‘Morning, Jane,’ said a voice, which from the fact that it was accompanied by a shrill bark such as could have proceeded only from a white, woolly dog I took to be that of the solid school friend. ‘Never mind about doing the room now.’
‘No, miss,’ said the housemaid, seeming well pleased with the idea, and pushed off, no doubt to have another gasper in the scullery. There followed a rustling of paper as the solid girl, seating herself on the sofa, skimmed through the morning journal. Then I heard her say ‘Oh, hallo, Madeline’, and was aware that the Bassett was with us.
‘Good morning, Hilda,’ said the Bassett in that soupy, treacly voice which had got her so disliked by all right-thinking men. ‘What a lovely, lovely morning.’
The solid girl said she didn’t see what was so particularly hot about it, adding that personally she found all mornings foul. She spoke morosely, and I could see that her disappointment in love had soured her, poor soul. I mourned for her distress, and had the circumstances been different, might have reached up and patted her on the head.
‘I have been gathering flowers,’ proceeded the Bassett. ‘Beautiful smiling flowers, all wet with the morning dew. How happy flowers seem, Hilda.’
The solid girl said why shouldn’t they, what had they got to beef about, and there was a pause. The solid girl said something about the prospects of the Surrey Cricket Club, but received no reply, and a moment later it was evident that Madeline Bassett’s thoughts had been elsewhere.
‘I have just been in the dining room,’ she said, and one spotted the tremor in the voice. ‘There was no letter from Gussie. I’m so worried, Hilda. I think I shall go down to Deverill by an earlier train.’
‘Suit yourself.’
‘I can’t help having an awful feeling that he is seriously injured. He said he had only sprained his wrist, but has he? That is what I ask myself. Suppose the horse knocked him down and trampled on him?’
‘He’d have mentioned it.’
‘But he wouldn’t. That’s what I mean. Gussie is so unselfish and considerate. His first thought would be to spare me anxiety. Oh, Hilda, do you think his spine is fractured?’
‘What rot! Spine fractured, my foot. If there isn’t a letter, all it means is that this other fellow – what’s his name – Wooster – has kicked at acting as an amanuensis. I don’t blame him. He’s dippy about you, isn’t he?’
‘He loves me very, very dearly. It’s a tragedy. I can’t describe to you, Hilda, the pathos of that look of dumb suffering in his eyes when we meet.’
‘Well, then, the thing’s obvious. If you’re dippy about a girl, and another fellow has grabbed her, it can’t be pleasant to sit at a writing table, probably with a rotten pen, sweating away while the other fellow dictates “My own comma precious darling period I worship you comma I adore you period How I wish comma my dearest comma that I could press you to my bosom and cover your lovely face with burning kisses exclamation mark”. I don’t wonder Wooster kicked.’
‘You’re very heartless, Hilda.’
‘I’ve had enough to make me heartless. I’ve sometimes thought of ending it all. I’ve got a gun in that drawer there.’
‘Hilda!’
‘Oh, I don’t suppose I shall. Lot of fuss and trouble. Have you seen the paper this morning? It says there’s some talk of altering the leg-before-wicket rule again. Odd how your outlook changes when your heart’s broken. I can remember a time when I’d have been all excited if they altered the leg-before-wicket rule. Now I don’t give a damn. Let ’em alter it, and I hope they have a fine day for it. What sort of a fellow is this Wooster?’
‘Oh, a dear.’
‘He must be, if he writes Gussie’s love letters for him. Either that or a perfect sap. If I were in your place, I’d give Gussie the air and sign up with him. Being a man, I presume he’s a louse, like all other men, but he’s rich, and money’s the only thing that matters.’
From the way Madeline said, ‘Oh, Hilda darling!’ – the wealth of reproach in the voice, I mean, and all that sort of thing – I could tell that these cynical words had got in amongst her, shocking her and wounding her finer feelings, and I found myself in complete accord with her attitude. I thoroughly disapproved of this girl and her whole outlook, and wished she wouldn’t say things like that. The position of affairs was black enough already, without having old school friends egging Madeline Bassett on to give Gussie the air and sign up with me.
