‘Precisely, madam. It would be a simple task for Mr. Wooster. I notice that since my last visit to Brinkley Court the bars which protected the windows have been removed.’
‘Yes, I had that done after that time when we were all locked out. You remember?’
‘Very vividly, madam.’
‘So there’s nothing to stop you, Bertie.’
‘Nothing but –’
I paused. I had been about to say ‘Nothing but my total and absolute refusal to take on the assignment in any shape or form’, but I checked the words before they could pass the lips. I saw that I was exaggerating what I had supposed to be the dangers and difficulties of the enterprise.
After all, I felt, there was nothing so very hazardous about it. A ludicrously simple feat for one of my agility and lissomness. A nuisance, of course, having to turn out at this time of night, but I was quite prepared to do so in order to bring the roses back to the cheeks of a woman who in my bib-and-cradle days had frequently dandled me on her knee, not to mention saving my life on one occasion when I had half-swallowed a rubber comforter.
‘Nothing at all,’ I replied cordially. ‘Nothing whatever. You provide the necklace, and I will do the rest. Which is your room?’
‘That last one on the left.’
‘Right.’
‘Left, fool. I’ll be going there now, so as to be in readiness. Golly, Jeeves, you’ve taken a weight off my mind. I feel a new woman. You won’t mind if you hear me singing about the house?’
‘Not at all, madam.’
‘I shall probably start first thing tomorrow.’
‘Any time that suits you, madam.’
He closed the door behind her with an indulgent smile, or something as nearly resembling a smile as he ever allows to appear on his map.
‘One is glad to see Mrs. Travers so happy, sir.’
‘Yes, you certainly bucked her up like a tonic. No difficulty about finding a ladder, I take it?’
‘Oh, no, sir. I chanced to observe one outside the tool-shed by the kitchen garden.’
‘So did I, now you mention it. No doubt it’s still there, so let’s go. If it were … what’s that expression of yours?’
‘If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly, sir.’
‘That’s right. No sense in standing humming and hawing.’
‘No, sir. There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.’
‘Exactly,’ I said.
I couldn’t have put it better myself.
The venture went with gratifying smoothness. I found the ladder, by the tool-shed as foreshadowed, and lugged it across country to the desired spot. I propped it up. I climbed it. In next to no time I was through the window and moving silently across the floor.
Well, not so dashed silently, as a matter of fact, because I collided with a table which happened to be in the fairway and upset it with quite a bit of noise.
‘Who’s there?’ asked a voice from the darkness in a startled sort of way.
This tickled me. ‘Ah,’ I said to myself amusedly, ‘Aunt Dahlia throwing herself into her part and giving the thing just the touch it needed to make it box-office.’ What an artist, I felt.
Then it said ‘Who’s there?’ again, and it was as though a well-iced hand had been laid upon my heart.
Because the voice was not the voice of any ruddy aunt, it was the voice of Florence Craye. The next moment light flooded the apartment and there she was, sitting up in bed in a pink boudoir cap.
13
* * *
I DON’T KNOW if you happen to be familiar with a poem called ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ by the bird Tennyson whom Jeeves had mentioned when speaking of the fellow whose strength was as the strength of ten. It is, I believe, fairly well known, and I used to have to recite it at the age of seven or thereabouts when summoned to the drawing-room to give visitors a glimpse of the young Wooster. ‘Bertie recites so nicely,’ my mother used to say – getting her facts twisted, I may mention, because I practically always fluffed my lines – and after trying to duck for safety and being hauled back I would snap into it. And very unpleasant the whole thing was, so people have told me.
Well, what I was about to say, when I rambled off a bit on the subject of the dear old days, was that though in the course of the years most of the poem of which I speak has slid from the memory, I still recall its punch line. The thing goes, as you probably know,
Tum tiddle umpty-pum
Tum tiddle umpty-pum
Tum tiddle umpty-pum
and this brought you to the snapperoo or pay-off, which was
Someone had blundered.
I always remember that bit, and the reason I bring it up now is that, as I stood blinking at this pink-boudoir-capped girl, I was feeling just as those Light Brigade fellows must have felt. Obviously someone had blundered here, and that someone was Aunt Dahlia. Why she should have told me that her window was the last one on the left, when the last one on the left was what it was anything but, was more than I could imagine. One sought in vain for what Stilton Cheesewright would have called the ulterior motive.
However, it is hopeless to try to fathom the mental processes of aunts, and anyway this was no time for idle speculation. The first thing the man of sensibility has to do on arriving like a sack of coals in a girl’s bedroom in the small hours is to get the conversation going, and it was to this that I now addressed myself. Nothing is worse on these occasions than the awkward pause and the embarrassed silence.
‘Oh, hullo,’ I said, as brightly and cheerily as I could manage. ‘I say, I’m most frightfully sorry to pop in like this at a moment when you were doubtless knitting up the ravelled sleave of care, but I went for a breather in the garden and found I was locked out, so I thought my best plan was not to rouse the house but to nip in through the first open window. You know how it is when you rouse houses. They don’t like it.’
