“What hit you?” I simply couldn’t follow the blighter.
“Oh, ah!” I’ve seen poor old Bingo through so many unsuccessful love-affairs that I’d almost forgotten there was a girl mixed up with that Goodwood business. Of course! Charlotte Corday Rowbotham. And she had given him the raspberry, I remembered, and gone off with Comrade Butt.
“I went through torments. Recently, however, I’ve--er--bucked up a bit. Tell me, Bertie, what are you doing down here? I didn’t know you knew these people.”
“Me? Why, I’ve known them since I was a kid.”
Young Bingo put his feet down with a thud.
“Do you mean to say you’ve known Lady Cynthia all that time?”
“Rather! She can’t have been seven when I met her first.”
“Good Lord!” said young Bingo. He looked at me for the first time as though I amounted to something, and swallowed a mouthful of smoke the wrong way. “I love that girl, Bertie,” he went on, when he’d finished coughing.
“Don’t speak of her in that horrible casual way. She’s an angel. An angel! Was she talking about me at all at dinner, Bertie?”
“I remember one thing. She said she thought you good-looking.”
Young Bingo closed his eyes in a sort of ecstasy. Then he picked up the notebook.
“Pop off now, old man, there’s a good chap,” he said, in a hushed, far-away voice. “I’ve got a bit of writing to do.”
“Poetry, if you must know. I wish the dickens,” said young Bingo, not without some bitterness, “she had been christened something except Cynthia. There isn’t a dam’ word in the language it rhymes with. Ye gods, how I could have spread myself if she had only been called Jane!”
Bright and early next morning, as I lay in bed blinking at the sunlight on the dressing-table and wondering when Jeeves was going to show up with a cup of tea, a heavy weight descended on my toes, and the voice of young Bingo polluted the air. The blighter had apparently risen with the lark.
“Leave me,” I said, “I would be alone. I can’t see anybody till I’ve had my tea.”
“When Cynthia smiles,” said young Bingo, “the skies are blue; the world takes on a roseate hue: birds in the garden trill and sing, and Joy is king of everything, when Cynthia smiles.” He coughed, changing gears. “When Cynthia frowns----”
“I’m reading you my poem. The one I wrote to Cynthia last night. I’ll go on, shall I?”