‘Hallo, doctor. That you? Where’s that brother-in-law of mine got to? Oh—there he is. Hi! Cecil …’
But Arndale had now reached the end of Selkirk Place and was visible there for a moment in the light of the arc-lamp over the bar, before he turned to his right hand up the lane and disappeared. Bertie Challoner replaced his pipe between his teeth resentfully and turned to regard Melhuish’s companion with an indifferent curiosity which changed abruptly to enthusiasm.
‘Why … Great Scott!’ he exclaimed, ‘it’s—’
He held out expansively an immense hand which Gore, recalling in time the trials of strength of other days, took very cautiously.
‘It is,’ he said. ‘How are you, young fellah?’
‘Fit. Come in and have a little drink. You must. I only heard tonight that you’d come home. I’ve been away for a few days. Come in and have a little drink, doctor, won’t you?’
‘Thanks, no, Challoner. I don’t think so. Good-night. Good-night again, Colonel.’
‘Good-night, doctor.’
Challoner’s gaze followed Melhuish’s retreat for a moment or two before he turned to conduct Gore into his elaborately-equipped bachelor quarters on the ground floor—one of the flats into which Number 73, like many others of the big houses in Selkirk Place, had been divided since the war.
‘Stiff old stick,’ he muttered, with a grimace. ‘Can’t think why Pickles married him. You dined with the Melhuishs tonight, Arndale told me. That’s a comfortable chair. I couldn’t believe Arndale when he told me you had come home. Cigarettes? You look fit. How’s things? Come back for good?’
‘Not sure,’ smiled Gore. ‘England on a night like this is not alluring.’
‘Filthy, isn’t it? Enough to make a chap commit murder or suicide or anything, to look out there into that mouldy Green in a fog like this. You’re staying at the Riverside, I hear. You look fit.’
‘Thank you, Bertie. As that is the second time you have made that remark in sixty seconds, I presume I must regard it as deserved. As a matter of fact, you will be glad to learn, I am perfectly fit.’
Challoner smiled vaguely—indeed he had made no pretence whatever of listening—threw, considering the hour, a surprisingly large quantity of coal on the fire, stirred it noisily, sighed, and subsided into a big chair and a silence which became at length embarrassing. His healthy, brick-red face, good-looking in a rather massive, heavy way, boyish still in repose despite its owner’s thirty years, assumed an expression of gloomy anxiety as its smile faded. Something had occurred to upset Master Bertie Challoner recently, Gore decided. He looked most unmistakably peeved and worried of mind.
‘Look here, my dear chap,’ said the visitor, preparing to take his departure. ‘I’m sure you’re wanting to get down to it, aren’t you? I’ll run in tomorrow morning sometime—’
But Challoner was visibly distressed by this reflection upon his hospitality.
‘Not at all, not at all. I’m simply delighted to see you, Wick—you know I am. Go on—sit down again, old chap. I’m—I’m just a bit worried about something, that’s all. Don’t you bother about me. I shouldn’t turn in for another good hour or so, anyhow. What sort of an evening did you have at the Melhuishs’? Pretty deadly, eh? Old Jimmy Wellmore, I hear—and the gashly Angela. I say, isn’t she a weird old thing? I simply can’t stick her. I’ll swear she drinks or dopes or something.’
‘You have a bad mind, young fellah,’ grinned Gore. ‘You always had. What a shocking thing to think of a lady who—well, she couldn’t be your mother, I suppose, but at any rate she is sufficiently mature to claim your respect.’
Challoner laid aside the extinct pipe which he had been regarding for some moments with intense displeasure, selected another from a crowded rack, and blew into it exhaustively and morosely.
‘I bet the old thing dopes,’ he said doggedly. ‘She’s as yellow as a Chink. Weird old frump … Gets up at three o’clock in the day, Sylvia says, and floats round in a dressing-gown until she goes to bed again, playing with those filthy little yapping dogs of hers—things like that ought to be put into a lethal chamber … How d’you think Pickles looks?’
He replaced the pipe in the rack, lighted a cigarette, and flopped into his chair again disconsolately. ‘This,’ Gore reflected, ‘is a little trying. I must get away before he unburdens his soul. A woman, of course—one of these fair creatures he’s got in a row on his mantelpiece, I suppose.’
Aloud, he said, with decision, ‘Very nice indeed. Quite the nicest person to look at I’ve seen since—well, since I saw her last, I believe. You got a game leg now, old chap?’
Challoner nodded absently.
‘Bit. Had a baddish crash in nineteen-eighteen … What’d you think of Melhuish?’
Now a young man of Bertie Challoner’s type must indeed be disturbed of soul, Gore told himself, if he declined an opportunity of dilating upon a game leg attributable to his share in the greatest of wars. Why this persistent desire to return to the Melhuishs’ and their dinner party?
‘Melhuish? Very nice. Very nice indeed. Not precisely … er … gushing. But a topping good chap, I should say.’
‘Oh, he’s all right, I suppose. Damn supercilious smile. Gets on my nerves. Sort of “You poor unfortunate ass, what are you alive for?” sort of smile. Not that I pretend to be exactly one of your brainy kind. I’m not.’
‘No,’ murmured the guest sympathetically.
‘Still, just because he’s a bit of a dab with a stethoscope, I don’t see that he need treat every one who isn’t as a worm. I bet Pickles often wishes she’d married old Cecil, after all.’
Gore deposited the ash of his cigarette in an ash-tray very, very carefully.
‘Yes?’ he said encouragingly. ‘For a moment it had occurred to me to think of another substitute for her actual choice … Yes?’
‘I suppose you know that Arndale was deadly keen about her, don’t you?’
‘Well, no. I can’t say that I had known that. Though I suppose one may assume fairly safely that most of the young fellahs—and old fellahs, for that matter—in this part of the world—’
‘Oh, yes. But old Arndale went all out for her, you know, until he found he hadn’t a show. He was absolutely silly about her. You ask Sylvia. Sylvia knows jolly well that he only married her because she was such a pal of Pickles’s. It’s a fact. She’ll tell you so herself without a blink. Of course Sylvia’s my sister, and all that—and she and Arndale get on all right, as it has turned out—I mean, everything considered. But if you ask me, if it came to picking Sylvia or Pickles out of the water, tomorrow—well, I bet old Sylvia would feed the fishes.’
Gore smiled pleasantly and still more encouragingly upon this most candid of brothers.
‘This,’ he said, ‘is most interesting. May I ask when this tragedy of unrequited love … came to a head, as it were?’
Challoner considered.
‘When? Oh … it was going on for a couple of years before Arndale married Sylvia. Nineteen-thirteen-fourteen-fifteen … just before the war and during the first year or so of it. I remember Sylvia used to tell me about it in her letters when I went to France first. Both she and Pickles were rather fed up with Cecil because he hadn’t joined up, I remember.’
Gore examined one of his host’s cigarettes critically.
‘These look about eighteen bob a hundred.’
‘A quid,’ said Challoner laconically. His guest sighed enviously and replaced the cigarette in the miniature