Bingo Bans the Bomb

When bingo little's wife, the popular novelist Rosie M. Banks, exerted her pull and secured for Bingo the editorship of Wee Tots, the journal for the nursery and the home, she had said it would be best not to haggle about salary but to take what H. C. Purkiss, its proprietor, offered, and Bingo had done so, glad to have even the smallest bit of loose change to rattle in his pocket. But came a day when he felt he could do with rather more, so he went to Mr. Purkiss and asked for a raise, and Mr. Purkiss stared at him incredulously.

"A what?" he cried, wincing as if some unfriendly hand had gripped him.

"Just to show your confidence in me and encourage me to rise to new heights of achievement," said Bingo. "It would be money well spent," he pointed out, tenderly picking a piece of fluff off Mr. Purkiss' coat sleeve, for everything helps on these occasions.

Mr. Purkiss shook his head. There were many reasons why he found himself unable to accede to the request---the hardness of the times, the growing cost of pulp paper, the severity of the income tax, to name but three. These and six or seven others he placed before his right-hand man, and an hour or so later, his daily task completed, the right-hand man went on his way, feeling like a left-hand man.

The June evening was one of those fine evenings that come to London perhaps twice in the course of an English summer, but its beauty struck no answering chord in Bingo's soul. The sun was smiling, but he could not raise so much as a simper. The skies were blue, but he was (continued on page 206) Bingo Bans the Bomb(continued from page 93) bluer. He told himself that he had not really hoped, for Mr. Purkiss notoriously belonged to the slow-with-a-buck or Jack Benny school of thought and no one had ever found it easy to induce him to loosen up, but nevertheless the disappointment was bitter. And what set the seal on his depression was that Mrs. Bingo was not available to console him. He yearned to go and cry on her shoulder, but she was unfortunately not among those present. She had left for Brighton with Mrs. Purkiss that morning to join in the Founders' Day-celebrations at the seminary where they had both been educated, and would not be back till tomorrow.

It seemed to him that all he could do was go to the Drones Club for a bite of dinner, possibly take in a movie after the meal and then return to his lonely home and so to bed, and he was passing with bowed head through Trafalgar Square en route for Dover Street, where the club was situated, when he heard a soprano voice exclaim "Lord love a duck!" and, looking up, saw that what had interrupted his reverie was a red-haired girl of singular beauty who had that indefinable air of being ready to raise hell at the drop of a hat which red-haired girls so often have.

"Oh, hullo," he said, speaking with the touch of awkwardness customary in young husbands accosted by red-haired girls when their wives are away. He had had no difficulty in recognizing her. Her name was Mabel Murgatroyd, and they had met some months previously in a water barrel in somebody's garden on the occasion when the police had raided the gambling club they were attending and it had been necessary to seek whatever shelter the neighborhood could provide. It was plain that the incident was green in Miss Murgatroyd's memory also, for she said:

"Well, if it isn't my old roommate Bingo Little! Fancy meeting you again. Been in any interesting water barrels lately?"

"No. not lately."

"Nor me. I don't know how it is with you, but I've sort of lost my taste for them. When you've seen one. I often say, you've seen them all. I'm going in more for politics these days. A bunch of boys and girls, including me, have decided to ban the bomb."

"What bomb would that be?"

"The one that's going to knock us all cross-eyed unless steps are taken through the proper channels. We're protesting against it. Every now and then we march from Aldermaston. protesting like a ton of bricks. We also sit."

"Sit?"

"That's right."

"Sit where?"

"Wherever we happen to be. Here, to take an instance at random."

"What, in the middle of Trafalgar Square? Don't the cops object?"

"You bet they do. They scoop us in and the papers feature it next morning and that helps the cause. Ah, here comes a rozzer now, just when we need him. Down with you," said Mabel Murgatroyd, and seizing Bingo by the wrist she drew him with her to the ground, causing 16 taxicabs, 3 omnibuses and 11 private cars to halt in their tracks, their drivers what-the-hell-ing in no uncertain terms.

