If, he had felt with a sinking heart, they succeeded in locating that ice, they would do it while he was far away, unable to keep an eye on them. And if ever a couple lived and breathed on whom it was advisable for a shareholder to keep an eye, and that a skinned one, it was the Molloys, Mr. and Mrs. He trusted neither of them as far as he could spit, and he was a poor spitter, lacking both distance and control.
But now this letter had come, removing all obstacles in the way of a visit to Shipley Hall. And on top of that there had been his recent interview with Soapy.
The whole thing, he felt as he floated through the sunlit grounds, was going to be almost too easy to be interesting. And when he stood outside the window of Lord Uffenham's bedroom, and noted that it was open and presented no difficulties of access to even the least nimble of intruders, his confidence reached its peak.
Until this moment, burglary was a form of gainful occupation of which Chimp Twist had had no experience. He had always made his money by brain work. But now the circumstances had turned him temporarily into a manual labourer, there was no diffidence in his soul, no hesitation in his bearing. If, as he stood at journey's end, his heart beat a little faster, that was all.
Inside the room, his first act was to go to the door, open it and listen intently. Somewhere in the distance, a female voice was singing a hymn with a good deal of stomp in it, which would have indicated to the practised ear that Mrs. Cork's cook had started to boil the spinach, but no other sound broke the silence. He left the door open, so that he might be warned, should feet come along the passage, and was pleased to see that the passage was a stone-flagged one. If such feet did approach, it would be to the accompaniment of a booming noise like the rolling of drums, and he would be enabled to withdraw well in advance of their arrival.
The room in which he stood, it seemed to him as his eye roamed about it, was a good deal more luxuriously furnished than one would have expected of a butler's bedroom. The explanation of this was that Lord Uffenham, in accepting employment at his old home, had made it clear to his niece that if he had to become a dashed Hey-You and cleaner of silver, he was blowed if he intended to live in absolute squalor; and he had collected from other parts of the establishment various pictures and ornaments, not to mention an easy chair, a carpet of the softest pile and even a chaise-longue, on which he could recline of an afternoon with his boots off. Thanks to this resolute scrounging, the place had become virtually a boudoir.
Nevertheless, there existed in Chimp's mind no doubt that he had come to the right spot. Immediately beneath the window was the water barrel of which Soapy had spoken, and beside it that touching memorial to the unidentified Ponto, stressing deceased's fidelity and friendliness. All that remained for him to do, therefore, was to ransack the apartment and hope for the best.
He set to work swiftly and silently, like a New York Customs official dealing with the effects of a star of the musical comedy stage who has left her native America for a trip to Paris and, returning, has announced that she has nothing to declare. He looked in drawers, he searched cupboards, he hunted behind chairs and pictures. He even prodded the chaise-longue, to make sure that its stuffing was bona fide stuffing.
Activities like these, especially when the weather is sultry, take their toll of a man, and presently he was obliged to pause and mop his brow. And it was while he was so engaged that his glance happened to fall on a handsome lacquer screen which stood in the far corner. In the gap between its base and the carpet there was visible a colossal pair of boots.
They caught Chimp's eye, and astonished him by their dimensions, but they conveyed no sinister message to him. Just boots, he felt—his host's spare ones, presumably. It was only a moment later that, looking more closely, he noticed above them the southern end of a pair of trousers. And it was suddenly brought home to him, with a sickening shock which reduced his spinal column to the consistency of the spinach which was now boiling briskly on the kitchen stove, that inside these trousers were human limbs. It was, in short, no mere supplementary brace of beetle-crushers that stood there, but a pair in active use, with their proprietor in occupation.
He was still reeling bonelessly from the effects of this hideous discovery, when the screen was drawn aside by a powerful hand and there stood before him the largest man he had ever seen. To his excited senses, the newcomer seemed to fill the room from wall to wall, and even so to be a little cramped for space.
"Well, rat?" observed this eye-filling individual.
