I rather think, though I can’t be sure, that at these words Stilton ground his teeth. Certainly there was a peculiar sound, as if a coffee mill had sprung into action. The voice that filtered through to my cosy retreat quivered hoarsely.
‘My head is not like a pumpkin!’
‘It is, too, like a pumpkin.’
‘It is not like a pumpkin at all. I have this on the authority of Bertie Wooster, who says it is more like the dome of St. Paul’s.’ He broke off, and there was a smacking sound. He had apparently smitten his brow. ‘Wooster!’ he cried, emitting an animal snarl. ‘I didn’t come here to talk about my head, I came to talk about Wooster, the slithery serpent who slinks behind chaps’ backs, stealing fellows’ girls from them. Wooster the home-wrecker! Wooster the snake in the grass from whom no woman is safe! Wooster the modern Don what’s-his-name! You’ve been conducting a clandestine intrigue with him right along. You thought you were fooling me, didn’t you? You thought I didn’t see through your pitiful … your pitiful … Dammit, what’s the word?… your pitiful … No, it’s gone.’
‘I wish you would follow its excellent example.’
‘Subterfuges! I knew I’d get it. Do you think I didn’t see through your pitiful subterfuges? All that bilge about wanting me to grow a moustache. Do you think I’m not on to it that the whole of that moustache sequence was just a ruse to enable you to break it off with me and switch over to the grass snake Wooster? “How can I get rid of this Cheesewright?” you said to yourself. “Ha, I have it!” you said to yourself. “I’ll tell him he’s got to grow a moustache. He’ll say like hell he’ll grow any bally moustache. And then I’ll say Ho! You won’t, won’t you? All right, then all is over between us. That’ll fix it.” It must have been a nasty shock to you when I yielded to your request. Upset your plans quite a bit, I imagine? You hadn’t bargained for that, had you?’
Florence spoke in a voice that would have frozen an Eskimo.
‘The door is just behind you, Mr. Cheesewright. It opens if you turn the handle.’
He came right back at her.
‘Never mind the door. I’m talking about you and the leper Wooster. I suppose you will now hitch on to him, or what’s left of him after I’ve finished stepping on his face. Am I right?’
‘You are.’
‘It is your intention to marry this human gumboil?’
‘It is.’
‘Ho!’
Well, I don’t know how you would have behaved in my place, hearing these words and realizing for the first time that the evil had spread as far as this. You would probably have started violently, as I did. No doubt I ought to have spotted the impending doom, but for some reason or other, possibly because I had been devoting so much thought to Stilton, I hadn’t. This abrupt announcement of my betrothal to a girl of whom I took the gravest view shook me to my depths, with the result, as I say, that I started violently.
And, of course, the one place where it is unwise to start violently, if you wish to remain unobserved and incognito, is a cupboard in a female’s bedroom. What exactly it was that now rained down on me, dislodged by my sudden movement, I cannot say, but I think it was hat-boxes. Whatever it was, it sounded in the stilly night like coal being lowered down a chute into a cellar, and I heard a sharp exclamation. A moment later a hand wrenched open the door and a suffused face glared in on me as I brushed the hat-boxes, if they were hat-boxes, from my hair.
‘Ho!’ said Stilton, speaking with difficulty like a cat with a fishbone in its throat. ‘Come on out of there, serpent,’ he added, attaching himself to my left ear and pulling vigorously.
I emerged like a cork out of a bottle.
14
* * *
IT IS ALWAYS a bit difficult to know just what to say on occasions like this. I said, ‘Oh, there you are, Stilton. Nice evening’, but it seemed to be the wrong thing, for he merely quivered as if he had got a beetle down his back and increased the incandescence of his gaze. I saw that it was going to require quite a good deal of suavity and tact on my part to put us all at our ease.
‘You are doubtless surprised –’ I began, but he held up a hand as if he had been back in the Force directing the traffic. He then spoke in a quiet, if rumbling, voice.
‘You will find me waiting in the corridor, Wooster,’ he said, and strode out.
