Captain Biggar writhed. It was like asking Joan of Arc if she happened to recall the time she saw that heavenly vision of hers. ‘How about it, boys?’ he inquired silently, looking pleadingly from right to left. ‘Couldn’t you stretch a point?’ But Tubby Frobisher and the Subahdar shook their heads.
‘The code, old man,’ said Tubby Frobisher.
‘Play the game, old boy,’ said the Subahdar.
‘Do you?’ asked Mrs Spottsworth.
‘Oh, rather,’ said Captain Biggar.
‘I had the strangest feeling, when I saw you that day, that we had met before in some previous existence.’
‘A bit unlikely, what?’
Mrs Spottsworth closed her eyes.
‘I seemed to see us in some dim, prehistoric age. We were clad in skins. You hit me over the head with your club and dragged me by my hair to your cave.’
‘Oh, no, dash it, I wouldn’t do a thing like that.’
Mrs Spottsworth opened her eyes, and enlarging them to their fullest extent allowed them to play on his like searchlights.
‘You did it because you loved me,’ she said in a low, vibrant whisper. ‘And I –’
She broke off. Something tall and willowy had loomed up against the skyline, and a voice with perhaps just a quaver of nervousness in it was saying ‘Hullo-ullo-ullo-ullo-ullo’.
‘I’ve been looking for you everywhere, Rosie,’ said Bill. ‘When I found you weren’t at the ruined chapel … Oh, hullo, Captain.’
‘Hullo,’ said Captain Biggar dully, and tottered off. Lost in the shadows a few paces down the path, he halted and brushed away the beads of perspiration which had formed on his forehead.
He was breathing heavily, like a buffalo in the mating season. It had been a near thing, a very near thing. Had this interruption been postponed even for another minute, he knew that he must have sinned against the code and taken the irrevocable step which would have made his name a mockery and a byword in the Anglo-Malay Club at Kuala Lumpur. A pauper with a bank balance of a few meagre pounds, he would have been proposing marriage to a woman with millions.
More and more, as the moments went by, he had found himself being swept off his feet, his ears becoming deafer and deafer to the muttered warnings of Tubby Frobisher and the Subahdar. Her eyes he might have resisted. Her voice, too, and the skin he had loved to touch. But when it came to eyes, voice, skin, moonlight, gentle breezes from the west and nightingales, the mixture was too rich.
Yes, he felt as he stood there heaving like a stage sea, he had been saved, and it might have been supposed that his prevailing emotion would have been a prayerful gratitude to Fate or Destiny for its prompt action. But, oddly enough, it was not. The first spasm of relief had died quickly away, to be succeeded by a rising sensation of nausea. And what caused this nausea was the fact that, being still within earshot of the rustic seat, he could hear all that Bill was saying. And Bill, having seated himself beside Mrs Spottsworth, had begun to coo.
Too little has been said in this chronicle of the ninth Earl of Rowcester’s abilities in this direction. When we heard him promising his sister Monica to contact Mrs Spottsworth and coo to her like a turtle dove, we probably formed in our minds the picture of one of those run-of-the-mill turtle doves whose cooing, though adequate, does not really amount to anything much. We would have done better to envisage something in the nature of a turtle dove of stellar quality, what might be called the Turtle Dove Supreme. A limited young man in many respects, Bill Rowcester could, when in mid-season form, touch heights in the way of cooing which left his audience, if at all impressionable, gasping for air.
These heights he was touching now, for the thought that this woman had it in her power to take England’s leading white elephant off his hands, thus stabilizing his financial position and enabling him to liquidate Honest Patch Perkins’ honourable obligations, lent him an eloquence which he had not achieved since May Week dances at Cambridge. The golden words came trickling from his lips like syrup.
Captain Biggar was not fond of syrup, and he did not like the thought of the woman he loved being subjected to all this goo. For a moment he toyed with the idea of striding up and breaking Bill’s spine in three places, but once more found his aspirations blocked by the code. He had eaten Bill’s meat and drunk Bill’s drink … both excellent, especially the roast duck … and that made the feller immune to assault. For when a feller has accepted a feller’s hospitality, a feller can’t go about breaking the feller’s spine, no matter what the feller may have done. The code is rigid on that point.