It had been Lord Uffenham's intention to intervene in the proceedings a good deal earlier than this. But, as always when he stood rooted to any given spot, he had allowed himself to float off on a train of thought. The stealthy movements without, announcing that his visitor had arrived, had set him musing on private detectives— what made them become private detectives, what they did in their spare time, about how much the income per annum of a fairly well-to-do investigator would amount to, and what had become of the one with the ginger moustache at whom he had thrown an umbrella in the year 1912.
He was now once more alert and the man of action.
The observation "Well, rat?" is one to which it is not easy to find an immediate and satisfactory response. Chimp Twist did not even attempt one. He stood gaping pallidly at this large man, who seemed by some optical illusion to be expanding still further with every moment that went by, bestriding his narrow world like a Colossus. And, as so often happened when he was in thought or agitation, he automatically raised a hand to his waxed moustache and gave it a twiddle.
The action grated upon Lord Uffenham. Moustache-twiddling reminded him of Lionel Green, and he hated to be compelled to think about that rising young interior decorator.
"Stop it!" he said sternly.
"Sir?" said Chimp, all obsequiousness and anxiety to oblige.
"Leave that thing alone," said Lord Uffenham. He eyed the unpleasant growth with increasing curiosity, for the sight of it had stimulated his always enquiring mind. "That moustache. Had it long?" he asked, like a doctor making the preliminary inquisition concerning some rare type of disease. "When did you first feel it coming on?"
Chimp, a little surprised, but extremely relieved at this unexpectedly pacific conversational opening, replied that the disfigurement in question was of fairly recent vintage. He had decided to grow it, he said, about a coupla years ago.
"What makes it stick out like that at the ends?" asked Lord Uffenham, going deeper and deeper into the subject.
Any topic other than that of his presence in the room would have been welcome to Chimp. He replied almost jauntily:
"Wax."
"Yer put wax on it?"
"Yessir, wax."
"What sort of wax?"
"Well, matter of fact, often as not I use soap."
"What sort of soap?"
"Toilet soap. Or maybe shaving cream."
"Then why did yer say wax?"
"Sometimes I use wax."
"Beeswax?"
"Just ordinary wax."
"And that's what makes it stick out?"
"Yessir, that's what makes it stick out."
"Well, it looks bloody awful. If it was mine, I'd have it off at the roots. And now," said Lord Uffenham, becoming the practical man of affairs and giving himself a shake to limber up his muscles and induce elasticity, "and now to break every bone in your foul body, you ghastly-looking little half-pint of misery."
In spite of the charming, comradely tone of the conversation up till now, with its underlying suggestion that he and Lord Uffenham were a couple of kindred spirits just lounging around and kidding back and forth, Chimp had never lost sight of the possibility that their chat might eventually work towards some such point. And even while answering his companion's questions in that almost fraternal spirit, he had been careful to keep well out of arm's reach and so to order his movements as always to be between the other and the door.
Lord Uffenham's words found him, accordingly, in an excellent strategic position
to make the dash for life, and he made it without delay. In the days of his young manhood, when, as he had told Anne, he had been much followed by private detectives, Lord Uffenham had once waited round a corner for one who had been trailing him from St. John's Wood to Berkeley Square, and had made a sudden spring at him from a shadowy doorway. Except on that single occasion, he could not recall ever having seen an enquiry agent move more nimbly. It seemed to him that there was just a whirring noise and a puff of dust, and the fellow was gone.
He was deeply chagrined. He blamed himself for having allowed a thirst for information to divert him from the main issue at a moment when he should have been attending strictly to business. It was patent now that he had lost for ever the chance of taking this private investigator's greasy neck in his hands and tying it into a lovers' knot, a task to which he had been looking forward with such bright enthusiasm. Opportunity knocks but once, and he had allowed it to knock in vain.
It seemed to Lord Uffenham, as it had seemed to the poet, that of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these—It might have been.
CHAPTER XVI
It is never easy for a man in so delicate a situation as J. that in which Chimp Twist had found himself to preserve the aequam mentem recommended by the Roman writer as suitable in times of stress. Had he been calmer, he would on tearing himself away from Lord Uffenham's society have turned to the left along the passage, and thus have put himself in a position to effect a masterly withdrawal by the back entrance, which stood only a few short yards away.