I understood the spirit which had prompted the words. It was the preux chevalier in him coming to the surface. You can stir up a Cheesewright till he froths at the mouth, but you cannot make him forget that he is an Old Etonian and a pukka Sahib. Old Etonians do not brawl in the presence of the other sex. Nor do pukka Sahibs. They wait till they are alone with the party of the second part in some secluded nook.
I thoroughly approved of this fineness of feeling, for it had left me sitting on top of the world. It would now, I saw, be possible for me to avoid anything in the nature of unpleasantness by executing one of those subtle rearward movements which great Generals keep up their sleeves for moments when things are beginning to get too hot. You think you have got one of these Generals cornered and are all ready to swoop on him, and it is with surprise and chagrin that, just as you are pulling up your socks and putting a final polish on your weapons, you observe that he isn’t there. He has withdrawn on his strategic railway, taking his troops with him.
With that ladder waiting in readiness for me, I was in a similarly agreeable position. Corridors meant nothing to me. I didn’t need to go into any corridors. All I had to do was slide through the window, place my foot on the top rung and carry on with a light heart to terra firma.
But there is one circumstance which can dish the greatest of Generals – viz. if, toddling along to the station to buy his ticket, he finds that since he last saw it the strategic railway has been blown up. That is the time when you will find him scratching his head and chewing the lower lip. And it was a disaster of this nature that now dished me. Approaching the window and glancing out, I saw that the ladder was no longer there. At some point in the course of the recent conversations it had vanished, leaving not a wrack behind.
What had become of it was a mystery I found myself unable to solve, but that was a thing that could be gone into later. At the moment it was plain that the cream of the Wooster brain must be given to a more urgent matter – to wit, the question of how I was to get out of the room without passing through the door and finding myself alone in a confined space with Stilton, the last person in his present frame of mind with whom a man of slender physique would wish to be alone in confined spaces. I put this to Florence, and she agreed, like Sherlock Holmes, that the problem was one which undoubtedly presented certain points of interest.
‘You can’t stay here all night,’ she said.
I admitted the justice of this, but added that I didn’t at the moment see what the dickens else I could do.
‘You wouldn’t care to knot your sheets and lower me to the ground with them?’
‘No, I wouldn’t. Why don’t you jump?’
‘And smash myself to hash?’
‘You might not.’
‘On the other hand, I might.’
‘Well, you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.’
I gave her a look. It seemed to me the silliest thing I had ever heard a girl say, and I have heard girls say some pretty silly things in my time. I was on the point of saying ‘You and your bally omelettes!’ when something seemed to go off with a pop in my brain and it was as though I had swallowed a brimming dose of some invigorating tonic, the sort of pick-me-up that makes a bedridden invalid rise from his couch and dance the Carioca. Bertram was himself again. With a steady hand I opened the door. And when Stilton advanced on me like a mass murderer about to do his stuff, I quelled him with the power of the human eye.
‘Just a moment, Stilton,’ I said suavely. ‘Before you give rein, if that’s the expression I want, to your angry passions, don’t forget you’ve drawn me in the Drones Club Darts sweep.’
It was enough. Haltin
g abruptly, as if he had walked into a lamp-post, he stood goggling like a cat in an adage. Cats in adages, Jeeves tells me, let ‘I dare not’ wait upon ‘I would’, and I could see with the naked eye that this was what Stilton was doing.
Flicking a speck of dust from my sleeve and smiling a quiet smile, I proceeded to rub it in.
‘You appreciate the position of affairs?’ I said. ‘By drawing my name, you have set yourself apart from ordinary men. To make it clear to the meanest intelligence … I allude to yours, my dear Cheesewright … where the ordinary man, seeing me strolling along Piccadilly, merely says “Ah, there goes Bertie Wooster”, you, having drawn me in the sweep, say “There goes my fifty-six pounds ten shillings”, and you probably run after me to tell me to be very careful when crossing the street because the traffic nowadays is so dangerous.’
He raised a hand and fingered his chin. I could see that my words were not being wasted. Shooting my cuffs, I resumed.
‘In what sort of condition shall I be to win that Darts tourney and put nearly sixty quid in your pocket, if you pull the strong-arm stuff you are contemplating? Try that one on your bazooka, my dear Cheesewright.’
