A Damsel in Distress, P. G. Wodehouse [best finance books of all time .txt] 📗

for the door-handle, so I knocked off his hat, and while he was retrieving it we moved on and escaped.”

The girl gave another silver peal of laughter.

“Oh, what a shame I couldn’t see it. But how resourceful of you! How did you happen to think of it?”

“It just came to me,” said George modestly.

A serious look came into the girl’s face. The smile died out of her eyes. She shivered.

“When I think how some men might have behaved in your place!”

“Oh, no. Any man would have done just what I did. Surely, knocking off Percy’s hat was an act of simple courtesy which anyone would have performed automatically!”

“You might have been some awful bounder. Or, what would have been almost worse, a slow-witted idiot who would have stopped to ask questions before doing anything. To think I should have had the luck to pick you out of all London!”

“I’ve been looking on it as a piece of luck⁠—but entirely from my viewpoint.”

She put a small hand on his arm, and spoke earnestly.

“Mr. Bevan, you mustn’t think that, because I’ve been laughing a good deal and have seemed to treat all this as a joke, you haven’t saved me from real trouble. If you hadn’t been there and hadn’t acted with such presence of mind, it would have been terrible!”

“But surely, if that fellow was annoying you, you could have called a policeman?”

“Oh, it wasn’t anything like that. It was much, much worse. But I mustn’t go on like this. It isn’t fair on you.” Her eyes lit up again with the old shining smile. “I know you have no curiosity about me, but still there’s no knowing whether I might not arouse some if I went on piling up the mystery. And the silly part is that really there’s no mystery at all. It’s just that I can’t tell anyone about it.”

“That very fact seems to me to constitute the makings of a pretty fair mystery.”

“Well, what I mean is, I’m not a princess in disguise trying to escape from anarchists, or anything like those things you read about in books. I’m just in a perfectly simple piece of trouble. You would be bored to death if I told you about it.”

“Try me.”

She shook her head.

“No. Besides, here we are.” The cab had stopped at the hotel, and a commissionaire was already opening the door. “Now, if you haven’t repented of your rash offer and really are going to be so awfully kind as to let me have that money, would you mind rushing off and getting it, because I must hurry. I can just catch a good train, and it’s hours to the next.”

“Will you wait here? I’ll be back in a moment.”

“Very well.”

The last George saw of her was another of those exhilarating smiles of hers. It was literally the last he saw of her, for, when he returned not more than two minutes later, the cab had gone, the girl had gone, and the world was empty.

To him, gaping at this wholly unforeseen calamity the commissionaire vouchsafed information.

“The young lady took the cab on, sir.”

“Took the cab on?”

“Almost immediately after you had gone, sir, she got in again and told the man to drive to Waterloo.”

George could make nothing of it. He stood there in silent perplexity, and might have continued to stand indefinitely, had not his mind been distracted by a dictatorial voice at his elbow.

“You, sir! Dammit!”

A second taxicab had pulled up, and from it a stout, scarlet-faced young man had sprung. One glance told George all. The hunt was up once more. The bloodhound had picked up the trail. Percy was in again!

For the first time since he had become aware of her flight, George was thankful that the girl had disappeared. He perceived that he had too quickly eliminated Percy from the list of the Things That Matter. Engrossed with his own affairs, and having regarded their late skirmish as a decisive battle from which there would be no rallying, he had overlooked the possibility of this annoying and unnecessary person following them in another cab⁠—a task which, in the congested, slow-moving traffic, must have been a perfectly simple one. Well, here he was, his soul manifestly all stirred up and his blood-pressure at a far higher figure than his doctor would have approved of, and the matter would have to be opened all over again.

“Now then!” said the stout young man.

George regarded him with a critical and unfriendly eye. He disliked this fatty degeneration excessively. Looking him up and down, he could find no point about him that gave him the least pleasure, with the single exception of the state of his hat, in the side of which he was rejoiced to perceive there was a large and unshapely dent.

“You thought you had shaken me off! You thought you’d given me the slip! Well, you’re wrong!”

George eyed him coldly.

“I know what’s the matter with you,” he said. “Someone’s been feeding you meat.”

The young man bubbled with fury. His face turned a deeper scarlet. He gesticulated.

“You blackguard! Where’s my sister?”

At this extraordinary remark the world rocked about George dizzily. The words upset his entire diagnosis of the situation. Until that moment he had looked upon this man as a Lothario, a pursuer of damsels. That the other could possibly have any right on his side had never occurred to him. He felt unmanned by the shock. It seemed to cut the ground from under his feet.

“Your sister!”

“You heard what I said. Where is she?”

George was still endeavouring to adjust his scattered faculties. He felt foolish and apologetic. He had imagined himself unassailably in the right, and it now appeared that he was in the wrong.

For a moment he was about to become conciliatory. Then the recollection of the girl’s panic and her hints at some trouble which threatened her⁠—presumably through the medium of this man, brother or no brother⁠—checked him. He did not know what it was all about, but the one thing that