing had actually occurred. His host’s upper lip had become a devastated area.
It was not Brancepeth’s custom, as a rule, to spring from his bed at the beginning of a new day, but he did so now. He was consumed with a burning eagerness to gaze upon his handiwork, for the first time to see Lord Bromborough steadily and see him whole. Scarcely ten minutes had elapsed before he was in his clothes and on his way to the breakfast-room. The other, he knew, was an early riser, and even so great a bereavement as he had suffered would not deter him from getting at the coffee and kippers directly he caught a whiff of them.
Only Phipps, however, was in the breakfast-room. He was lighting wicks under the hot dishes on the sideboard. Brancepeth greeted him jovially.
“Good morning, Phipps. What ho, what ho, with a hey nonny nonny and a hot cha-cha.”
The butler was looking nervous, like Macbeth interviewing Lady Macbeth after one of her visits to the spare room.
“Good morning, sir. Er—might I ask, sir. . . .”
“Oh, yes,” said Brancepeth. “The operation was a complete success. Everything went according to plan.”
“I am very glad to hear it, sir.”
“Not a hitch from start to finish. Tell me, Phipps,” said Brancepeth, helping himself buoyantly to a fried egg and a bit of bacon and seating himself at the table, “what sort of a fish did Lord Bromborough look like before he had a moustache?”
The butler reflected.
“Well, sir, I don’t know if you have seen Sidney the Sturgeon?”
“Eh?”
“On the pictures, sir. I recently attended a cinematographic performance at Norwich—it was on my afternoon off last week—and,” said Phipps, chuckling gently at the recollection, “they were showing a most entertaining new feature, ‘The Adventures of Sidney the Sturgeon.’ It came on before the big picture, and it was all I could do to keep a straight face. This sturgeon looked extremely like his lordship in the old days.”
He drifted from the room and Brancepeth stared after him, stunned. His air castles had fallen about him in ruins. Fame, fortune, and married bliss were as far away from him as ever. All his labour had been in vain. If there was already a funny fish functioning on the silver screen, it was obvious that it would be mere waste of time to do another. He clasped his head in his hands and groaned over his fried egg. And, as he did so, the door opened.
“Ha!” said Lord Bromborough’s voice. “Good morning, good morning.”
Brancepeth spun round with a sharp jerk which sent a piece of bacon flying off his fork as if it had been shot from a catapult. Although his host’s appearance could not affect his professional future now, he was consumed with curiosity to see what he looked like. And, having spun round, he sat transfixed. There before him stood Lord Bromborough, but not a hair of his moustache was missing. It flew before him like a banner in all its pristine luxuriance.
“Eh, what?” said Lord Bromborough, sniffing. “Kedgeree? Capital, capital.”
He headed purposefully for the sideboard. The door opened again, and Edwin Potter came in, looking more of a boob than ever.
In addition to looking like a boob, Edwin Potter seemed worried.
“I say,” he said, “my father’s missing.”
“On how many cylinders?” asked Lord Bromborough. He was a man who liked his joke of a morning.
“I mean to say,” continued Edwin Potter, “I can’t find him. I went to speak to him about something just now, and his room was empty and his bed had not been slept in.”
Lord Bromborough was dishing out kedgeree on to a plate.
“That’s all right,” he said. “He wanted to try my hammock last night, so I let him. If he slept as soundly as I did, he slept well. I came over all drowsy as I was finishing my glass of hot milk and I woke this morning in an arm-chair in the smoking-room. Ah, my dear,” he went on, as Muriel entered, “come along and try this kedgeree. It smells excellent. I was just telling our young friend here that his father slept in my hammock last night.”
Muriel’s face was wearing a look of perplexity.
“Out in the garden, do you mean?”
“Of course I mean out in the garden. You know where my hammock is. I’ve seen you lying in it.”
“Then there must be a goat in the garden.”
“Goat?” said Lord Bromborough, who had now taken his place at the table and was shovelling kedgeree into himself like a stevedore loading a grain ship. “What do you mean, goat? There’s no goat in the garden. Why should there be a goat in the garden?”
“Because something has eaten off Sir Preston’s moustache.”
“What!”
“Yes. I met him outside, and the shrubbery had completely disappeared. Here he is. Look.”
What seemed at first to Brancepeth a total stranger was standing in the doorway. It was only when the newcomer folded his arms and began to speak in a familiar rasping voice that he recognized Sir Preston Potter, Bart., of Wapleigh Towers.
“So!” said Sir Preston, directing at Lord Bromborough a fiery glance full of deleterious animal magnetism.
Lord Bromborough finished his kedgeree and looked up.
“Ah, Potter,” he said. “Shaved your moustache, have you? Very sensible. It would never have amounted to anything, and you will be happier without it.”
Flame shot from Sir Preston Potter’s eye. The man was plainly stirred to his foundations.
“Bromborough,” he snarled, “I have only five things to say to you. The first is that you are the lowest, foulest fiend that ever disgraced the pure pages of Debrett; the second that your dastardly act in clipping off my moustache shows you a craven, who knew that defeat stared him in the eye and that only thus he could hope to triumph; the third that I intend to approach my lawyer immediately with a view to taking legal action; the fourth is good-bye for ever; and the fifth——”
“Have an egg,” said Lord Bromborough.
“I will not have an egg. This is not a matter which can be lightly passed off with eggs. The fifth thing I wish to say——”
“But, my dear fellow, you seem to be suggesting that I had something to do with this. I approve of what has happened, yes. I approve of it heartily. Norfolk will be a sweeter and better place to live in now that this has occurred. But it was none of my doing. I was asleep in the smoking-room all night.”