I would have spoken further, developing the theme, for it seemed to me that I was on the right lines … so much better, I mean to say, than affecting to be walking in my sleep. All that ‘Where am I?’ stuff, I mean. Too damn silly … but she suddenly gave one of those rippling laughs of hers.
‘Oh, Bertie!’ she said, and not, mark you, with that sort of weary fed-up-ness with which girls generally say ‘Oh, Bertie!’ to me. ‘What a romantic you are!’
‘Eh?’
She rippled again. It was a relief, of course, to find that she did not propose to yell for help and all that sort of thing, but I must say I found this mirth a bit difficult to cope with. You’ve probably had the same experience yourself – listening to people guffawing like hyenas and not having the foggiest what the joke is. It makes you feel at a disadvantage.
She was looking at me in an odd kind of way, as if at some child for whom, while conceding that it had water on the brain, she felt a fondness.
‘Isn’t this just the sort of thing you would do!’ she said. ‘I told you I was no longer engaged to D’Arcy Cheesewright, and you had to fly to me. You couldn’t wait till the morning, could you? I suppose you had some sort of idea of kissing me softly while I slept?’
I leaped perhaps six inches in the direction of the ceiling. I was appalled, and I think not unjustifiably so. I mean, dash it, a fellow who has always prided himself on the scrupulous delicacy of his relations with the other sex doesn’t like to have it supposed that he deliberately shins up ladders at one in the morning in order to kiss girls while they sleep.
‘Good Lord, no!’ I said, replacing the chair which I had knocked over in my agitation. ‘Nothing further from my thoughts. I take it your attention happened to wander for a moment when I was outlining the facts, just now. What I was saying, only you weren’t listening, was that I went for a breather in the garden and found I was locked out –’
She rippled once more. That looking-fondly-at-idiot-child expression on her face had become intensified.
‘You
don’t think I’m angry, do you? Of course I’m not. I’m very touched. Kiss me, Bertie.’
Well, one has to be civil. I did as directed, but with an uneasy feeling that this was a bit above the odds. I didn’t at all like the general trend of affairs, the whole thing seeming to me to be becoming far too French. When I broke out of the clinch and stepped back, I found the expression on her face had changed. She was now regarding me in a sort of speculative way, if you know what I mean, rather like a governess taking a gander at the new pupil.
‘Mother’s quite wrong,’ she said.
‘Mother?’
‘Your Aunt Agatha.’
This surprised me.
‘You call her Mother? Oh, well, okay, if you like it. Up to you, of course. What was she wrong about?’
‘You. She keeps insisting that you are a vapid and irreflective nitwit who ought years ago to have been put in some good mental home.’
I drew myself up haughtily, cut more or less to the quick. So this was how the woman was accustomed to shoot off her bally head about me in my absence, was it! A pretty state of affairs. The woman, I’ll trouble you, whose repulsive son Thos I had for years practically nursed in my bosom. That is to say, when he passed through London on his way back to school, I put him up at my residence and not only fed him luxuriously but with no thought of self took him to the Old Vic and Madame Tussaud’s. Was there no gratitude in the world?
‘She does, does she?’
‘She’s awfully amusing about you.’
‘Amusing, eh?’
‘It was she who said that you had a brain like a peahen.’
Here, of course, if I had wished to take it, was an admirable opportunity to go into this matter of peahens and ascertain just where they stood in the roster of our feathered friends as regarded the I.Q., but I let it go.
She adjusted the boudoir cap, which the recent embrace had tilted a bit to one side. She was still looking at me in that speculative way.
‘She says you are a guffin.’
‘A what?’
‘A guffin.’
‘I don’t understand you.’
‘It’s one of those old-fashioned expressions. What she meant, I think, was that she considered you a wet smack and a total loss. But I told her she was quite mistaken and that there is a lot more in you than people suspect. I realized that when I found you in that bookshop that day buying Spindrift. Do you remember?’
I had not forgotten the incident. The whole thing had been one of those unfortunate misunderstandings. I had promised Jeeves to buy him the works of a cove of the name of Spinoza – some kind of philosopher or something, I gathered – and the chap at the bookshop, expressing the opinion that there was no such person as Spinoza, had handed me Spindrift as being more probably what I was after, and scarcely had I grasped it when Florence came in. To assume that I had purchased the thing and to autograph it for me in green ink with her fountain-pen had been with her the work of an instant.
‘I knew then that you were groping dimly for the light and trying to educate yourself by reading good literature, that there was something lying hidden deep down in you that only needed bringing out. It would be a fascinating task, I told myself, fostering the latent potentialities of your budding mind. Like watching over some timid, backward flower.’
I bridled pretty considerably. Timid, backward flower, my left eyeball, I was thinking. I was on the point of saying something stinging like ‘Oh, yes?’ when she proceeded.
‘I know I can mould you, Bertie. You want to improve yourself, and that is half the battle. What have you been reading lately?’
‘Well, what with one thing and another, my reading has been a bit cut into these last days, but I am in the process of plugging away at a thing called The Mystery of the Pink Crayfish.’
Her slender frame was more or less hidden beneath the bedclothes, but I got the impression that a shudder had run through it.
‘Oh, Bertie!’ she said, this time with something more nearly approaching the normal intonation.
