A Knight on Wheels Part 35

"No."

"Do you skate?"

"Yes."

"I have never seen you at Princes."

"I have never been there," confessed Philip, feeling very much ashamed of himself.

"How tragic! Where _do_ you go? Is there another place?"

"I skate--whenever there is a frost," said Philip. "I am rather bucolic."

"Oh, you mean on ponds, and that sort of thing," said Miss Duncombe gently. "You shouldn't, you know. It's not done now. Are you very fond of exercise?"

"I take all I can."

"So do I. I adore it. Do you hunt?"

"Once in a way."

"Polo?"

"No."

"You _are_ a monosyllabic man! What do you go in for?"

"Rugby football."

Miss Duncombe shivered elegantly.

"How very quaint--and how squdgy!" she said. "I am afraid you are a Cave Man."

"What is that?"

"Some other girls and I," explained Miss Babs, "have a sort of little society of our own, called the Idealists. Our _seances_ are simply too thrilling. We sit on cushions round the floor and smoke Russian cigarettes and drink the most divine liqueurs--pink or green or gold--and have the duckiest little debates."

Philip, dumbly gripping the tube of French pastry, gaped, quite frankly.

This eccentric young female was an entirely new type to him.

"What do you debate about?" he asked respectfully, sipping his tea, which by this time was stone cold.

"Oh," said Miss Babs vaguely, "subconscious influences, and soul-harmonies, and things like that. We divide men and women into various cla.s.ses. Men like you are Cave Men. Most of the Cave Men I know are soldiers. Then there are Soul Men--actors, and musicians. Then creatures who do nothing but crawl about in beautiful clothes are Thing Men. Men with shiny faces and hot hands are b.u.t.ter Men. We divide women differently. Most of them are Impossibles, but there are a good many All-Buts. Life is so varied. The human soul, with all its infinite shades of colour--"

Philip, quite intoxicated by the exotic atmosphere in which he found himself, bit heavily and incautiously into the roll of pastry.

Straightway from either end there sprang a long and sinuous jet of clotted cream. The rearmost section shot violently down his own throat, nearly choking him; that in front descended upon the inlaid parquet floor in a tubular cascade, where it formed an untidy and conspicuous ant-hill.

In a moment one of Miss Duncombe's daintily-shod feet slid forward, her skimpy skirt forming a promontory which effectually hid the disaster from the eyes of others--especially Lady Rendle.

"Mop it up quickly," she said in an excited whisper. "Take your handkerchief--anything! No one will see." She spoke breathlessly, with all the zeal of a faithful sister screening a delinquent small brother from the wrath to come.

Philip, as he bent confusedly down to clear up the mess, recognised with genuine pleasure that for all her soulfulness and pose Miss Babs Duncombe was nothing more, after all, than a jolly little schoolgirl suffering from a bad attack of adolescence.

"That was the sweetest thing that ever happened," said Babs, after all traces of havoc had been obliterated. "If you could have _seen_ yourself when the cream squirted out of the end! I must tell the Idealists about it at the next _seance_. Now, I must not laugh any more, or I shall get a purple face. Tell me, is my nose shiny?"

She submitted her peach-like countenance to Philip's embarra.s.sed inspection.

"It looks all right," he said.

"I don't believe you," said Miss Duncombe, and extracted a small mirror from a gold bag. She viewed herself with a gasp of dismay.

"How can you say such a thing?" she exclaimed indignantly.

Swiftly she produced a powder-puff, and proceeded to repair the ravages caused by excessive mirth in a warm room. The unsophisticated Philip gazed at her, speechless, and was still gazing when he was whirled away by his indefatigable hostess--Lady Rendle believed in keeping her male callers circulating: it enabled those whose conversational stock-in-trade was scanty to indulge in the luxury of repet.i.tion--to the side of one Sheila Garvey.

Miss Garvey began at once:--

"Do you play cricket at all?"

"No, not now," said Philip; "but I play--"

Apparently Miss Garvey had no desire to discuss other pastimes.

"Still, you go to Lords occasionally, I suppose," she suggested.

Yes, Philip went to Lords.

"And I hope you are Middles.e.x."

Yes; on consideration, Philip was Middles.e.x.

"My _fiance_ plays for Middles.e.x," mentioned Miss Garvey carelessly.

Philip, secretly blessing this unknown cricketer, said eagerly:--

"I should like to hear about _him_"--implying that the rest of Middles.e.x did not matter.

After that he enjoyed a welcome rest. By occasionally supplying such fuel as, "What did he do against the Australians in the fourth Test Match?" or, "What does he think about the off-theory?" he maintained a full head of steam on Miss Garvey for something like twenty minutes. He sat thankfully listening and watching the clock, secure in the knowledge that time was slipping away and that Timothy had promised that their call should not extend beyond half-past five.

"Another five minutes and we are out of the wood," he said to himself.

But he was mistaken. He had just accompanied Miss Garvey (chaperoned, of course, by the _fiance_) step by step, match by match, through an entire cricket-tour in the Antipodes, including five Test Matches (with a special excursion up-country in order to see the _fiance_ score a century against Twenty-Two of Woolloomoolloo), when his hostess once more intervened, with the inevitable sentence:--

"Mr. Meldrum, I want to introduce you to a charming girl."

Once more, with leaden footsteps, Philip crossed the room. Timothy apparently had forgotten all about both him and the time. A despairing glance in his direction revealed him ensconced in a window-seat with Miss Babs Duncombe. In that fastness he remained for another forty minutes. When at length, restored to a sense of duty by the departure of Miss Duncombe and his introduction to a grim young woman interested in Foreign Missions, Master Timothy set out to reclaim his long-lost friend, Philip had pa.s.sed through the hands, _seriatim_, of a damsel who had besought him to obtain for her autograph-book the signature of a certain music-hall comedian (mainly noted for an alcoholic repertoire and a deplorable wardrobe) whom she affirmed she "dearly loved"; another who endeavoured to convert him to the worship of Debussy, not desisting until she discovered that Philip imagined Debussy to be a French watering-place; and a third, whose t.i.tle to fame appeared to be founded upon the fact that she had once bitten a policeman in order to demonstrate her fitness to exercise the Parliamentary franchise.

"Now, we will go to the Club and drink deep," said Timothy, as they turned out of Lowndes Square. "You haven't thanked me yet, O brother, for your P.S.A."