He is at liberty, however, to docket the feller in his mind as a low-down, fortune-hunting son of a what not, and this was how Captain Biggar was docketing Bill as he lumbered back to the house. And it was – substantially – how he described him to Jill when, passing through the french window, he found her crossing the living room on her way to deposit her things in her sleeping apartment.
‘Good gracious!’ said Jill, intrigued by his aspect. ‘You seem very upset, Captain Biggar. What’s the matter? Have you been bitten by an alligator?’
Before proceeding the captain had to put her straight on this.
‘No alligators in England,’ he said. ‘Except, of course, in zoos. No, I have been shocked to the very depths of my soul.’
‘By a wombat?’
Again the captain was obliged to correct her misapprehensions. An oddly ignorant girl, this, he was thinking.
‘No wombats in England, either. What shocked me to the very depths of my soul was listening to a low-down, fortune-hunting English peer doing his stuff,’ he barked bitterly. ‘Lord Rowcester, he calls himself. Lord Gigolo’s what I call him.’
Jill started so sharply that she dropped her suitcase.
‘Allow me,’ said the captain, diving for it.
‘I don’t understand,’ said Jill. ‘Do you mean that Lord Rowcester –?’
One of the rules of the code is that a white man must shield women, and especially young, innocent girls, from the seamy side of life, but Captain Biggar was far too stirred to think of that now. He resembled Othello not only in his taste for antres vast and deserts idle but in his tendency, being wrought, to become perplexed in the extreme.
‘He was making love to Mrs Spottsworth in the moonlight,’ he said curtly.
‘What!’
‘Heard him with my own ears. He was cooing to her like a turtle dove. After her money, of course. All the same, these effete aristocrats of the old country. Make a noise like a rich widow anywhere in England, and out come all the dukes and earls and viscounts, howling like wolves. Rats, we’d call them in Kuala Lumpur. You should hear Tubby Frobisher talk about them at the club. I remember him saying one day to Doc and Squiffy – the Subahdar wasn’t there, if I recollect rightly – gone up country, or something – “Doc,” he said …’
It was probably going to be a most extraordinarily good story, but Captain Biggar did not continue it any further for he saw that his audience was walking out on him. Jill had turned abruptly, and was passing through the door. Her head, he noted, was bowed, and very properly, too, after a revelation like that. Any nice girl would have been knocked endways by such a stunning exposé of the moral weaknesses of the British aristocracy.
He sat down and picked up the evening paper, throwing it from him with a stifled cry as the words ‘Whistler’s Mother’ leaped at him from the printed page. He did not want to be reminded of Whistler’s Mother. He was brooding darkly on Honest Patch Perkins and wondering wistfully if Destiny (or Fate) would ever bring their paths together again, when Jeeves came floating in. Simultaneously, Rory entered from the library.
‘Oh, Jeeves,’ said Rory, ‘will you bring me a flagon of strong drink? I am athirst.’
With a respectful movement of his head Jeeves indicated the tray he was carrying, laden with the right stuff, and Rory accompanied him to the table, licking his lips.
‘Something for you, Captain?’ he said.
‘Whisky, if yo
u please,’ said Captain Biggar. After that ordeal in the moonlit garden, he needed a restorative.
‘Whisky? Right. And for you, Mrs Spottsworth?’ said Rory, as that lady came through the french window accompanied by Bill.
‘Nothing, thank you, Sir Roderick. On a night like this, moonlight is enough for me. Moonlight and your lovely garden, Billiken.’
‘I’ll tell you something about that garden,’ said Rory. ‘In the summer months –’ He broke off as Monica appeared in the library door. The sight of her not only checked his observations on the garden, but reminded him of her injunction to boost the bally place to this Spottsworth woman. Looking about him for something in the bally place capable of being boosted, his eye fell on the dower chest in the corner and he recalled complementary things he had heard said in the past about it.
It seemed to him that it would make a good point d’appui. ‘Yes,’ he proceeded, ‘the garden’s terrific, and furthermore it must never be overlooked that Rowcester Abbey, though a bit shop-soiled and falling apart at the seams, contains many an objet d’art calculated to make the connoisseur sit up and say “What ho!” Cast an eye on that dower chest, Mrs Spottsworth.’
