V
THE BASKET IN THE BOUNDARY ROAD
The doctors will tell you sometimes that motoring is good for the nerves; and since so many of them now buy cars, and there's no man like a doctor for looking after his own flesh and blood, I suppose they mean what they say. All the same, I wish I'd had a doctor with me the night I picked up Mabel Bellamy; for if his nerves had stood that and he hadn't given himself quinine and iron for the next two months, why, I'd have paid his fee myself.
You see, it was a rum job from the very beginning of it. I was working for Hook-Nosed Moss at the time, and, being Lent, and half the theatrical ladies of position doing penance down at Monte Carlo, we weren't exactly knocking a hole in the Bank of England—nor, for that matter, even earning our fares to Jerusalem. Moss came down to the garage in the West End gloomier and gloomier every day; and one morning when I saw that he'd pawned his diamond shirt-stud (the same that we called "The Bleriot"), why then, says I, Lal Britten, keep off the Stock Exchange and don't put your last thirty bob in Consols, wherever else you place it.
Now this was the state of things when one morning, early in the month of March last year, we were rung up from a public telephone call in Bayswater, and the covered Napier was ordered for a house in the Richmond Road, Bayswater—a locality with which I was unfamiliar, but which Moss declared must be all right, since the gentleman who lived there knew that we had a Napier car and therefore was in a manner introduced to us. Half an hour later he discovered that Richmond Road was nothing better than a mean street of lodging-houses, and, my word, didn't he reel off his instructions to me like texts out of a copy-book.
"Dot's a shame, Britten," he said, coming round by the bonnet of the car, which I was tuning up for the trip—"I was deceived by the dabe of the street. We must have our modey before they have the goods. Mind that now, you dote drive a mile unless they pay the shinies. Three guideas id your pocket and then you drive 'em. Are you listening, Britten?"
I managed to give him a squirt of oil out of my can—for we do love Moss, and then I told him that Nelson on the quarter-deck of the Victory wasn't more alive to his duties.
"Three guineas cash down and then I drive 'em. Is this a round trip to see the beauties of Surrey, Mr. Moss, or do I return to my little cot after the ball is over? I'd like to know on account of taking my Court suit, if you don't mind."
"Oh," says he, "you're ordered for ded o'clock, so I suppose id's the light fadastic toe, Britten. But mide you get your modey—or I'll stop your salary, sure. Three guideas and what you cad hook for yourself—I shan't touch that, Britten—I dow how to treat my servants well."
I laughed at this, but didn't say too much for fear he should find out that he'd got a patch of oil as big as a football on the back of his beautiful new spring suit, and when he had told me that the party's name was Faulkland Jones and had given me the number of the house, I got on with my work again and soon had the three-year-old Napier running as well as ever she did in all her life. Nor did anything else happen until ten o'clock that night, at which hour precisely I drove her up to the house in the Richmond Road, Bayswater, and sent a small boy to knock at the door.