I think that Madeline would have gone on to chide and rebuke, but at this point, instead of speaking, she suddenly uttered a squeal or wordless exclamation, and the solid girl said ‘Now what?’
‘My photograph!’
‘What about it?’
‘Where is it?’
‘On the table.’
‘But it’s not. It’s gone.’
‘Then I suppose Jane has smashed it. She always does smash everything that isn’t made of sheet-iron, and I see no reason why she should have made an exception in favour of your photograph. You’d better go and ask her.’
‘I will,’ said Madeline, and I heard her hurrying out.
A few moments passed, self inhaling fluff and the solid girl presumably scanning her paper for further facts about the leg-before-wicket rule, and then I heard her say ‘Sit still’, no doubt addressing the white, woolly dog, for shortly afterwards she said ‘Oh, all right, blast you, buzz off if you want to’, and there was a thud; not a dull, sickening thud but the sort of thud a white, woolly dog makes when landing on a carpet from a sofa of medium height. And it was almost immediately after this that there came a sound of sniffing in my vicinity, and with a considerable lowering of the already low morale I realized that the animal must have picked up the characteristic Wooster smell and was now in the process of tracking it to its source.
And so it proved. Glancing round, I suddenly found its face about six inches from mine, its demeanour that of a dog that can hardly believe its eyes. Backing away with a startled ‘Ooops!’ it retreated to the centre of the room and began barking.
‘What’s the matter, you silly ass?’ said the solid girl, and then there was a silence. On her part, that is. The white, woolly dog continued to strain its vocal cords.
Madeline Bassett re-entered.
‘Jane says –’ she began, then broke off with a piercing scream. ‘Hilda! Oh, Hilda, what are you doing with that pistol?’
The solid girl calmed her fears, though leaving mine in status quo.
‘Don’t get excited. I’m not going to shoot myself. Though it would be a pretty good idea, at that. There’s a man behind the sofa.’
‘Hilda!’
‘I’ve been wondering for some time where that curious, breathing sound was coming from. Percy spotted him. At-a-boy, Percy, nice work. Come on out of it, you.’
Rightly concluding that she meant me, I emerged, and Madeline uttered another of her piercing screams.
‘A dressy criminal, though shopsoiled,’ said the solid girl, scrutinizing me over the young cannon which she was levelling at my waistcoat. ‘One of those Mayfair men you read about, I suppose. Hallo, I see he’s got that photograph you were looking for. And probably half a dozen other things as well. I think the first move is to make him turn out his pockets.’
The thought that in one of those pockets lay Gussie’s letter caused me to reel and utter a strangled cry, and the solid girl said if I was going to have a fit, that was all right with her, but she would be obliged if I would step through the window and have it outside.
It was at this point that Madeline Bassett most fortunately found speech. During the preceding exchanges, if you can call it exchanges when one person has taken the floor and is doing all the talking, she had been leaning against the wall with a hand to her heart, giving an impersonation, and not at all a bad one either, of a cat with a herring-bone in its throat. She now made her first contribution to the dialogue.
‘Bertie!’ she cried.
The solid girl seemed puzzled.
‘Be
rtie?’
‘This is Bertie Wooster.’
‘The complete letter-writer? Well, what’s he doing here? And why has he swiped your photograph?’
Madeline’s voice sank to a tremulous whisper.
‘I think I know.’
‘Then you’re smarter than I am. Goofy, the whole proceeding strikes me as.’
‘Will you leave us, Hilda? I want to speak to Bertie … alone.’
‘Right ho. I’ll be shifting along to the dining room. I don’t suppose, feeling the way I do, there’s a dog’s chance of my being able to swallow a mouthful, but I can be counting the spoons.’
The solid girl pushed off, accompanied by the white, woolly dog, leaving us all set for a tête-à-tête which I for one would willingly have avoided. In fact, though it would, of course, have been a near thing with not much in it either way, I think I would have preferred a tête-à-tête with Dame Daphne Winkworth.