As it was, losing his presence of mind in his intense desire to arrange for immediate absence of body, he turned to the right, setting a course which led directly towards the main portion of the house. And he had not proceeded far before he found his progress barred by a green baize door.
But only for an instant. He did not know what lay beyond this obstacle, but he had a lively sense of what was on his side of it, and he had no hesitation in charging at it like a footballer bucking the line. It gave way before him, swinging easily on its hinges, and he came into a spacious open space, dotted about with chairs, small tables and old oak settles, with a massive door at one end and to one side a broad flight of stairs. He was, in short, in the hall, and here for a moment he paused, wondering what to do for the best.
He was pleased to find that he had the leisure to do 30, and even more surprised than pleased. It seemed inexplicable to him that there came to his ears no sound of following footsteps and that the green baize barrier did not swing violently open again, to reveal Lord Uffenham thundering in his wake. He wondered what had become of him.
As a matter of fact, Lord Uffenham had thundered in his wake for a few strides. But he was a man built more for statuesqueness than activity, the majestic glacier rather than the racing whippet, and right from the start he had not had much hope of coming in anywhere but a bad second. When he had seen his quarry cutting out so excellent a pace, and had become aware of the creaking of his own joints, he had abandoned the pursuit. "Easy come, easy go," he had said to himself with the splendid Uffenhamian philosophy, and had gone off to his pantry for a glass of port.
Chimp stood holding his breath, his furtive little eyes darting about the handsomely appointed lounging place in which he stood. He was alone at last, but there was no saying how long this privacy would continue. There was a door to his left, and beyond it a passage, leading to the unknown. At any moment, some intruder might come through this door or along this passage, so it behoved him, he recognised, to keep moving. A little sleep, a little folding of the hands, may be all right for the man of leisure, but not for one who is virtually the hunted stag.
And now his eye was attracted by two small windows, with flower-pots on their sills. They stood one on either side of the massive door, and through them was visible blue sky and greenery. And he realized, though it had taken him some time to do so, that the massive door was Shipley Hall's front door, and that he had only to turn its handle to win through to the open air and freedom.
He darted towards it, but even as his fingers touched the latch there came from the other side the sound of voices. He leaped back, and the door near the passage began to open, and somebody within could be heard whistling. It was, to keep the record straight, Mr. Trumper, who, greatly restored after his encounter with Lord Uffenham by some capital shooting on the billiard table, was about to go to his room to dress for dinner.
It seemed to Chimp that he was encompassed on every side, and for an instant he was about to resign himself to the inevitable. Then he saw that in this grossly over-populated house there was one vacant spot. There appeared to be no one on the stairs. He decided to fill this hiatus. He was up them like the monkey he so closely resembled in a series of rapid bounds, and Mr. Trumper, emerging from the billiard-room, caught with the tail of his eye a flying form, the sight of which rendered him for a moment vaguely uneasy.
Thoughts of burglars flashed into Mr. Trumper's mind. Then he dismissed the idea. Burglars, he reflected, were creatures of the night and would not be likely to put on what amounted to a matinee performance. Nor did they, it occurred to him, skim up stairs in this volatile fashion. They prowled and prowled around, like the hosts of Midian, but always, or so he had been given to understand, at a reasonable pace.
His fears allayed, he resumed his whistling, and after taking a glance at the hall table, to see if any letters had come for him by the evening post, turned to greet Mrs. Cork, who had just entered through the front door accompanied by Mrs. Barlow.
"Oh, Eustace," said Mrs. Cork, "I wanted to see you. We have run out of ants' eggs for the goldfish. Will you go to the village first thing to-morrow and buy some? I think you can get them at the grocer's."
"Of course, of course. Certainly, Clarissa, delighted," said Mr. Trumper.
