‘So sorry to disturb you, Bertie,’ said the aged relative courteously.
‘Not at all,’ I replied with equal suavity. ‘Is there something I can do for the multitude?’
‘Sir Watkyn has got some extraordinary idea into his head about wanting to search your room.’
‘Search my room?’
‘I intend to search it from top to bottom,’ said old Bassett, looking very Bosher Street-y.
I glanced at Aunt Dahlia, raising the eyebrows.
‘I don’t understand. What’s all this about?’
She laughed indulgently.
‘You will scarcely believe it, Bertie, but he thinks that cow-creamer is here.’
‘Is it missing?’
‘It’s been stolen.’
‘You don’t say!’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, well, well.’
‘He’s very upset about it.’
‘I don’t wonder.’
‘Most distressed.’
‘Poor old bloke.’
I placed a kindly hand on Pop Bassett’s shoulder. Probably the wrong thing to do, I can see, looking back, for it did not soothe.
‘I can do without your condolences, Mr Wooster, and I should be glad if you would not refer to me as a bloke. I have every reason to believe that not only is my cow-creamer in your possession, but Constable Oates’s helmet, as well.’
A cheery guffaw seemed in order. I uttered it.
‘Ha, ha!’
Aunt Dahlia came across with another.
‘Ha, ha!’
‘How dashed absurd!’
‘Perfectly ridiculous.’
‘What on earth would I be doing with cow-creamers?’
‘Or policemen’s helmets?’
‘Quite.’
‘Did you ever hear such a weird idea?’
‘Never. My dear old host,’ I said, ‘let us keep perfectly calm and cool and get all this straightened out. In the kindliest spirit, I must point out that you are on the verge – if not slightly past the verge – of making an ass of yourself. This sort of thing won’t do, you know. You can’t dash about accusing people of nameless crimes without a shadow of evidence.’
‘I have all the evidence I require, Mr Wooster.’
‘That’s what you think. And that, I maintain, is where you are making the floater of a lifetime. When was this modern Dutch gadget of yours abstracted?’
He quivered beneath the thrust, pinkening at the tip of the nose.
‘It is not modern Dutch!’
‘Well, we can thresh that out later. The point is: When did it leave the premises?’
‘It has not left the premises.’
‘That, again, is what you think. Well, when was it stolen?’
‘About twenty minutes ago.’
‘Then there you are. Twenty minutes ago I was up here in my room.’
This rattled him. I had thought it would.
‘You were in your room?’
‘In my room.’
‘Alone?’
‘On the contrary. Jeeves was here.’
‘Who is Jeeves?’
‘Don’t you know Jeeves? This is Jeeves. Jeeves … Sir Watkyn Bassett.’
‘And who may you be, my man?’
‘That’s exactly what he is – my man. May I say my right-hand man?’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘Not at all, Jeeves. Well-earned tribute.’
Pop Bassett’s face was disfigured, if you could disfigure a face like his, by an ugly sneer.
‘I regret, Mr Wooster, that I am not prepared to accept as conclusive evidence of your innocence the unsupported word of your manservant.’
‘Unsupported, eh? Jeeves, go and page Mr Spode. Tell him I want him to come and put a bit of stuffing into my alibi.’
‘Very good, sir.’
He shimmered away, and Pop Bassett seemed to swallow something hard and jagged.
‘Was Roderick Spode with you?’
‘Certainly he was. Perhaps you will believe him?’
‘Yes, I would believe Roderick Spode.’
‘Very well, then. He’ll be here in a moment.’
He appeared to muse.
‘I see. Well, apparently I was wrong, then, in supposing that you are concealing my cow-creamer. It must have been purloined by somebody else.’
‘Outside job, if you ask me,’ said Aunt Dahlia.
‘Possibly the work of an international gang,’ I hazarded.
‘Very likely.’
‘I expect it was all over the place that Sir Watkyn had bought the thing. You remember Uncle Tom had been counting on getting it, and no doubt he told all sorts of people where it had gone. It wouldn’t take long for the news to filter through to the international gangs. They keep their ear to the ground.’
