Pop Glossop, having only a sketchy acquaintance with this female of the species and so not knowing that from childhood up her motto had been ‘Anything goes’, was all animation and tell-me-more.
‘You have thought of some course of action that it will be feasible for us to pursue, Miss Wickham?’
‘Certainly. It sticks out like a sore thumb. Do you know which Wilbert’s room is?’
He said he did.
‘And do you agree that if you snitch things when you’re staying at a country house, the only place you can park them in is your room?’
He said that this was no doubt so.
‘Very well, then.’
He looked at her with what I have heard Jeeves call a wild surmise.
‘Can you be … Is it possible that you are suggesting …?’
‘That somebody nips into Wilbert’s room and hunts around? That’s right. And it’s obvious who the people’s choice is. You’re elected, Bertie.’
Well, I wasn’t surprised. As I say, I had seen it coming. I don’t know why it is, but whenever there’s dirty work to be undertaken at the crossroads, the cry that goes round my little circle is always ‘Let Wooster do it.’ It never fails. But though I hadn’t much hope that any words of mine would accomplish anything in the way of averting the doom, I put in a rebuttal.
‘Why me?’
‘It’s young man’s work.’
Though with a growing feeling that I was fighting in the last ditch, I continued rebutting.
‘I don’t see that,’ I said. ‘I should have thought a mature, experienced man of the world would have been far more likely to bring home the bacon than a novice like myself, who as a child was never any good at hunt-the-slipper. Stands to reason.’
‘Now don’t be difficult, Bertie. You’ll enjoy it,’ said Bobbie, though where she got that idea I was at a loss to understand. ‘Try to imagine you’re someone in the Secret Service on the track of the naval treaty which was stolen by a mysterious veiled woman diffusing a strange exotic scent. You’ll have the time of your life. What did you say?’
‘I said “Ha!” Suppose someone pops in?’
‘Don’t be silly. Mrs. Cream is working on her book. Phyllis is in her room, typing Upjohn’s speech. Wilbert’s gone for a walk. Upjohn isn’t here. The only character who could pop in would be the Brinkley Court ghost. If it does, give it a cold look and walk through it. That’ll teach it not to come butting in where it isn’t wanted, ha ha.’
‘Ha ha,’ trilled Pop Glossop.
I thought their mirth ill-timed and in dubious taste, and I let them see it by my manner as I strode off. For of course I did stride off. These clashings of will with the opposite sex always end with Bertram Wooster bowing to the inev. But I was not in jocund mood, and when Bobbie, speeding me on my way, called me her brave little man and said she had known all along I had it in me, I ignored the remark with a coldness which must have made itself felt.
It was a lovely afternoon, replete with blue sky, beaming sun, buzzing insects and what not, an afternoon that seemed to call to one to be out in the open with God’s air playing on one’s face and something cool in a glass at one’s side, and here was I, just to oblige Bobbie Wickham, tooling along a corridor indoors on my way to search a comparative stranger’s bedroom, this involving crawling on floors and routing under beds and probably getting covered with dust and fluff. The thought was a bitter one, and I don’t suppose I have ever come closer to saying ‘Faugh!’ It amazed me that I could have allowed myself to be let in for a binge of this description simply because a woman wished it. Too bally chivalrous for our own good, we Woosters, and always have been.
As I reached Wilbert’s door and paused outside doing a bit of screwing the courage to the sticking point, as I have heard Jeeves call it, I found the proceedings reminding me of something, and I suddenly remembered what. I was feeling just as I had felt in the old Malvern House epoch when I used to sneak down to Aubrey Upjohn’s study at dead of night in quest of the biscuits he kept there in a tin on his desk, and there came back to me the memory of the occasion when, not letting a twig snap beneath my feet, I had entered his sanctum in pyjamas and a dressing-gown, to find him seated in his chair, tucking into the biscuits himself. A moment fraught with embarrassment. The What-does-this-mean-Wooster-ing that ensued and the aftermath next morning – six of the best on the old spot – had always remained on the tablets of my mind, if that’s the expression I want.