It was a moment fraught with discomfort for Bingo. Apart from the fact that all this was doing his trousers no good, he had the feeling that he was making himself conspicuous, a thing he greatly disliked. But these minor qualms were overshadowed by the graver dysphoria occasioned by the arrival of the government employee to whom his companion had alluded. He was about eight feet, seven in height, and his mood was plainly not sunny. For weeks he had been straining his back lifting debutantes and their escorts off London's roadways, and like so many of his colleagues he was sick of it. Without even saying "Ho" or "What's all this?" he attached himself to the persons of Bingo and Miss Murgatroyd and led them from the scene. And in next to no time Bingo found himself in one of Bosher Street's cozy prison cells, due to lace the awful majesty of the law on the following morning.

It was not, of course, an entirely novel experience for him. In his bachelor days he had generally found himself in custody on boat-race night. But he was now a respectable married man and had said goodbye to all that, and it is not too much to say that he burned with shame and remorse. Nor did the morrow bring anything in the nature of a happy ending.

"Five pounds," said the Bosher Street magistrate, a man of few words. "Next case," and Bingo, though he felt that a wiser beak would have been content with a reprimand, paid the money to the clerk of the court and was allowed to depart.

Mr. Purkiss was not at the office of Wee Tots when he arrived, and he was consequently at leisure to review his position. Considering the vicissitudes through which he had passed, his morale was reasonably high. He had slept only fitfully on the plank bed provided for their customers by the authorities and he had had practically no breakfast, but he felt that the experience had made him a deeper, graver man, which is always a good thing. And what comforted him particularly was the thought that there was no chance of Mrs. Bingo finding out how he had been employing himself in her absence, for with great presence of mind he had given his name as Charles de Gaulle with an address in East Dulwich. He and Mrs. Bingo had always conducted their married life on strictly turtledove lines, but he was a shrewd enough student of the sex to know that you can push a turtledove just so far. Amiable though his Rosie's disposition was, he knew that if informed that he had been sitting in Trafalgar Square cheek by jowl, as it were, with red-haired girls of singular beauty she would explode with as loud a report as the bomb which he had been engaged in banning.

It was, accordingly, with the feeling that if this was not the best of all possible worlds, it would do till another came along that he addressed himself to the morning's correspondence, and he was reading a letter from Tommy Bootle (12) about his cat Tibbles, when the telephone rang and Mrs. Bingo's voice floated over the wire.

"Bingo?"

"Oh, hullo, light of my life. You back?"

"I am."

"How did everything go?"

"Quite satisfactorily."

"Did Mrs. Purkiss make a speech?"

"She did."

"Must have been nice for you meeting all the old college chums."

"Very."

"No doubt you swapped reminiscences of midnight feeds in the dormitory and what the games mistress said when she found Maud and Angela smoking reefers behind the gymnasium."

"Quite. Bingo, have you seen the Mirror this morning?"

"I have it on my desk, but I haven't looked at it yet."

"Turn to page eight," said Mrs. Bingo, and there was a click as she rang off.

Bingo did as directed, somewhat puzzled. Usually his mate's voice was soft and melodious, easily mistaken for silver bells ringing across a sunlit meadow in the springtime, but in the recent exchange of ideas he had seemed to sense in it a certain metallic note, and it perplexed him

But not for long. Scarcely had his eye rested on page eight when all was made clear to him and the offices of Wee Tots did one of those entrechats which Nijinsky used to do in the Russian ballet. It was as if the bomb Miss Murgatroyd disliked so much had been touched off beneath his swivel chair.

Page eight was mostly pictures. There was one of the Prime Minister opening a bazaar, another of a resident of Chipping Norton who had just celebrated his hundredth birthday, a third of students rioting in Pernambuco or Mozambique or somewhere. But the one that interested him was the one at the foot of the page. It depicted a large policeman with a girl of singular beauty in one hand and in the other a young man whose features, though somewhat distorted, he was immediately able to recognize. Newspaper photographs tend occasionally to be blurred, but this one was a credit to the artist behind the camera.

It was captioned:

Miss "ginger" murgatroyd and friends and as he gazed at it there swept over him an intense desire for a couple of quick ones. Experience had taught him that there was nothing that so stimulated the thought processes as a drop of the right stuff, and seldom had his thought processes been in such need of stimulation as now. To grab his hat and hasten to the Drones Club was with him the work of an instant. There was no place in London where the stuff was righter than at the Drones, and there, it occurred to him, he might find someone who had something to suggest. And as luck would have it, the first person he ran into in the bar was Freddie Widgeon, not only one of the finest minds in the club, but a man who all his adult life had been thinking up ingenious ways of getting himself out of trouble with the other sex.

