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A Damsel in Distress

Page 92

Lord Belpher's twenty-first birthday dawned brightly, heralded in

by much twittering of sparrows in the ivy outside his bedroom. These

Percy did not hear, for he was sound asleep and had had a late

night. The first sound that was able to penetrate his heavy slumber

and rouse him to a realization that his birthday had arrived was

the piercing cry of Reggie Byng on his way to the bath-room across

the corridor. It was Reggie's disturbing custom to urge himself on

to a cold bath with encouraging yells; and the noise of this

performance, followed by violent splashing and a series of sharp

howls as the sponge played upon the Byng spine, made sleep an

impossibility within a radius of many yards. Percy sat up in bed,

and cursed Reggie silently. He discovered that he had a headache.

Presently the door flew open, and the vocalist entered in person,

clad in a pink bathrobe and very tousled and rosy from the tub.

"Many happy returns of the day, Boots, old thing!"

Reggie burst rollickingly into song.

"I'm twenty-one today!

Twenty-one today!

I've got the key of the door!

Never been twenty-one before!

And father says I can do what I like!

So shout Hip-hip-hooray!

I'm a jolly good fellow,

Twenty-one today."

Lord Belpher scowled morosely.

"I wish you wouldn't make that infernal noise!"

"What infernal noise?"

"That singing!"

"My God! This man has wounded me!" said Reggie.

"I've a headache."

"I thought you would have, laddie, when I saw you getting away with

the liquid last night. An X-ray photograph of your liver would show

something that looked like a crumpled oak-leaf studded with

hob-nails. You ought to take more exercise, dear heart. Except for

sloshing that policeman, you haven't done anything athletic for

years."

"I wish you wouldn't harp on that affair!"

Reggie sat down on the bed.

"Between ourselves, old man," he said confidentially, "I also--I

myself--Reginald Byng, in person--was perhaps a shade polluted

during the evening. I give you my honest word that just after

dinner I saw three versions of your uncle, the bishop, standing in

a row side by side. I tell you, laddie, that for a moment I thought

I had strayed into a Bishop's Beano at Exeter Hall or the Athenaeum

or wherever it is those chappies collect in gangs. Then the three

bishops sort of congealed into one bishop, a trifle blurred about

the outlines, and I felt relieved. But what convinced me that I

had emptied a flagon or so too many was a rather rummy thing that

occurred later on. Have you ever happened, during one of these

feasts of reason and flows of soul, when you were bubbling over

with joie-de-vivre--have you ever happened to see things? What I

mean to say is, I had a deuced odd experience last night. I could

have sworn that one of the waiter-chappies was that fellow who

knocked off your hat in Piccadilly."

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