“The fifth thing I wish to say——”
“In an arm-chair. If you doubt me, I can show you the arm-chair.”
“The fifth thing I wish to say is that the engagement between my son and your daughter is at an end.”
“Like your moustache. Ha, ha!” said Lord Bromborough, who had many good qualities but was not tactful.
“Oh, but, Father!” cried Edwin Potter. “I mean, dash it!”
“And I mean,” thundered Sir Preston, “that your engagement is at an end. You have my five points quite clear, Bromborough?”
“I think so,” said Lord Bromborough, ticking them off on his fingers. “I am a foul fiend, I’m a craven, you are going to institute legal proceedings, you bid me good-bye for ever, and my daughter shall never marry your son. Yes, five in all.”
“Add a sixth. I shall see that you are expelled from all your clubs.”
“I haven’t got any.”
“Oh?” said Sir Preston, a little taken aback. “Well, if ever you make a speech in the House of Lords, beware. I shall be up in the gallery, booing.”
He turned and strode from the room, followed by Edwin, protesting bleatingly. Lord Bromborough took a cigarette from his case.
“Silly old ass,” he said. “I expect that moustache of his was clipped off by a body of public-spirited citizens. Like the Vigilantes they have in America. It is absurd to suppose that a man could grow a beastly, weedy caricature of a moustache like Potter’s without inflaming popular feeling. No doubt they have been lying in wait for him for months. Lurking. Watching their opportunity. Well, my dear, so your wedding’s off. A nuisance in a way of course, for I’d just bought a new pair of trousers to give you away in. Still it can’t be helped.”
“No, it can’t be helped,” said Muriel. “Besides there will be another one along in a minute.”
She shot a tender smile at Brancepeth, but on his lips there was no answering simper. He sat in silence, crouched over his fried egg.
What did it profit him, he was asking himself bitterly, that the wedding was off? He himself could never marry Muriel. He was a penniless artist without prospects. He would never invent a comic animal for the movies now. There had been an instant when he had hoped that Sir Preston’s uncovered face might suggest one, but the hope had died at birth. Sir Preston Potter, without his moustache, had merely looked like a man without a moustache.
He became aware that his host was addressing him.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said, ‘Got a light?’”
“Oh, sorry,” said Brancepeth.
He took out his lighter and gave it a twiddle. Then, absently, he put the flame to the cigarette between his host’s lips.
Or, rather, for preoccupation had temporarily destroyed his judgment of distance, to the moustache that billowed above and around it. And the next moment there was a sheet of flame and a cloud of acrid smoke. When this had cleared away, only a little smouldering stubble was left of what had once been one of Norfolk’s two most outstanding eyesores.
A barely human cry rent the air, but Brancepeth hardly heard it. He was staring like one in a trance at the face that confronted him through the shrouding mists, fascinated by the short, broad nose, the bulging eyes, the mouth that gaped and twitched. It was only when his host made a swift dive across the table with bared teeth and clutching hands that Prudence returned to its throne. He slid under the table and came out on the other side.
“Catch him!” cried the infuriated peer. “Trip him up! Sit on his head!”
“Certainly not,” said Muriel. “He is the man I love.”
“Is he!” said Lord Bromborough, breathing heavily as he crouched for another spring. “Well, he’s the man I am going to disembowel with my bare hands—when I catch him.”
“I think I should nip through the window, darling,” said Muriel gently.
Brancepeth weighed the advice hastily and found it good. The window, giving on to the gravel drive, was, he perceived, open at the bottom. The sweet summer air floated in, and an instant later he was floating out. As he rose from the gravel, something solid struck him on the back of the head. It was a coffee-pot.
But coffee-pots, however shrewdly aimed, mattered little to Brancepeth now. This one had raised a painful contusion, and he had in addition skinned both hands and one of his knees. His trousers, moreover, a favourite pair, had a large hole in them. Nevertheless, his heart was singing within him.
For Phipps had been wrong. Phipps was an ass. Phipps did not know a fish when he saw one. Lord Bromborough’s face did not resemble that of a fish at all. It suggested something much finer, much fuller of screen possibilities, much more box-office than a fish. In that one blinding instant of illumination before he had dived under the table, Brancepeth had seen Lord Bromborough for what he was—Ferdinand the Frog.
He turned, to perceive his host in the act of hurling a cottage loaf.
“Muriel!” he cried.
“Hullo?” said the girl, who had joined her father at the window and was watching the scene with great interest.
“I love you, Muriel.”
“Same here.”
“But for the moment I must leave you.”
“I would,” said Muriel. She glanced over her shoulder. “He’s gone to get the kedgeree.” And Brancepeth saw that Lord Bromborough had left his butt. “He is now,” she added, “coming back.”
“Will you wait for me, Muriel?”
“To all eternity.”
“It will not be necessary,” said Brancepeth. “Call it six months or a year. By that time I shall have won fame and fortune.”
He would have spoken further, but at this moment Lord Bromborough reappeared, poising the kedgeree. With a loving smile and a wave of the hand, Brancepeth leaped smartly to one side. Then, turning, he made his way down the drive, gazing raptly into a future of Rolls-Royces, caviare and silk underclothing made to measure.
A gaping chasm opened in the hillside. The air became full of a sort of macédoine of grass, dirt, flowers, and beetles. And dimly in the centre of this moving hash, one perceived the ball travelling well. Accompanied by about a pound of mixed solids, it cleared the brow and vanished from our sight.