Mrs. Barlow said that she had often thought how curious it was that goldfish should ever have acquired a taste for ants' eggs, seeing that in their natural, wild state they could scarcely have moved in the same social sphere, so to speak, as ants. This led to Mrs. Cork, who had a fund of good stories about the animal kingdom, telling of an emu she had known which ate aspirin tablets, and in the interest of these exchanges all thoughts of the mystery man with the indiarubber legs passed from Mr. Trumper's mind.
Chimp, meanwhile, now arrived in the upper regions, had discovered that his spirited dash, though a sound tactical move and one which had saved him from having to plunge into Shipley Hall society and meet a lot of new people, which is always tedious, was not, as he had hoped, an end, but a beginning. Movements from the floor above indicated the presence there of yet another of the Hall's teeming millions, and to his agitated mind it seemed that this person was moving in his direction.
With people likely at any moment to come up, and other people likely at any moment to come down, it was plain to him that some haven of refuge in his immediate vicinity was essential, and the only one which presented itself was the bedroom outside which he was standing. Left to himself, he would have preferred not to go into any more strange bedrooms, for Lord Uffenham's had given him a feeling of satiety, but it appeared clear that he had no choice.
He crept to the door, and peered in. The room was empty. It seemed to him almost incredible that in a house like this there could be an unoccupied space, but so it was. He hurried in, and once more paused to listen.
It was at this point that he heard Mr. Trumper coming up the stairs, and the paralysing thought crossed his mind that the latter might quite conceivably be making for this very room. And he was perfectly right. Mr. Trumper, having heard all that there was to hear about emus and goldfish, had resumed his journey upstairs to dress for dinner. For an instant, Chimp stood transfixed, his beady little eyes flickering to and fro. Then, at the end of the room beside the fireplace, he saw that there stood a small wardrobe.
The sight of it affected him very much as that of a rainbow used to affect the poet Words worth. Wardrobes are practically the same thing as cupboards, and
it has been shown that Chimp Twist was never really at his ease outside cupboards. A man either has or has not this cupboard complex implanted in him. Chimp had, and the wardrobe seemed to draw him like a magnet. He could see that it would be a snug fit, but he yearned for it as the hart yearns for the water-brooks. Not even on the occasion when he had beheld Jeff bounding up the staircase of Halsey Buildings had he experienced a stronger desire to put himself away in storage.
Thirty seconds later, he was inside. He could have made it in twenty-three flat, but he had paused to see if there was a key in the door, and this slowed him up. There was no key, so he went in without it, and was adjusting himself to his cramped surroundings, holding the inside of the door to prevent it falling open, when it was borne in upon him that he had done well to hurry. There was a sound of jocund whistling, and Mr. Trumper entered the room.
Eustace Trumper was in excellent spirits. He had made two breaks of double figures in the billiard-room, always a sound reason for rejoicing, and in addition he had been asked by Mrs. Cork to go to the village and buy ants' eggs for her. It was this that so particularly exhilarated him.
Every lover likes to be called upon to perform deeds for his lady, and it seemed to Mr. Trumper that this spirit of reliance on the part of the woman he loved—this leaning upon him, as it were, was promising. For twelve years, ever since the decease of her late husband, who had contracted pneumonia as the result of an injudicious dip in the Trafalgar Square fountain one chilly New Year's Eve, he had been wooing Mrs. Cork in his timid way, and this sort of thing gave him hope. The woman who asks you to buy ants' eggs for her to-day is the woman who shyly whispers "Yes" to-morrow. Or so it seemed to Mr. Trumper.
It was to the accompaniment of further melodious whistling that he hopped out of his clothes, sluiced himself with hot water from the can in the basin and donned his shirt. Only when he was about to tie his tie, an act that called for care and concentration, did he become silent. And it was during this period of silence that Chimp Twist, who had been troubled for some little time with a bit of fluff up his nose, found himself unable to repress a violent sneeze. In the stillness of the room, it rang out like the hissing of a hundred soda-water syphons, and Mr. Trumper rose six inches into the air and came down trembling in every limb, the tie falling from his nerveless hand.