He related his story, and Freddie, listening sympathetically, said he had frequently been in the same sort of jam himself. There was, he said, only one thing to do, and Bingo said that one would be ample.

"I am assuming," said Freddie, "that you haven't the nerve to come the heavy he-man over the little woman? Look, her in the eye, I mean, and make her wilt. Shove your chin out and say 'Oh, yeah?' and 'So what?'"

Bingo assured him that his assumption was correct.

"I thought not. Then you must have an accident."

"An accident?"

"You know the old gag about women becoming ministering angels when pain and anguish wring the brow. I can testify that it works. Her heart will melt if she sees you all bunged up with splints and bandages. The best thing would be to get knocked over by a taxicab."

"What's the next best thing?"

"I have sometimes obtained excellent results by falling down a coal hole and spraining an ankle, but it's not easy to find a good coal hole these days, so in your case I would advise returning to the office and dropping a typewriter on your foot."

"But I should break a toe."

"Exactly. You couldn't do better.

Break two or even three. No sense in spoiling the ship for a ha'p'orth of tar."

Bingo shuddered visibly.

"I couldn't do it, Freddie old man," he said, and Freddie clicked his tongue censoriously.

"You're a difficult man to help, Bingo.

Then the only thing I can suggest is that you have a double."

"I've already had one."

"I don't mean that sort of double.

Tell Mrs. Bingo that there must be someone going about the place so like you that the keenest eye is deceived."

"By Jove, Freddie," said Bingo gratefully, "I believe you've hit it."

But, back at the office, he found his enthusiasm waning. Doubts began to creep in, and what he had supposed to be the scheme of a lifetime lost some of its pristine attractiveness. Mrs. Bingo wrote stories about girls who wanted to be loved for themselves alone and strong silent men who went out into the sunset with stiff upper lips, but she was not without a certain rude intelligence and it was more than possible, he felt, that she might fail to swallow an explanation which he could now see was difficult of ingestion.

In its broad general principles the idea was good, but his story, it was plain, would need propping up. Somebody must stiffen it with a bit of verisimilitude, and who better for this purpose than Miss Murgatroyd? Her word would be believed. If he could induce her to go to Mrs. Bingo and tell her that she had never set eyes on Richard ("Bingo") Little in her life and that her Trafalgar Square crony had been a cousin of hers of the name---say---of Ernest Maltravers, the home might yet be saved from the melting pot. She was, he knew, the daughter of Lord somebody ... Blennerhassett, that was the name. He looked him up in the telephone book and was presently in communication with him.

"Oh, good morning, Lord Blennerhassett," he began.

"Who says it's good?" said the peer, who seemed to be ruffled about something.

"My name is Little."

"And mine is mud after what that ass of a daughter of mine did yesterday. I shan't be able to show my face at the club. The boys at the Athenaeum will kid the pants off me. Sitting on her fanny in the middle of Trafalgar Square and getting hauled in by the flatties! I don't know what girls are coming to these days. 'See what you've done, you blighted female,' I said to her when she rolled in from the police court. 'Blotted the escutcheon, that's what you've done.' I let her have it straight from the shoulder."

"Girls will be girls," said Bingo, hoping to soothe.

"Not while I have my health and strength they won't," said Lord Blenner-hassett.

Bingo saw that nothing was to be gained by pursuing this line of thought. Mabel Murgatroyd's parent was plainly in no mood for abstract discussion of the modern girl. Even at this distance he could hear him gnashing his teeth. Unless it was an electric drill working in the street. He changed the subject.

"I wonder if I could speak to Miss Murgatroyd?"

"Stop wondering. You can't."

"Why not?"

"Because I've shipped her off to her aunt in Edinburgh with strict instructions to stay there till she gets some sense into her fat little head. Are you a reporter?"

"No, just a friend."

