(Extract from the diary of Sir Eustace Pedler) As I remarked once before, I am essentially a man of peace. I yearn for a quiet life—and that’s just the one thing I don’t seem able to have. I am always in the middle of storms and alarms. The relief of getting away from Pagett with his incessant nosing out of intrigues was enormous, and Miss Pettigrew is certainly a useful creature. Although there is nothing of the houri about her, one or two of her accomplishments are invaluable. It is true that I had a touch of liver at Bulawayo and behaved like a bear in consequence, but I had had a disturbed night in the train. At 3 a.m. an exquisitely dressed young man looking like a musical-comedy hero of the Wild West entered my compartment and asked where I was going. Disregarding my first murmur of “Tea—and for God’s sake don’t put sugar in it,” he repeated his question, laying stress on the fact that he was not a waiter but an Immigration officer. I finally succeeded in satisfying him that I was suffering from no infectious disease, that I was visiting Rhodesia from the purest of motives, and further gratified him with my full Christian names and my place of birth. I then endeavoured to snatch a little sleep, but some officious ass aroused me at 5.30 with a cup of liquid sugar which he called tea. I don’t think I threw it at him, but I know that that was what I wanted to do. He brought me unsugared tea, stone cold, at 6, and I then fell asleep utterly exhausted, to awaken just outside Bulawayo and be landed with a beastly wooden giraffe, all legs and neck!
But for these small contretemps, all had been going smoothly. And then fresh calamity befell.
It was the night of our arrival at the Falls. I was dictating to Miss Pettigrew in my sitting-room, when suddenly Mrs. Blair burst in without a word of excuse and wearing most compromising attire.
“Where’s Anne?” she cried.
A nice question to ask. As though I were responsible for the girl. What did she expect Miss Pettigrew to think? That I was in the habit of producing Anne Beddingfeld from my pocket at midnight or thereabouts? Very compromising for a man in my position.
“I presume,” I said coldly, “that she is in her bed.”
I cleared my throat and glanced at Miss Pettigrew, to show that I was ready to resume dictating. I hoped Mrs. Blair would take the hint. She did nothing of the kind. Instead she sank into a chair and waved a slippered foot in an agitated manner.
“She’s not in her room. I’ve been there. I had a dream—a terrible dream—that she was in some awful danger, and I got up and went to her room, just to reassure myself, you know. She wasn’t there and her bed hadn’t been slept in.”
She looked at me appealingly.
“What shall I do, Sir Eustace?”
Repressing the desire to reply, “Go to bed, and don’t worry over nothing. An able-bodied young woman like Anne Beddingfeld is perfectly well able to take care of herself,” I frowned judicially.
“What does Race say about it?”
Why should Race have it all his own way? Let him have some of the disadvantages as well as the advantages of female society.
“I can’t find him anywhere.”
She was evidently making a night of it. I sighed and sat down in a chair.
“I don’t quite see the reason for your agitation,” I said patiently.
“My dream——”
“That curry we had for dinner!”
“Oh, Sir Eustace!”
The woman was quite indignant. And yet everybody knows that nightmares are a direct result of injudicious eating.
“After all,” I continued persuasively, “why shouldn’t Anne Beddingfeld and Race go out for a little stroll without having the whole hotel aroused about it?”
“You think they’ve just gone out for a stroll together? But it’s after midnight!”
“One does these foolish things when one is young,” I murmured, “though Race is certainly old enough to know better.”
“Do you really think so?”
“I dare say they’ve run away to make a match of it,” I continued soothingly, though fully aware that I was making an idiotic suggestion. For, after all, at a place like this, where is there to run away to?
I don’t know how much longer I should have gone on making feeble remarks, but at that moment Race himself walked in upon us. At any rate, I had been partly r............