Read Hot Water for Free Online Page B

scissors.
    Unaware of this, Packy continued to sit perplexed. And he had just decided to give the thing up and take his custom elsewhere, when the telephone rang at his elbow.
    To ignore a ringing telephone is one of the few feats of which humanity has so far proved incapable. Packy took up the receiver, and instantaneously a loud and irascible voice with an American intonation nearly broke his ear-drum.
    'Hello! Hello! HELL-O! Say, how many more times have I got to call up before I get a little service? Come on! Come on! If this is the way you run your hotels on this side, God help England! Do you think I've nothing better to do than sit here trying to get a blasted barber-shop on the wire? Come on! Come on! Come on!'
    'Are you there?' enquired Packy mildly.
    The Voice seemed to resent the question.
    'Are you there, darn it! That's the point. I've been ringing for the last half-hour. What's the matter with you all? Deaf or something? This is Senator Opal speaking, from Suite 400. I want a man up here at once. Senator Ambrose Opal. Suite 400. Send a man here immediately. I want my hair cut.'
    It was on the tip of Packy's tongue to inform the other that by one of those coincidences which so often occur in life he himself was in precisely the same situation. But even as he opened his mouth to reveal this bond which linked them he became aware of a disturbing emotion.
    He diagnosed it immediately. It was the Old Adam stirring within him once more.
    In his unregenerate days, in that graceless past before Beatrice's beneficent influence had come to give his soul its Daily Dozen, such an opportunity for making a fool of himself would have enchanted him. With a good deal of dismay, he found that it was enchanting him now. Indeed, it was making his mouth water. Only the thought of Beatrice...
    'Come on! Come on!'
    And yet, would Beatrice wish him to reject an experience which could scarcely fail to enrich his outlook on life?
    'Come on! Come on! Come on!'
    Suddenly Packy's conscience was at rest. He wondered what he had been hesitating for. Beatrice, he saw now, would be the first to applaud the bringing of aid and comfort to a distressed Senator. To go and hack at this old buster's thatch would be to perform a kindly and altruistic act, very much the same sort of thing for which Sir Philip Sidney and the Boy Scouts are so highly thought of. He rather doubted if even Beatrice's aunt Gwendolyn could find anything in it to view with concern.
    And there was another thing. This obviously must be the famous Senator Opal, the great Dry legislator, the man who had only just failed to put over the Opal Law, which was to have been about six times as severe as the Volstead Act. If he shrank from the proposed tryst, he would probably never get another chance of meeting this celebrity. And Beatrice was always saying how much she wanted him to meet the best people.
    For Beatrice's sake, then, he must certainly see the thing through.
    'I will be right up, sir,' he said respectfully.
3
    Packy Franklyn was not an unreasonable young man. He knew that you cannot have everything just so in this world. Nevertheless, as he entered Suite 400, he could have wished that its occupant had been a shade less formidable. His first sight of Senator Ambrose Opal made him feel as if he had taken on the lion-barbering concession at a Zoo.
    The sponsor of the Opal Law was a man of medium height and rather more than medium girth. He had the massive forehead which seems to go with seats in the American Senate. Above this forehead was a fine jungle of snow-white hair, below it a pair of jet-black eyebrows, and beneath these two piercing and penetrating eyes which even now were none too friendly.
    'Come on, come on,' he said. It seemed to be his favourite expression.
    He seated himself in a convenient chair, and Packy, having swathed him in a sheet, brought to bear what he could remember of the technique of the profession.
    'Rather thin on top, sir.'
    'No, it's