‘And arbitrary. If you described him as going about seeking whom he might devour, you wouldn’t be far wrong.’
‘Sounds a stinker.’
‘And is. I’d like to get back at him, but it’s difficult with a fellow that size.’
‘I see what you mean. You would be giving away too much weight. He’s a big stinker, and you’re a little stinker.’
Again Chippendale showed in his manner that he found Jerry lacking in tact.
‘Well, that’s one way of putting it.’
‘So you’re baffled.’
‘Yes and no. I wouldn’t care to take on a human hippopotamus like him in physical combat, but I have a scheme or method as you might say which would lower his pride to the dust if put into operation. Only I’d need an accomplice.’
‘Better advertise. What is the scheme or method?’
‘I’ll tell you. I must begin by saying that this bluebottle has trouble with his feet.’
But having begun by saying it he was precluded from elaborating his theme by the re-entry of Crispin, and Jerry was left to ponder, if he cared to do so, on what connection Constable Simms’s foot trouble could have with the triumph Chippendale was hoping for, always provided that he could find the necessary accomplice. Possibly Simms suffered from corns, and it would be the task of the accomplice to tread on them. Though why this, though painful, should lower the officer’s pride to the dust it was not easy to see.
As Crispin advanced into the room, it was plain that all was not well with him. He was wearing the unmistakable air of a man who has failed to find the blue bird. His eyes protruded, his moustache drooped, and what hair he had was ruffled as if he had been running agitated hands through it. He looked like one of those messengers in Greek tragedy who come bringing news of ruin and disaster, and they were about as glum a lot as you could meet in a month of Sundays.
But there was this difference between him and such a messenger. The latter would have made a long speech full of ‘Woe, woe’ and stuff about the anger of the gods. Crispin got down to the res without preamble.
‘She’s given that miniature to the vicar for his jumble sale in aid of the Church Lads Annual Outing,’ he said, speaking in a voice which for its hollowness and lack of vivacity might have come from a tomb.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The shock of bad news affects different people in different ways. Some hardy souls are able to take it with a stiff upper lip, but on none of the three upper lips at the moment under advisement was there anything remotely resembling rigidity. Crispin, who on receipt of Barney’s bombshell had quivered like a jelly in a high wind, was still quivering: Jerry uttered an odd gurgling sound which might have proceeded from the children’s toy known as the dying rooster: while Chippendale once more requested some unspecified person to chase his aunt Fanny up a gum tree. It would not be too much to say that consternation reigned.
Crispin was the first to break the silence which had fallen on the room.
‘She must be mad! Why, the thing’s a Gainsborough. It’s worth a fortune. What on earth could have made her do it?’
‘Religion, cocky,’ said Chippendale, never at a loss for the logical explanation. ‘Religious fervour. It takes the females that way sometimes. I had an aunt who pawned my father’s false teeth in order to contribute to the mission for propagating the gospel among the unenlightened natives of West Africa.
Grilled subsequently by the family, she said she was laying up treasure in heaven, but she can’t have laid up much, because false teeth are what you might call a drag on the market and don’t fetch more than a few bob. It’s my aunt Myrtle I’m speaking of,’ he went on, as if anxious to obviate any chance of confusion between this relative and the one who was so often chased up gum trees. ‘I’ll tell you something funny about my aunt Myrtle… Pardon?’ he said, for Jerry had spoken.
Jerry explained that he had merely said ‘Damn your aunt Myrtle’, and Chippendale, amused by the coincidence, told him that those were the very words his father had uttered on becoming aware of his bereavement.
‘He was greatly attached to those teeth. He used to be able to crack Brazil nuts with them, and of course without them he couldn’t preserve that debonair appearance. You’d hardly believe the things he said about the unenlightened natives of West Africa, though a moment of reflection would have told him that they weren’t to be blamed for what had occurred. But I merely brought up that about my aunt Myrtle to illustrate what I was saying with ref to women coming over all religious.’