It was a tense struggle, of course, but it didn’t last long. Reason prevailed. With a low grunt which spoke eloquently of the overwrought soul, he stepped back, and with a cheery ‘Well, good night, old man’ and a benevolent wave of the hand I left him and made my way to my room.
As I entered it, Aunt Dahlia in a maroon dressing-gown rose from the chair in which she had been sitting and fixed me with a blazing eye, struggling for utterance.
‘Well!’ she said, choking on the word like a Pekingese on a chump chop too large for its frail strength. After which, speech failing her, she merely stood and gargled.
I must say that this struck me as in the circs a bit thick. I mean, if anyone was entitled to have blazing eyes and trouble with the vocal cords, it was, as I saw it, me. I mean, consider the facts. Owing to this woman’s cloth-headed blundering when issuing divisional orders, I was slated to walk down the aisle with Florence Craye and had been subjected to an ordeal which might well have done permanent damage to the delicate nerve centres. I was strongly of the opinion that so far from being glared and gargled at I was in a position to demand a categorical explanation and to see that I got it.
As I cleared my throat in order to put this to her, she mastered her emotion sufficiently to be able to speak.
‘Well!’ she said, looking like a female minor prophet about to curse the sins of the people. ‘May I trespass on your valuable time long enough to ask you what in the name of everything bloodsome you think you’re playing at, young piefaced Bertie? It is now some twenty minutes past one o’clock in the morning, and not a spot of action on your part. Do you expect me to sit up all night waiting for you to get around to a simple, easy task which a crippled child of six could have had all done and washed up in a quarter of an hour? I suppose this is just the shank of the evening to you dissipated Londoners, but we rustics like to get our sleep. What’s the idea? Why the delay? What on earth have you been doing all this while, you revolting young piece of cheese?’
I laughed a hollow, mirthless laugh. Getting quite the wrong angle on it, she begged me to postpone my farmyard imitations to a more suitable moment. I told myself that I must be calm … calm.
‘Before replying to your questions, aged relative,’ I said, holding myself in with a strong effort, ‘let me put one to you. Would you mind informing me in a few simple words why you told me that your window was the end one on the left?’
‘It is the end one on the left.’
‘Pardon me.’
‘Looking from the house.’
‘Oh, looking from the house?’ A great light dawned on me. ‘I thought you meant looking at the house.’
‘Looking at the house it would of course be …’ She broke off with a startled yowl, staring at me with quite a good deal of that wild surmise stuff. ‘Don’t tell me you got into the wrong room?’
‘It could scarcely have been wronger.’
‘Whose was it?’
‘Florence Craye’s.’
She whistled. It was plain that the drama of the situation had not escaped her.
‘Was she in bed?’
‘With a pink boudoir cap on.’
‘And she woke up and found you there?’
‘Almost immediately. I knocked over a table or something.’ She whistled again.
‘You’ll have to marry the girl.’
‘Quite.’
‘Though I doubt if she would have you.’
‘I have positive inside information to the contrary.’
‘You fixed it up?’
‘She fixed it up. We are affianced.’
‘In spite of that moustache?’
‘She likes the moustache.’
‘She does? Morbid. But what about Cheesewright? I thought he and she were affianced, as you call it?’
‘No longer. It’s off.’
‘They’ve bust up?’
‘Completely.’
‘And now she’s taken you on?’
‘That’s right.’
A look of concern came into her face. Despite the occasional brusqueness of her manner, and the fruity names she sees fit to call me from time to time, she loves me dearly and my well-being is very near her heart.
‘She’s pretty highbrow for you, isn’t she? If I know her, she’ll have you reading W.H. Auden before you can say “What ho”.’
‘She rather hinted at some such contingency, though, if I recollect, T.S. Eliot was the name that was mentioned.’
‘She proposes to mould you?’
‘I gathered so.’
‘You won’t like that.’
‘No.’
She nodded understandingly.