‘I was admiring it when I first arrived. It’s beautiful.’
‘Yes, it is nice, isn’t it?’ said Monica, giving her husband a look of wifely approval. One didn’t often find Rory showing such signs of almost human intelligence. ‘Duveen used to plead to be allowed to buy it, but of course it’s an heirloom and can’t be sold.’
‘Goes with the house,’ said Rory.
‘It’s full of the most wonderful old costumes.’
‘Which go with the house,’ said Rory, probably quite incorrectly, but showing zeal.
‘Would you like to look at them?’ said Monica, reaching for the lid.
Bill uttered an agonized cry.
‘They’re not in there!’
‘Of course they are. They always have been. And I’m sure Rosalinda would enjoy seeing them.’
‘I would indeed.’
‘There’s quite a romantic story attached to this dower chest, Rosalinda. The Lord Rowcester of that time – centuries ago – wouldn’t let his daughter marry the man she loved, a famous explorer and discoverer.’
‘The old boy was against Discoveries,’ explained Rory. ‘He was afraid they might discover America. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Oh, I beg your pardon.’
‘The lover sent his chest to the girl, filled with rare embroideries he had brought back from his travels in the East, and her father wouldn’t let her have it. He told the lover to come and take it away. And the lover did, and of course inside it was the young man’s bride. Knowing what was going to happen, she had hidden there.’
‘And the funny part of the story is that the old blister followed the chap all the way down the drive, shouting “Get that damn thing out of here!”’
Mrs Spottsworth was enchanted.
‘What a delicious story. Do open it, Monica.’
‘I will. It isn’t locked.’
Bill sank bonelessly into a chair.
‘Jeeves!’
‘M’lord?’
‘Brandy!’
‘Very good, m’lord.’
‘Well, for heaven’s sake!’ said Monica.
She was staring wide-eyed at a check coat of loud pattern and a tie so crimson, so intensely blue horseshoed, that Rory shook his head censoriously.
‘Good Lord, Bill, don’t tell me you go around in a coat like that? It must make you look like an absconding bookie. And the tie! The cravat! Ye gods! You’d better drop in at Harrige’s and see the chap in our haberdashery department. We’ve got a sale on.’
Captain Biggar strode forward. There was a tense, hard expression on his rugged face.
‘Let me look at that.’ He took the coat, felt in the pocket and produced a black patch. ‘Ha!’ he said, and there was a wealth of meaning in his voice.
Rory was listening at the library door.
‘Hullo,’ he said. ‘Someone talking French. Must be Boussac. Don’t want to miss Boussac. Come along, Moke. This girl,’ said Rory, putting a loving arm round her shoulder, ‘talks French with both hands. You coming, Mrs Spottsworth? It’s the Derby Dinner on television.’
‘I will join you later, perhaps,’ said Mrs Spottsworth. ‘I left Pomona out in the garden, and she may be getting lonely.’
‘You, Captain?’
Captain Biggar shook his head. His face was more rugged than ever.
‘I have a word or two to say to Lord Rowcester first. If you can spare me a moment, Lord Rowcester?’
‘Oh, rather,’ said Bill faintly.
Jeeves returned with the brandy, and he sprang for it like Whistler’s Mother leaping at the winning post.
11
* * *
BUT BRANDY, WHEN administered in one of those small after-dinner glasses, can never do anything really constructive for a man whose affairs have so shaped themselves as to give him the momentary illusion of having been hit in the small of the back by the Twentieth Century Limited. A tun or a hogshead of the stuff might have enabled Bill to face the coming interview with a jaunty smile. The mere sip which was all that had been vouchsafed to him left him as pallid and boneless as if it had been sarsaparilla. Gazing through a mist at Captain Biggar, he closely resembled the sort of man for whom the police spread drag-nets, preparatory to questioning them in connection with the recent smash-and-grab robbery at Marks and Schoenstein’s Bon Ton Jewellery Store on Eighth Avenue. His face had shaded away to about the colour of the underside of a dead fish, and Jeeves, eyeing him with respectful commiseration, wished that it were possible to bring the roses back to his cheeks by telling him one or two good things which had come into his mind from the Collected Works of Marcus Aurelius.