Jerry, who was recovering only slowly and had not yet regained his usual amiability, asked sourly what was so religious in giving a donation to a jumble sale in aid of the Church Lads Annual Outing.
‘I don’t even know what church lads are.’
Chippendale seemed surprised at this gap in a friend’s knowledge. Always eager to be of help, he hastened to fill it.
They’re just a lot of pie-faced young perishers who collect in gangs in these rural parishes. Choir boys, mostly. They attend Sunday school and sing in the choir, and once a year they let ‘em loose to have an outing. They go off in a charabanc with buns and hard-boiled eggs and lemonade, and that of course runs into money. You don’t get buns and hard-boiled eggs and lemonade for nothing, let alone hire of charabanc and tip to driver, so the vicar has this jumble sale to bump up the cash receipts. Ask me, he’s a mug to take the trouble. Much simpler to drown the little barstards in a bucket. That would teach them to make personal remarks about people’s physical appearance. Do you know what one of them called me yesterday?’
The question was addressed to Crispin, who responded with a petulance equal to Jerry’s.
‘I do not wish to hear what he called you yesterday.’
‘I’d rather not have heard it myself. Where they pick up these expressions is more than I could tell you. In Sunday school, I suppose. But I was telling you about my aunt Myrtle. She had false teeth same as Father, but whereas his fitted him like the paper on the wall, hers didn’t, and she had to get another set, which left her with the first lot on her hands. She never liked wasting anything, but she couldn’t think what to do with them. Why she didn’t pawn them and give the proceeds to the West Africans, I don’t know, but apparently it didn’t occur to her. The idea she got after a lot of thought was to make them the basis, if you know what the word means, of a mouse trap. She got a scientific feller she knew to fix one up with the teeth inside it in such a way that any mouse that shoved its nose in would get its loaf of bread snapped off, and all would have been well if she hadn’t gone into the kitchen in the dark one night with no shoes on and tripped over the trap, which promptly came down like a ton of bricks on her big toe, nearly severing it. And the doctors at the hospital decided to amputate in case gangrene might set in. And as the teeth were legally hers, the result was that she became the only woman in East Dulwich, where she was living at the time, who could truthfully say that she had bitten her own toe off. It gave her prestige. ‘Well, I can’t stay chaffing with you all day, mates, so if you don’t want me for anything further, I’ll be getting about my duties.’
After he had left them Jerry and Crispin sat in silence for perhaps an hour, full of what Alfred, Lord Tennyson, once described as thoughts too deep for tears. Of the two mourners it was Jerry who mourned the more bitterly, for he was tortured by the galling realization that in supposing that he had the sort of brain that can solve any dilemma he had been mistaken. As Chippendale would have said, it lowered his pride to the dust.
He could see no way out of the impasse. The idea of burgling the vicarage and tying the vicar up and sticking lighted matches between his toes till he disgorged the miniature he dismissed as impracticable. It had a momentary attraction, but prudence told him that that sort of thing would lead to his arrest by Constable Simms. And while this would probably result in the zealous officer being promoted to sergeant, he preferred that his rise to the heights should be achieved by other means. Let Constable Simms devote
his energies to trying to alleviate the trouble he had with his feet, whatever that was.
As had happened before, he found the atmosphere of the library oppressive. It stifled his brain powers, such as they were. In the hope that fresh air and exercise would once again stimulate his little grey cells he rose and informed Crispin that he was going for a walk.
But before he could reach the door it opened, and he saw that Chippendale, the human homing pigeon, had returned.
2
He received chilly glances from both Jerry and Crispin. There are times when a nephew and uncle with a great deal on their minds are glad of the addition to their deliberations of a weedy little man who looks like a barnyard fowl, but this was not one of them.
What particularly irked them was the fact that this fowl impersonator was so plainly in the best of spirits, looking indeed as if he had just bought the world and paid cash down for it. That was what in their despondent mood they found so hard to bear. A melancholy Chippendale they could have endured: to a Chippendale in tears they might have extended a cordial welcome: but a Chippendale grinning all over his face in the manner popularized by Cheshire cats affected them like a knife stab in the breast, and they were about to clothe this sentiment in words, when the intruder spoke.