17
* * *
THE PROCEEDINGS OPENED with one of those long, sticky silences which give you the same unpleasant feeling you get when you let them rope you in to play ‘Bulstrode, a butler’ in amateur theatricals and you go on and find you have forgotten your opening lines. She was standing gazing at me as if I had been a photographer about to squeeze the bulb and take a studio portrait in sepia and silver-grey wash, and after a while it seemed to me that it was about time one of us said something. The great thing on these occasions is to get the conversation going.
‘Nice day,’ I said. ‘I thought I’d look in.’
She enlarged the eyes a bit, but did not utter, so I proceeded.
‘It occurred to me that you might be glad to have the latest bulletin about Gussie, so I popped up on the milk train. Gussie, I am glad to say, is getting along fine. The wrist is still stiff, but the swelling is subsiding and there is no pain. He sends his best.’
She remained sotto voce as the silent tomb, and I carried on. I thought a word or two touching upon my recent activities might now be in order. I mean, you can’t just come bounding up from behind the furniture and let it go at that. You have to explain and clarify your motives. Girls like to know these things.
‘You are probably asking yourself,’ I said, ‘what I was doing behind that sofa. I parked myself there on a sudden whim. You know how one gets these sudden whims. And you may be thinking it a bit odd that I should be going around with this studio portrait in my possession. Well, I’ll tell you. I happened to see it on the table there, and I took it to give to Gussie. I thought he would like to have it, to buck him up in your absence. He misses you sorely, of course, and it occurred to me that it would be nice for him to shove it on the dressing table and study it from time to time. No doubt he already has several of these speaking likenesses, but a fellow can always do with one more.’
Not too bad, it seemed to me, considering that the material had had to be thrown together rather against time, and I was hoping for the bright smile and the cordial ‘Why, yes, to be sure, a capital idea’. Instead of which, she waggled her head in a slow, mournful sort of way, and a teardrop stood in her eye.
‘Oh, Bertie!’ she said.
I have always found it difficult to think of just the right come-back when people say ‘Oh, Bertie!’ to me. My Aunt Agatha is always doing it, and she has me stymied every time. I found myself stymied now. It is true that this ‘Oh, Bertie!’ of the Bassett’s differed in many respects from Aunt Agatha’s ‘Oh, Bertie!’ its tone being one of soupiness rather than asperity, but the effect was the same. I stood there at a loss.
‘Oh, Bertie!’ she said again. ‘Do you read Rosie M. Banks’s novels?’ she asked.
I was a bit surprised at her changing the subject like this, but equally relieved. A talk about current literature, I felt, might ease the strain. These booksy chats often do.
‘Not very frequently,’ I said. ‘They sell like hot cakes, Bingo tells me.’
‘You have not read Mervyn Keene, Clubman?’
‘No, I missed that. Good stuff?’
‘It is very, very beautiful.’
‘I must put it on my library list.’
‘You are sure you have not read it?’
‘Oh, quite. As a matter of fact, I’ve always steered rather clear of Mrs Bingo’s stuff. Why?’
‘It seemed such an extraordinary coincidence … Shall I tell you the story of Mervyn Keene?’
‘Do.’
She took time out to gulp a bit. Then she carried on in a low voice with a goodish amount of throb to it.
‘He was young and rich and handsome, an officer in the Coldstream Guards and the idol of all who knew him. Everybody envied him.’
‘I don’t wonder, the lucky stiff.’
‘But he was not really to be envied. There was a tragedy in his life. He loved Cynthia Grey, the most beautiful girl in London, but just as he was about to speak his love, he found that she was engaged to Sir Hector Mauleverer, the explorer.’
‘Dangerous devils, these explorers. You want to watch them like hawks. In these circs, of course, he would have refrained from speaking his love? Kept it under his hat, I suppose, what?’
‘Yes, he spoke no word of love. But he went on worshipping her, outwardly gay and cheerful, inwardly gnawed by a ceaseless pain. And then one night her brother Lionel, a wild young man who had unfortunately got into bad company, came to his rooms and told him that he had committed a very serious crime and was going to be arrested, and he asked Mervyn to save him by taking the blame himself. And, of course, Mervyn said he would.’