‘Damn clever, those gangs,’ assented the aged relative.
Pop Bassett had seemed to me to wince a trifle at the mention of Uncle Tom’s name. Guilty conscience doing its stuff, no doubt – gnawing, as these guilty consciences do.
‘Well, we need not discuss the matter further,’ he said. ‘As regards the cow-creamer, I admit that you have established your case. We will now turn to Constable Oates’s helmet. That, Mr Wooster, I happen to know positively, is in your possession.’
‘Oh, yes?’
‘Yes. The constable received specific information on the point from an eyewitness. I will proceed, therefore, to search your room without delay.’
‘You really feel you want to?’
‘I do.’
I shrugged the shoulders.
‘Very well,’ I said, ‘very well. If that is the spirit in which you interpret the duties of a host, carry on. We invite inspection. I can only say that you appear to have extraordinarily rummy views on making your guests comfortable over the weekend. Don’t count on my coming here again.’
I had expressed the opinion to Jeeves that it would be entertaining to stand by and watch this blighter and his colleague ferret about, and so it proved. I don’t know when I have extracted more solid amusement from anything. But all these good things have to come to an end at last. About ten minutes later, it was plain that the bloodhounds were planning to call it off and pack up.
To say that Pop Bassett was wry, as he desisted from his efforts and turned to me, would be to understate it.
‘I appear to owe you an apology, Mr Wooster,’ he said.
‘Sir W. Bassett,’ I rejoined, ‘you never spoke a truer word.’
And folding my arms and drawing myself up to my full height, I let him have it.
The exact words of my harangue have, I am sorry to say, escaped my memory. It is a pity that there was nobody taking them down in shorthand, for I am not exaggerating when I say that I surpassed myself. Once or twice, when a bit lit at routs and revels, I have spoken with an eloquence which, rightly or wrongly, has won the plaudits of the Drones Club, but I don’t think that I have ever quite reached the level to which I now soared. You could see the stuffing trickling out of old Bassett in great heaping handfuls.
But as I rounded into my peroration, I suddenly noticed that I was failing to grip. He had ceased to listen, and was staring past me at something out of my range of vision. And so worth looking at did this spectacle, judging from his expression, appear to be that I turned in order to take a dekko.
It was the butler who had so riveted Sir Watkyn Bassett’s attention. He was standing in the doorway, holding in his right hand a silver salver. And on that salver was a policeman’s helmet.
14
* * *
I REMEMBER OLD Stinker Pinker, who towards the end of his career at Oxford used to go in for social service in London’s tougher districts, describing to me once in some detail the sensations he had experienced one afternoon, while spreading the light in Bethnal Green, on being unexpectedly kicked in the stomach by a costermonger. It gave him, he told me, a strange, dreamy feeling, together with an odd illusion of having walked into a thick fog. And th
e reason I mention it is that my own emotions at this moment were extraordinarily similar.
When I had last seen this butler, if you recollect, on the occasion when he had come to tell me that Madeline Bassett would be glad if I could spare her a moment, I mentioned that he had flickered. It was not so much at a flickering butler that I was gazing now as at a sort of heaving mist with a vague suggestion of something butlerine vibrating inside it. Then the scales fell from my eyes, and I was enabled to note the reactions of the rest of the company.
They were all taking it extremely big. Pop Bassett, like the chap in the poem which I had to write out fifty times at school for introducing a white mouse into the English Literature hour, was plainly feeling like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken, while Aunt Dahlia and Constable Oates resembled respectively stout Cortez staring at the Pacific and all his men looking at each other with a wild surmise, silent upon a peak in Darien.
It was a goodish while before anybody stirred. Then, with a choking cry like that of a mother spotting her long-lost child in the offing, Constable Oates swooped forward and grabbed the lid, clasping it to his bosom with visible ecstasy.
The movement seemed to break the spell. Old Bassett came to life as if someone had pressed a button.