‘Well, it’s dashed good,’ I insisted stoutly. ‘This baronet, this Sir Eustace Willoughby, is discovered in his library with his head bashed in –’
A look of pain came into her face.
‘Please!’ she sighed. ‘Oh, dear,’ she said, ‘I’m afraid it’s going to be uphill work fostering the latent potentialities of your budding mind.’
‘I wouldn’t try, if I were you. Give it a miss, is my advice.’
‘But I hate to think of leaving you in the darkness, doing nothing but smoke and drink at the Drones Club.’
I put her straight about this. She had her facts wrong.
‘I also play Darts.’
‘Darts!’
‘As a matter of fact, I shall very soon be this year’s club champion. The event is a snip for me. Ask anybody.’
‘How can you fritter away your time like that, when you might be reading T.S. Eliot? I would like to see you –’
What it was she would have liked to see me doing she did not say, though I presumed it was something foul and educational, for at this juncture someone knocked on the door.
It was the last contingency I had been anticipating, and it caused my heart to leap like a salmon in the spawning season and become entangled with my front teeth. I looked at the door with what I have heard Jeeves call a wild surmise, the persp. breaking out on my brow.
Florence, I noticed, seemed a bit startled, too. One gathered that she hadn’t expected, when setting out for Brinkley Court, that her bedroom was going to be such a social centre. There’s a song I used to sing a good deal at one time, the refrain or burthen of which began with the words ‘Let’s all go round to Maud’s’. Much the same sentiment appeared to be animating the guests beneath Aunt Dahlia’s roof, and it was, of course, upsetting for the poor child. At one in the morning girls like a bit of privacy, and she couldn’t have had much less privacy if she had been running a snack bar on a racecourse.
‘Who’s that?’ she cried.
‘Me,’ responded a deep, resonant voice, and Florence clapped a hand to her throat, a thing I didn’t know anybody ever did off the stage.
For the d.r.v. was that of G. D’Arcy Cheesewright. To cut a long story short, the man was in again.
It was with a distinctly fevered hand that Florence reached out for a dressing-gown, and in her deportment, as she hopped from between the sheets, I noted a marked suggestion of a pea on a hot shovel. She is one of those cool, calm, well-poised modern girls from whom as a rule you can seldom get more than a raised eyebrow, but I could see that this thing of having Stilton a pleasant visitor at a moment when her room was all cluttered up with Woosters had rattled her more than slightly.
‘What do you want?’
‘I have brought your letters.’
‘Leave them on the mat.’
‘I will not leave them on the mat. I wish to confront you in person.’
‘At this time of night! You aren’t coming in here!’
‘That,’ said Stilton crisply, ‘is where you make your ruddy error. I am coming in there.’
I remember Jeeves saying something once about the poet’s eye in a fine frenzy rolling and glancing from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven. It was in much the same manner that Florence’s eye now rolled and glanced. I could see what was disturbing her, of course. It was that old problem which always bothers chaps in mystery thrillers – viz. how to get rid of the body – in this case, that of Bertram. If Stilton proposed to enter, it was essential that Bertram be placed in storage somewhere for the time being, but the question that arose was where.
There was a cupboard on the other side of the room, and she nipped across and flung open the door.
‘Quick!’ she hissed, and it’s all rot to say you can’t hiss a word that hasn’t an ‘s’ in it. She did it on her head.
‘In here!’
The suggestion struck me as a good one. I popped in and she closed the door behind me.
W
ell, actually, the fingers being, I suppose, nerveless, she didn’t, but left it ajar. I was able, consequently, to follow the ensuing conversation as clearly as if it had been coming over the wireless.
Stilton began it.
‘Here are your letters,’ he said stiffly.
‘Thank you,’ she said stiffly.
‘Don’t mention it,’ he said stiffly.
‘Put them on the dressing-table,’ she said stiffly.
‘Right ho!’ he said stiffly.
I don’t know when I’ve known a bigger night for stiff speakers.
After a brief interval, during which I presumed that he was depositing the correspondence as directed, Stilton resumed.
‘You got my telegram?’
‘Of course I got your telegram.’
‘You notice I have shaved my moustache?’
‘I do.’
‘It was my first move on finding out about your underhanded skulduggery.’
‘What do you mean, my underhanded skulduggery?’
‘If you don’t call it underhanded skulduggery, sneaking off to night clubs with the louse Wooster, it would be extremely entertaining to be informed how you would describe it.’
‘You know perfectly well that I wanted atmosphere for my book.’
‘Ho!’
‘And don’t say “Ho”.’
‘I will say “Ho”!’ retorted Stilton with spirit. ‘Your book, my foot! I don’t believe there is any book. I don’t believe you’ve ever written a book.’
‘Indeed? How about Spindrift, now in its fifth edition and soon to be translated into the Scandinavian?’
‘Probably the work of the louse Gorringe.’
I imagine that at this coarse insult Florence’s eyes flashed fire. The voice in which she spoke certainly suggested it.
‘Mr. Cheesewright, you have had a couple!’
‘Nothing of the kind.’
‘Then you must be insane, and I wish you would have the courtesy to take that pumpkin head of yours out of here.’