A Few Quick Ones Read Online Free PDF Page B

folded him in a long lingering embrace, the car bowled off, and Harold Pickering found himself alone with this oversized plugugly in what seemed to his fevered fancy a great empty space, like one of those ones in the movies where two strong men stand face to face and Might is the only law.
    Sidney McMurdo was staring at him with a peculiar intensity. There was a disturbing gleam in his eyes, and his hands, each the size of a largish ham, were clenching and unclenching as if flexing themselves for some grim work in the not too distant future.
    "Did she", he asked in an odd, hoarse voice, "say - fiancé?"
    "Why, yes," said Harold Pickering, with a nonchalance which it cost him a strong effort to assume. "Yes, that's right, I believe she did."
    "You are going to marry Agnes Flack?"
    "There is some idea of it, I understand."
    "Ah!" said Sidney McMurdo, and the intensity of his stare was now more marked than ever.
    Harold Pickering quailed beneath it. His heart, as he gazed at this patently steamed-up colossus, missed not one beat but several. Nor, I think, can we blame him. All publishers are sensitive, highly strung men. Gollancz is. So is Hamish Hamilton. So are Chapman and Hall, Heinemann and Herbert Jenkins, Ltd. And even when in sunny mood, Sidney McMurdo was always a rather intimidating spectacle. Tall, broad, deep-chested and superbly muscled, he looked like the worthy descendant of a long line of heavyweight gorillas, and nervous people and invalids were generally warned if there was any likelihood of their meeting him unexpectedly. Harold Pickering could not but feel that an uncle who would want anything like that at his sickbed must be eccentric to the last degree.
    However, he did his best to keep the conversation on a note of easy cordiality.
    "Nice weather," he said.
    "Bah!" said Sidney McMurdo.
    "How's your uncle?"
    "Never mind my uncle. Are you busy at the moment, Mr. Pickering?"
    "No."
    "Good, said Sidney McMurdo. "Because I want to break your neck."
    There was apause. Harold Pickering backed astep. Sidney McMurdo advanced astep. Harold Pickering backed another step. Sidney McMurdo advanced again. Harold Pickering sprang sideways. Sidney McMurdo also sprang sideways. If it had not been for the fact that the latter was gnashing his teeth and filling the air with a sound similar to that produced by an inexperienced Spanish dancer learning to play the castanets, one might have supposed them to be practising the opening movements of some graceful, old-world gavotte.
    "Or, rather," said Sidney McMurdo, correcting his previous statement, "tear you limb from limb."
    "Why?" asked Harold Pickering, who liked to go into things.
    "You know why," said Sidney McMurdo, moving eastwards as his vis-a-vis moved westwards. "Because you steal girls' hearts behind people's backs, like a snake."
    Harold Pickering, who happened to know something about snakes, might have challenged this description of their habits, but he was afforded no opportunity of doing so. His companion had suddenly reached out a clutching hand, and only by coyly drawing it back was he enabled to preserve his neck intact.
    "Here, just a moment," he said.
    I have mentioned that publishers are sensitive and highly strung. They are also quickwitted. They think on their feet. Harold Pickering had done so now. Hodder and Stoughton could not have reacted more nimbly.
    "You are proposing to tear me limb from limb, are you?"
    "And also to dance on the fragments.”
    It was not easy for Harold Pickering to sneer, for his lower jaw kept dropping, but he contrived to do so.
    "I see," he said, just managing to curl his lip before the jaw got away from him again. "Thus ensuring that you shall be this year's club champion. Ingenious, McMurdo. It's one way of winning, of course. But I should not call it very sporting."
    He had struck the right note. The blush of shame mantled Sidney McMurdo's cheek. His hands fell to his sides, and he stood chewing his lip, plainly