Bingo had never heard the howl of a timber wolf that had stubbed its toe on a rock while hurrying through a Canadian forest, but he thought it must closely resemble the sound that nearly cracked his eardrum.

"You are, are you? No doubt one of the friends who have led her astray and started her off on all this escutcheon blotting. I'd like to skin the lot of you with a blunt knife. Bounders with beards! You have a beard, of course?"

"No, no beard."

"Don't try to fool me. All you ghastly outsiders are festooned with the fungus. You flaunt it. Why the devil don't you shave?"

"I shave every morning."

"Is that so? Then will you do me a personal favor?"

"Certainly, certainly."

"Did you shave today?"

"As a matter of fact, no. I hadn't time. I had rather a busy morning."

"Then go back to whatever germ-ridden den you inhabit and do it now. And don't use a safety razor, use one of the old-fashioned kind, because then there's a sporting chance that you may sever your blasted carotid artery, which would be what some writer fellow whose name I can't recall described as a consummation devoutly to be wished. Goodbye."

It was in thoughtful mood that Bingo replaced the receiver. He fancied that he had noticed a certain unfriendliness in Lord Blennerhassett's manner---guarded, perhaps, but nevertheless unmistakable unfriendliness---and he was conscious of that feeling of frustration that comes to those who fail to make friends and influence people: but that was not the main cause of his despondency. What was really worrying him was the realization that with Mabel Murgatroyd in Edinburgh he had lost his only chance of putting across that double thing and making it stick. It was, he now saw more clearly than ever, not at all the sort of story a young husband could expect to make convincing without the help of a strong supporting cast.

It really began to seem as if Freddie's typewriter-on-toe sequence was his only resource, and he stood for some time eying the substantial machine on which he was wont to write the Uncle Joe to His Chickabiddies page. He even lifted it and held it for a moment poised. But he could not bring himself to let it fall. He hesitated and delayed. If Shakespeare had happened to come by with Ben Jonson, he would have nudged the latter in the ribs and whispered, "See that chap, rare Ben? He illustrates exactly what I was driving at when I wrote that stuff about letting 'I dare not' wait upon 'I would' like the poor cat i' the adage."

Finally he gave up the unequal struggle. Replacing the machine, he flung himself into his chair and with his head in his hands uttered a hollow groan. As he did so, he got the impression that there was a curious echo in the room, but looking up he saw that he had been in error in attributing this to the acoustics. There had been two groans in all, and the second one had proceeded from the lips of H. C. Purkiss. The proprietor of Wee Tots was standing in the doorway of his private office, propping himself against the woodwork with an outstretched hand, and it was obvious at a glance that he was not the suave, dapper H. C. Purkiss of yesterday. There were dark circles under his eyes, and those eyes could have stepped straight onto any breakfast plate and passed without comment as poached eggs. His nervous system, too, was plainly far from being in midseason form, for when in the street outside an automobile backfired, he quivered in every limb and made what looked to Bingo like a spirited attempt to break the European record for the standing high jump.

"Ah. Mr. Little." he said huskily.

"Busy at work, I see. Good, good. Anything of interest in the morning post bag?"

"Mostly the usual gibbering. Amazing how many of our young subscribers seem to have softening of the brain. There is a letter from Wilfred Waterson (seven) about his pet tortoise that would act as a passport into any but the most choosy lunatic asylum."

"Quite, quite. But we must not expect old heads on young shoulders. And speaking of heads, I wonder if you could oblige me with a couple of aspirins? Or a glass of tomato juice with a drop of Worcestershire sauce in it would do. You have none? Too bad. It might have brought a certain relief."

Illumination flashed upon Bingo.

"Good Lord!" he cried. "Were you on a toot last night?"

Mr. Purkiss waved a deprecating hand, nearly overbalancing in the process.

"Toot is a harsh word, Mr. Little. I confess that in Mrs. Purkiss' absence I attempted to alleviate my loneliness by joining a group of friends of my bachelor days who wished to play poker. It was a lengthy session, concluding only an hour ago, and it is possible that in the course of the evening I may have exceeded---slightly---my customary intake of alcoholic refreshment. It seemed to be expected of me, and I did not like to spoil the party. But when you use the word 'toot' ..."