‘Got a bit of good news for you, mates,’ he said, and the bizarre idea that in the world as at present constituted there could be such a thing as good news held them speechless. Parted lips and bulging eyes showed how keen was their interest, but no verbal comment emerged. Except for a difference in clothes they might have been a couple of Trappist monks listening to a playlet of suspense on the radio.
Unlike Crispin, who, it will be remembered, had come to the point without delay, Chippendale preferred the circuitous approach. For a considerable time he might have been delivering an address to an audience of teenagers on the subject of how they should comport themselves when they went out into the great world. Have courage, he said. Never give up, he said. Tell yourself that it is darkest before the dawn and that though the storm clouds may lower, the sun will eventually come smiling through, he said.
But, he added, courage by itself was not enough. It was also essential to have the ability to think quick. If you couldn’t think quick when disaster was doing its stuff, you were sunk. He himself had always been a quick thinker, and in this matter of the ruddy vicar having got hold of the ruddy miniature he had spotted the course to pursue. And what was that? ‘I’ll tell you, chums,’ said Chippendale, humanely putting them out of their suspense. ‘We all want the ruddy miniature, don’t we. Well, I’ve just been to the ruddy vicar and got it.’
He paused and seemed to be waiting for comment, but his audience appeared unable to take in what he had said.
‘Got it?’ said Jerry.
‘But how is that possible?’ said Crispin.
‘Everything’s possible, cocky, if you think quick enough.’
‘You mean the miniature is in your possession?’
‘I’m glad you asked me that,’ said Chippendale. ‘Yes, my ruddy possession is just what it’s ruddy well in.’
They had assimilated it now, and sharp cries, two in number, burst from their lips simultaneously. They gazed at him adoringly. There was no longer anything in their aspect to suggest that they held the view that with the possible exception of animalculae in stagnant ponds he was the lowest form of life which civilization had yet produced.
Neither was slow with his applause. Jerry said Chippendale was a marvel. Crispin endorsed this opinion. A superman, Jerry said, and Crispin said that that was just the word he had been groping for. He added that he found it difficult to understand how even one so gifted could have achieved such a triumph.
‘How did you manage it?’ said Jerry.
‘I went to him and pitched the tale.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Yes,’ said Crispin. “What tale did you — ah — pitch?’
‘Give you three guesses.’
‘Please!’
‘Well, all right,’ said Chippendale, relenting. ‘I told him the girl in the picture was the dead spit of a girl I’d loved and lost owing to her having died in my arms of what’s the ailment beginning with an l, not leprosy, starts with a leuk.’
‘Leukaemia?’
‘That was it. I said she had kicked the bucket from an attack of leukaemia and I wanted the thing to remind me of her, so would he be so kind as to allow me to buy it before the sale opened and the general purchasing public was let in. I said it meant everything to me and I was sure he would understand, and he said Yes, yes, in a very real sense he understood and certainly certainly he would cough it up. So he did, and I came away with it, wrapped up in a bit of brown paper. Simple.’
‘Admirable,’ said Crispin, correcting his choice of adjectives. ‘I cannot praise your ingenuity too highly.’
‘Nor me,’ said Jerry. ‘It just shows…
He paused, and Chippendale asked what it just showed.
‘How right you were about the sun coming smiling through,’ said Jerry. He had been about to say that it just showed that you can’t judge a man’s brain power by his looks, because even one who closely resembles the more unpleasant type of barnyard fowl in appearance can nevertheless possess the mental qualities of a great general, but he reflected in time that this might give offence. ‘What have you done with the thing?’
‘I’ve got it stowed away. I suppose I’d better give it to Mr Scrope to take care of.’
Crispin agreed that that would be best, and Chippendale said he would attend to it in due course.