‘Men don’t. I attribute my own happy marriage to the fact that I have never so much as laid a finger on old Tom. Agatha is trying to mould Worplesdon, and I believe his agonies are frightful. She made him knock off smoking the other day, and he behaved like a cinnamon bear with its foot in a trap. Has Florence told you to knock off smoking?’
‘Not yet.’
‘She will. And after that it’ll be cocktails.’ She gazed at me with a good deal of what-do-you-call-it. You could see that remorse had her in its grip. ‘I’m afraid I’ve got you into a bit of a jam, my poppet.’
‘Don’t give it a thought, old blood relation,’ I said. ‘These things happen. It is your predicament, not mine, that is exercising me. We’ve got to get you out of your sea of troubles, as Jeeves calls it. Everything else is relatively unimportant. My thoughts of self are merely in about the proportion of the vermouth to the gin in a strongish dry martini.’
She was plainly touched. Unless I am very much mistaken, her eyes were wet with unshed tears.
‘That’s very altruistic of you, Bertie dear.’
‘Not at all, not at all.’
‘One wouldn’t think it, to look at you, but you have a noble soul.’
‘Who wouldn’t think it, to look at me?’
‘And if that’s the way you feel, all I can say is that it does you credit and let’s get going. You’d better go and shift that ladder to the right window.’
‘You mean the left window.’
‘Well, let’s call it the correct window.’
I braced myself to break the bad news.
‘Ah,’ I said, ‘but what you’re overlooking – possibly because I forgot to tell you – is that a snag has arisen which threatens to do our aims and objects a bit of no good. The ladder isn’t there.’
‘Where?’
‘Under the right window, or perhaps I should say the wrong window. When I looked out, it was gone.’
‘Nonsense. Ladders don’t melt into thin air.’
‘They do, I assure you, at Brinkley Court, Brinkley-cum-Snodsfield-in-the-Marsh. I don’t know what conditions prevail elsewhere, but at Brinkley Court they vanish if you take your eye off them for
so much as an instant.’
‘You mean the ladder’s disappeared?’
‘That is precisely the point I was endeavouring to establish. It has folded its tents like the Arabs and silently stolen away.’
She turned bright mauve, and I think was about to rap out something in the nature of a Quorn-and-Pytchley expletive, for she is a woman who seldom minces her words when stirred, but at this juncture the door opened and Uncle Tom came in. I was too distrait to be able to discern whether or not he was pottering, but a glance was enough to show me that he was definitely all of a doodah.
‘Dahlia!’ he exclaimed. ‘I thought I heard your voice. What are you doing up at this hour?’
‘Bertie had a headache,’ replied the old relative, a quick thinker. ‘I have been giving him an aspirin. The head a little better now, Bertie?’
‘One notes a slight improvement,’ I assured her, being a quick thinker myself. ‘You’re out and about a bit late, aren’t you, Uncle Tom?’
‘Yes,’ said Aunt Dahlia. ‘What are you doing up at this hour, my old for-better-or-for-worser? You ought to have been asleep ages ago.’
Uncle Tom shook his head. His air was grave.
‘Asleep, old girl? I shan’t get any sleep tonight. Far too worried. The place is alive with burglars.’
‘Burglars? What gives you that idea? I haven’t seen any burglars. Have you, Bertie?’
‘Not one. I remember thinking how odd it was.’
‘You probably saw an owl or something, Tom.’
‘I saw a ladder. When I was taking my stroll in the garden before going to bed. Propped up against one of the windows. I took it away in the nick of time. A minute later, and burglars would have been streaming up it in their thousands.’
Aunt Dahlia and I exchanged a glance. I think we were both feeling happier now that the mystery of the vanishing 1. had been solved. It’s an odd thing, but however much of an aficionado one may be of mysteries in book form, when they pop up in real life they seldom fail to give one the pip.
She endeavoured to soothe his agitation.
‘Probably just a ladder one of the gardeners was using and forgot to put back where it belonged. Though, of course,’ she went on thoughtfully, feeling no doubt that a spot of paving the way would do no harm, ‘I suppose there is always a chance of a cracksman having a try for that valuable pearl necklace of mine. I had forgotten that.’