‘The silly ass! Why?’
‘For Cynthia’s sake. To save her brother from imprisonment and shame.’
‘But it meant going to chokey himself. I suppose he overlooked that?’
‘No. Mervyn fully realized what must happen. But he confessed to the crime and went to prison. When he came out, grey and broken, he found that Cynthia had married Sir Hector and he went out to the South Sea Islands and became a beachcomber. And time passed. And then one day Cynthia and her husband arrived at the island on their travels and stayed at Government House, and Mervyn saw her drive by, and she was just as beautiful as ever, and their eyes met, but she didn’t recognize him, because of course he had a beard and his face was changed because he had been living the pace that kills, trying to forget.’
I remembered a good one I had read somewhere about the pace that kills nowadays being the slow, casual walk across a busy street, but I felt that this was not the moment to spring it.
‘He found out that she was leaving next morning, and he had nothing to remember her by, so he broke into Government House in the night and took from her dressing table the rose she had been wearing in her hair. And Cynthia found him taking it, and, of course, she was very upset when she recognized him.’
‘Oh, she recognized him this time? He’d shaved, had he?’
‘No, he still wore his beard, but she knew him when he spoke her name, and there was a very powerful scene in which he told her how he had always loved her and had come to steal her rose, and she told him that her brother had died and confessed on his death-bed that it was he who had been guilty of the crime for which Mervyn had gone to prison. And then Sir Hector came in.’
‘Good situation. Strong.’
‘And, of course, he thought Mervyn was a burglar, and he shot him, and Mervyn died with the rose in his hand. And, of course, the sound of the shot roused the house, and the Governor came running in and said: “Is anything missing?” And Cynthia in a low, almost inaudible voice said: “Only a rose.” That is the story of Mervyn Keene, Clubman.’
Well, it was difficult, of course, to know quite what comment to make. I said ‘Oh, ah!’ but I felt at the time that it could have been improved on. The fact is, I was feeling a bit stunned. I had always known in a sort of vague, general way that Mrs Bingo wrote the world’s worst tripe – Bingo generally changes the subject nervously if anyone mentions the little woman’s output – but I had never supposed her capable of
bilge like this.
But the Bassett speedily took my mind off literary criticism. She had resumed her saucerlike stare, and the teardrop in the eye was now more noticeable than ever.
‘Oh, Bertie,’ she said, and her voice, like Cynthia’s, was low and almost inaudible, ‘I ought to have given you my photograph long ago. I blame myself. But I thought it would be too painful for you, too sad a reminder of all that you had lost. I see now that I was wrong. You found the strain too great to bear. At all costs you had to have it. So you stole into the house, like Mervyn Keene, and took it.’
‘What!’
‘Yes, Bertie. There need be no pretences between you and me. And don’t think I am angry. I am touched, more deeply touched than I can say, and oh, so, so sorry. How sad life is!’
I was with her there.
‘You betcher,’ I said.
‘You saw my friend Hilda Gudgeon. There is another tragedy. Her whole happiness has been ruined by a wretched quarrel with the man she loves, a man called Harold Anstruther. They were playing in the Mixed Doubles in a tennis tournament not long ago and – according to her – I don’t understand tennis very well – he insisted on hogging the game, as she calls it. I think she means that when the ball came near her and she was going to strike it, he rushed across and struck it himself, and this annoyed her very much. She complained to him, and he was very rude and said she was a rabbit and had better leave everything to him, and she broke off the engagement directly the game was finished. And now she is broken-hearted.’
I must say she didn’t sound very broken-hearted. Just as the Bassett said these words, there came from without the uproar of someone singing, and I identified the voice as that of the solid school friend. She was rendering that old number ‘Give yourself a pat on the back’, and the general effect was of an exhilarated foghorn. The next moment, she came leaping into the room, and I have never seen anything more radiant. If she hadn’t had the white, woolly dog in her arms, I wouldn’t have recognized the sombre female of so short a while ago.