‘But first there’s one little matter I’d like disposed of. I wonder,’ he said, addressing Jerry, ‘if you remember me telling you that Constable Simms has trouble with his feet?’
Jerry assured him that he had not forgotten. He had been at something of a loss, he said, to see how the officer’s misfortune, though of medical interest, fitted in with the scheme of things. The information, he thought, could more appropriately have been confided to a professional chiropodist than to himself.
‘What’s wrong with his feet?’
‘During the morning and early afternoon,’ said Chippendale, ‘nothing, but towards evening, when he’s done his rounds, they become heated, and this occasions him considerable discomfort. He didn’t tell me so himself, him and me not being on those terms, but I had it from the wife of the postman, where he lodges. He told her, and she told me, that when he’s come to the end of the long long trail, as the song says, his plates of meat felt as if they was on fire.’
‘Too bad.’
‘Depends on how you look at it. I regard it as a bit of luck. Manna in the wilderness, as you might say.’
“Why does it strike you like that?’
‘Well, figure it out for yourself. What’s the first thing a feller does when his plates of meat are feeling as if they were on fire? He shoves them in cold water.’
Jerry conceded this. So did Crispin. But they said they still could not see why this should be supposed to be of interest to two men who were in no sense intimates of Constable Simms.
‘Scarcely know him by sight,’ said Jerry. ‘What have his incandescent plates of meat got to do with us?’
‘You’ll find out all in good time,’ said Chippendale. He spoke with the quiet patience of a teacher in an elementary school who is having a difficulty in explaining something obvious to two pupils who are slow in the uptake but is determined to drive it into their thick heads. ‘Do you know the brook?’
Crispin continued fogged. He said he had a friend of that name, but had not seen him for years.
The brook that runs into the lake,’ said Chippendale, losing his patience a little.
‘Yes, yes, of course I know that brook.’
‘Well, after he’s done his last round, Simms goes and takes off his boots and sits beside it and lets the water run over his feet.’
‘His plates of meat, you mean,’ said Jerry.
‘It’
s the same thing,’ said Chippendale, now openly impatient. ‘One drops into this habit of talking rhyming slang. The point I’m trying to establish is that Constable Simms sits there dabbling his extremities in the brook.’
‘So what?’
‘So anybody who wanted to could creep up behind him and give him a push and immerse him.’
Jerry had no difficulty in following what was in his mind. He remembered what the speaker had said about lowering Constable Simms’s pride to the dust. Such an immersion would undoubtedly go far towards accomplishing this. Once again he was compelled to admire the man’s grasp of strategy and tactics.
‘When are you going to do it?’ he asked almost with reverence.
The question plainly surprised Chippendale.
‘Who, me?’ he said. ‘I’m not going to do it. Why, lord love a duck, I’d be the prime suspect, my relations with the son of a what-not being so strained, and if I hadn’t an unbreakable alibi I’d be for it. It’s a job for one of you two. You’d better toss for it.’
This seemed reasonable to Jerry. He, Crispin and Chippendale were allies, as closely linked together as those boys of the Old Brigade who stood steadily shoulder to shoulder, and he did not consider that it was asking too much of an ally to suggest that he should push a policeman into a brook. It was just one of those trifling good turns which allies are entitled to expect of one another. If one of the three Musketeers had asked the other two Musketeers to push Cardinal Richelieu into the Seine, the other two Musketeers would have sprung to the task with their hair in a braid.
Looking at Crispin and hoping from him a similar endorsement of the plan, he was astonished to read in his face an unmistakable reluctance to co-operate. It would not be putting it too strongly to say that Crispin was aghast. When he spoke, his utterance, though only a monosyllable, showed this.
‘What!’
‘You heard, cocky.’
‘I would not dream of doing such a thing.’
‘Well, you’d better start dreaming, or you won’t get that miniature. I’ll take it up to London myself and collect the whole two hundred your brother Bill is offering for it. Treat me right, and you’ll have your cut. Refuse to do the simplest little thing I ask you to, and not a penny do you get. So let’s hear from you, chum.’