"It sounds like a toot to me. Yes, I would say that it had all the earmarks of a ... Gosh!" said Bingo, breaking off.

An idea of amazing brilliance had struck him. Twenty-four hours ago he would never have had the moral courage to suggest such a thing, but now that H. C. Purkiss had shown himself to be one of the boys---poker parties in the home and all that---he was convinced that if he. Bingo, begged him, Purkiss, to say that he. Bingo, had been with him, Purkiss, last night, he. Purkiss, would not have the inhumanity to refuse. And Mrs. Bingo would not dream of disbelieving a statement from such a source.

He had just opened his lips to speak, when Mr. Purkiss resumed his remarks.

"Perhaps you are right. Mr. Little. Quite possibly toot may be the mot juste. One thing is certain, it has placed me in a position of the gravest peril. I am informed by my maidservant that Mrs. Purkiss made no fewer than three attempts to reach me on the telephone last night---at ten-thirty p.m., shortly after midnight and again at four o'clock in the morning, and I greatly fear that my failure to answer her calls will have occasioned her some concern. So------"

Bingo's heart sank like an oyster going down for the third time in an oyster stew. He would have reeled beneath the shock, had he not been seated. Impossible now to assure Mrs. Bingo that he had been with Mr. Purkiss during the hours he had spent in his Bosher Street cell. So poignant was his angaish that he uttered a piercing cry, and Mr. Purkiss leaped silently into the air, dislodging some plaster from the ceiling with the top of his head.

"So," Mr. Purkiss went on, having returned to terra firma, "I should be infinitely grateful to you, Mr. Little, if you would vouch for the fact that I was with you till an advanced hour at your home. It would, indeed, do no harm if you were to tell Mrs. Purkiss that we sat up so long discussing office matters that you allowed me to spend the night in your spare room."

Bingo drew a deep breath. It has been sufficiently established that the proprietor of Wee Tots was not easy on the eye as of even date, but to him he seemed a lovely spectacle. He could not have gazed on him with more appreciation if he had been the Taj Mahal by moonlight.

His manner, however, was austere. A voice had seemed to whisper in his ear that here, if he played his cards right, he could do himself a bit of good. There was, so he had learned from a reliable source, a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, led on to fortune.

"Am I to understand, Purkiss," he said, "that you are asking me to tell a deliberate falsehood?"

"You would be doing me a great kindness."

"I'm not so sure that I feel like doing you kindnesses. Yesterday I asked you for a raise of salary and you curtly refused."

"Not curtly."

"Well, fairly curtly."

"Yes, I remember. But I have been giving the matter thought, and I am now prepared to increase your stipend by---shall we say ten pounds a month."

"No, we jolly well shan't say anything of the ruddy sort. Make it fifty."

"Fifty!"

"Well, call it forty-five."

"You would not consider thirty?"

"Certainly not."

"Very well."

"You agree?"

"I do."

The telephone rang.

"Ah," said Bingo. "That is probably my wife again. Hullo?"

"Bingo?"

"Oh, hullo, moon of my delight. What became of you when we were talking before? Why did you buzz off like a jack rabbit?"

"I had to go and look after Mrs. Purkiss."

"Something wrong with her?"

"She kept fainting. She was distracted because Mr. Purkiss was not at home all night."

Bingo laughed a jolly laugh.

"Of course he wasn't. He was with me.

We had office matters to discuss, and I took him home with me. We sat up so long that I put him in the spare room. He spent the night there."

There was a long silence at the other end of the wire. Then Mrs. Bingo spoke.

"But what about that photograph?"

"Which photograph? Oh, you mean the one in the paper. I think I know what is in your mind. It looked rather like me, didn't it? I was quite surprised. I'd often heard of this thing of fellows having doubles, but I'd never come across an instance of it before. Except in books, of course. I remember one by E. Phillips Oppenheim where there was an English bloke who looked just like a German bloke, and the English bloke posed as the German bloke or vice versa, I've forgotten which. I believe it caused some confusion. But, getting back to that photograph, obviously if I spent the night with Purkiss I couldn't have spent it in a dungeon cell, as my double presumably did. But perhaps you would care to have a word with Purkiss, who is here at my side. For you, Purkiss," said Bingo, handing him the receiver.