‘Where – where did you get that, Butterfield?’
‘I found it in a flower bed, Sir Watkyn.’
‘In a flower bed?’
‘Odd,’ I said. ‘Very strange.’
‘Yes, sir. I was airing Miss Byng’s dog, and happening to be passing the side of the house I observed Mr Wooster drop something from his window. It fell into the flower bed beneath, and upon inspection proved to be this helmet.’
Old Bassett drew a deep breath.
‘Thank you, Butterfield.’
The butler breezed off, and old B., revolving on his axis, faced me with gleaming pince-nez.
‘So!’ he said.
There is never very much you can do in the way of a telling come-back when a fellow says ‘So!’ to you. I preserved a judicious silence.
‘Some mistake,’ said Aunt Dahlia, taking the floor with an intrepidity which became her well. ‘Probably came from one of the other windows. Easy to get confused on a dark night.’
‘Tchah!’
‘Or it may be that the man was lying. Yes, that seems a plausible explanation. I think I see it all. This Butterfield of yours is the guilty man. He stole the helmet, and knowing that the hunt was up and detection imminent, decided to play a bold game and try to shove it off on Bertie. Eh, Bertie?’
‘I shouldn’t wonder, Aunt Dahlia. I shouldn’t wonder at all.’
‘Yes, that is what must have happened. It becomes clearer every moment. You can’t trust these saintly looking butlers an inch.’
‘Not an inch.’
‘I remember thinking the fellow had a furtive eye.’
‘Me, too.’
‘You noticed it yourself, did you?’
‘Right away.’
‘He reminds me of Murgatroyd. Do you remember Murgatroyd at Brinkley, Bertie?’
‘The fellow before Pomeroy? Stoutish cove?’
‘That’s right. With a face like a more than usually respectable archbishop. Took us all in, that face. We trusted him implicitly. And what was the result? Fellow pinched a fish slice, put it up the spout and squandered the proceeds at the dog races. This Butterfield is another Murgatroyd.’
‘Some relation, perhaps.’
‘I shouldn’t be surprised. Well, now that that’s all satisfactorily settled and Bertie dismissed without a stain on his character, how about all going to bed? It’s getting late, and if I don’t have my eight hours, I’m a rag.’
She had injected into the proceedings such a pleasant atmosphere of all-pals-together and hearty let’s-say-no-more-about-it that it came quite as a shock to find that old Bassett was failing to see eye to eye. He proceeded immediately to strike the jarring note.
‘With your theory that somebody is lying, Mrs Travers, I am in complete agreement But when you assert that it is my butler, I must join issue with you. Mr Wooster has been exceedingly clever – most ingenious –’
‘Oh, thanks.’
‘– but I am afraid that I find myself unable to dismiss him, as you suggest, without a stain on his character. In fact, to be frank with you, I do not propose to dismiss him at all.’
He gave me the pince-nez in a cold and menacing manner. I can’t remember when I’ve seen a man I liked the look of less.
‘You may possibly recall, Mr Wooster, that in the course of our conversation in the library I informed you that I took the very gravest view of this affair. Your suggestion that I might be content with inflicting a fine of five pounds, as was the case when you appeared before me at Bosher Street convicted of a similar outrage, I declared myself unable to accept. I assured you that the perpetrator of this wanton assault on the person of Constable Oates would, when apprehended, serve a prison sentence. I see no reason to revise that decision.’
This statement had a mixed press. Eustace Oates obviously approved. He looked up from the helmet with a quick, encouraging smile and but for the iron restraint of discipline would, I think, have said ‘Hear, hear!’ Aunt Dahlia and I, on the other hand, didn’t like it.
‘Here, come, I say now, Sir Watkyn, really, dash it,’ she expostulated, always on her toes when the interests of the clan were threatened. ‘You can’t do that sort of thing.’
‘Madam, I both can and will.’ He twiddled a hand in the direction of Eustace Oates. ‘Constable!’