Captain Biggar, even when seen through a mist, presented a spectacle which might well have intimidated the stoutest. His eyes seemed to Bill to be shooting out long, curling flames, and why they called a man with a face as red as that a White Hunter was more than he was able to understand. Strong emotion, as always, had intensified the vermilion of the captain’s complexion, giving him something of the appearance of a survivor from an explosion in a tomato cannery.
Nor was his voice, when he spoke, of a timbre calculated to lull any apprehensions which his aspect might have inspired. It was the voice of a man who needed only a little sympathy and encouragement to make him whip out a revolver and start blazing away with it.
‘So!’ he said.
There are no good answers to the word ‘So!’ particularly when uttered in the kind of voice just described, and Bill did not attempt to find one.
‘So you are Honest Patch Perkins!’
Jeeves intervened, doing his best as usual.
‘Well, yes and no, sir.’
‘What do you mean, yes and no? Isn’t this the louse’s patch?’ demanded the captain, brandishing Exhibit A. ‘Isn’t that the hellhound’s ginger moustache?’ he said, giving Exhibit B a twiddle. ‘And do you think I didn’t recognize that coat and tie?’
‘What I was endeavouring to convey by the expression “Yes and no”, sir, was that his lordship has retired from business.’
‘You bet he has. Pity he didn’t do it sooner.’
‘Yes, sir. Oh, Iago, the pity of it, Iago.’
‘Eh?’
‘I was quoting the Swan of Avon, sir.’
‘Well, stop quoting the bally Swan of Avon.’
‘Certainly, sir, if you wish it.’
Bill had recovered his faculties to a certain extent. To say that even now he was feeling boomps-a-daisy would be an exaggeration, but he was capable of speech.
‘Captain Biggar,’ he said, ‘I owe you an explanation.’
‘You owe me three thousand and five pounds two and six,’ said the captain, coldly corrective.
This silenced Bill again, and the captain took advantage of the fact to call him eleven derogatory names.
Jeeves assumed the burden of
the defence, for Bill was still reeling under the impact of the eleventh name.
‘It is impossible to gainsay the fact that in the circumstances your emotion is intelligible, sir, for one readily admits that his lordship’s recent activities are of a nature to lend themselves to adverse criticism. But can one fairly blame his lordship for what has occurred?’
This seemed to the captain an easy one to answer.
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘You will observe that I employed the adverb “fairly”, sir. His lordship arrived on Epsom Downs this afternoon with the best intentions and a capital adequate for any reasonable emergency. He could hardly have been expected to foresee that two such meagrely favoured animals as Lucy Glitters and Whistler’s Mother would have emerged triumphant from their respective trials of speed. His lordship is not clairvoyant.’
‘He could have laid the bets off.’
‘There I am with you sir. Rem acu tetigisti.’
‘Eh?’
‘A Latin expression, which might be rendered in English by the American colloquialism “You said a mouthful”. I urged his lordship to do so.’
‘You?’
‘I was officiating as his lordship’s clerk.’
The captain stared.
‘You weren’t the chap in the pink moustache?’
‘Precisely, sir, though I would be inclined to describe it as russet rather than pink.’
The captain brightened.
‘So you were his clerk, were you? Then when he goes to prison, you’ll go with him.’
‘Let us hope there will be no such sad ending as that, sir.’
‘What do you mean, “sad” ending?’ said Captain Biggar.
There was an uncomfortable pause. The captain broke it.
‘Well, let’s get down to it,’ he said. ‘No sense in wasting time. Properly speaking, I ought to charge this sheep-faced, shambling refugee from hell –’
‘The name is Lord Rowcester, sir.’
‘No, it’s not, it’s Patch Perkins. Properly speaking, Perkins, you slinking reptile, I ought to charge you for petrol consumed on the journey here from Epsom, repairs to my car, which wouldn’t have broken down if I hadn’t had to push it so hard in the effort to catch you … and,’ he added, struck with an afterthought, ‘the two beers I had at the Goose and Gherkin while waiting for those repairs to be done. But I’m no hog. I’ll settle for three thousand and five pounds two and six. Write me a cheque.’