He didn’t add ‘Arrest this man!’ or ‘Do your duty!’ but the officer got the gist. He clumped forward zealously. I was rather expecting him to lay a hand on my shoulder or to produce the gyves and apply them to my wrists, but he didn’t. He merely lined up beside me as if we were going to do a duet and stood there looking puff-faced.
Aunt Dahlia continued to plead and reason.
‘But you can’t invite a man to your house and the moment he steps inside the door calmly bung him into the coop. If that is Gloucestershire hospitality, then heaven help Gloucestershire.’
‘Mr Wooster is not here on my invitation, but on my daughter’s.’
‘That makes no difference. You can’t wriggle out of it like that. He is your guest. He has eaten your salt. And let me tell you, while we are on the subject, that there was a lot too much of it in the soup tonight.’
‘Oh, would you say that?’ I said. ‘Just about right, it seemed to me.’
‘No. Too salty.’
Pop Bassett intervened.
‘I must apologize for the shortcomings of my cook. I may be making a change before long. Meanwhile, to return to the subject with which we were dealing, Mr Wooster is under arrest, and tomorrow I shall take the necessary steps to –’
‘And what’s going to happen to him tonight?’
‘We maintain a small but serviceable police station in the village, presided over by Constable Oates. Oates will doubtless be able to find him accommodation.’
‘You aren’t proposing to lug the poor chap off to a police station at this time of night? You could at least let him doss in a decent bed.’
‘Yes, I see no objection to that. One does not wish to be unduly harsh. You may remain in this room until tomorrow, Mr Wooster.’
‘Oh, thanks.’
‘I shall lock the door –’
‘Oh, quite.’
‘And take charge of the key –’
‘Oh, rather.’
‘And Constable Oates will patrol beneath the window for the remainder of the night.’
‘Sir?’
‘This will check Mr Wooster’s known propensity for dropping things from windows. You had better take up your station at once, Oates.’
‘Very good, sir.’
There was a note of quiet anguish in the officer’s voice, and it was plain that the smug satisfaction with which he had been watching the progress of events had waned. His v
iews on getting his eight hours were apparently the same as Aunt Dahlia’s. Saluting sadly, he left the room in a depressed sort of way. He had his helmet again, but you could see that he was beginning to ask himself if helmets were everything.
‘And now, Mrs Travers, I should like, if I may, to have a word with you in private.’
They oiled off, and I was alone.
I don’t mind confessing that my emotions, as the key turned in the lock, were a bit poignant. On the one hand, it was nice to feel that I had got my bedroom to myself for a few minutes, but against that you had to put the fact that I was in what is known as durance vile and not likely to get out of it.
Of course, this was not new stuff to me, for I had heard the bars clang outside my cell door that time at Bosher Street. But on that occasion I had been able to buoy myself up with the reflection that the worst the aftermath was likely to provide was a rebuke from the bench or, as subsequently proved to be the case, a punch in the pocket-book. I was not faced, as I was faced now, by the prospect of waking on the morrow to begin serving a sentence of thirty days’ duration in a prison where it was most improbable that I would be able to get my morning cup of tea.
Nor did the consciousness that I was innocent seem to help much. I drew no consolation from the fact that Stiffy Byng thought me like Sidney Carton. I had never met the chap, but I gathered that he was somebody who had taken it on the chin to oblige a girl, and to my mind this was enough to stamp him as a priceless ass. Sidney Carton and Bertram Wooster, I felt – nothing to choose between them. Sidney, one of the mugs – Bertram, the same.
I went to the window and looked out. Recalling the moody distaste which Constable Oates had exhibited at the suggestion that he should stand guard during the night hours, I had a faint hope that, once the eye of authority was removed, he might have ducked the assignment and gone off to get his beauty sleep. But no. There he was, padding up and down on the lawn, the picture of vigilance. And I had just gone to the washhand-stand to get a cake of soap to bung at him, feeling that this might soothe the bruised spirit a little, when I heard the door handle rattle.