Except for the tapping of a typewriter in a room along the corridor, showing that Ma Cream was hard at her self-appointed task of curdling the blood of the reading public, all was still. I stood outside the door for a space, letting ‘I dare not’ wait upon ‘I would’, as Jeeves tells me cats do in adages, then turned the handle softly, pushed – also softly – and, carrying on into the interior, found myself confronted by a girl in housemaid’s costume who put a hand to her throat like somebody in a play and leaped several inches in the direction of the ceiling.
‘Coo!’ she said, having returned to terra firma and taken aboard a spot of breath. ‘You gave me a start, sir!’
‘Frightfully sorry, my dear old housemaid,’ I responded cordially. ‘As a matter of fact, you gave me a start, making two starts in all. I’m looking for Mr. Cream.’
‘I’m looking for a mouse.’
This opened up an interesting line of thought.
‘You feel there are mice in these parts?’
‘I saw one this morning, when I was doing the room. So I brought Augustus,’ she said, and indicated a large black cat who until then had escaped my notice. I recognized him as an old crony with whom I had often breakfasted, I wading into the scrambled eggs, he into the saucer of milk.
‘Augustus will teach him,’ she said.
Now, right from the start, as may readily be imagined, I had been wondering how this housemaid was to be removed, for of course her continued presence would render my enterprise null and void. You can’t search rooms with the domestic staff standing on the sidelines, but on the other hand it was impossible for anyone with any claim to be a preux chevalier to take her by the slack of her garment and heave her out. For a while the thing had seemed an impasse, but this statement of hers that Augustus would teach the mouse gave me an idea.
‘I doubt it,’ I said. ‘You’re new here, aren’t you?’
She conceded this, saying that she had taken office only in the previous month.
‘I thought as much, or you would be aware that Augustus is a broken reed to lean on in the matter of catching mice. My own acquaintance with him is a longstanding one, and I have come to know his psychology from soup to nuts. He hasn’t caught a mouse since he was a slip of a kitten. Except when eating, he does nothing but sleep. Lethargic is the word that springs to the lips. If you cast an eye on him, you will see that he’s asleep now.’
‘Coo! So he is.’
‘It’s a sort of disease. There’s a scientific name for it. Trau-some-thing. Traumatic symplegia, that’s it. This cat has traumatic symplegia. In other words, putting it in simple language adapted to the lay mind, where other cats are content to get their eight hours, Augustus wants his twenty-four. If you will be ruled by me, you will abandon the whole project and take him back to the kitchen. You’re simply wasting your time here.’
My eloquence was not without its effect. She said ‘Coo!’ again, picked up the cat, who muttered something drowsily which I couldn’t follow, and went out, leaving me to carry on.
8
* * *
THE FIRST THING I noticed when at leisure to survey my surroundings was that the woman up top, carrying out her policy of leaving no stone unturned in the way of sucking up to the Cream family, had done Wilbert well where sleeping accommodation was concerned. What he had drawn when clocking in at Brinkley Court was the room known as the Blue Room, a signal honour to be accorded to a bachelor guest, amounting to being given star billing, for at Brinkley, as at most country houses, any old nook or cranny is co
nsidered good enough for the celibate contingent. My own apartment, to take a case in point, was a sort of hermit’s cell in which one would have been hard put to it to swing a cat, even a smaller one than Augustus, not of course that one often wants to do much cat-swinging. What I’m driving at is that when I blow in on Aunt Dahlia, you don’t catch her saying ‘Welcome to Meadowsweet Hall, my dear boy. I’ve put you in the Blue Room, where I am sure you will be comfortable.’ I once suggested to her that I be put there, and all she said was ‘You?’ and the conversation turned to other topics.
The furnishing of this Blue Room was solid and Victorian, it having been the G.H.Q. of my Uncle Tom’s late father, who liked things substantial. There was a four-poster bed, a chunky dressing table, a massive writing table, divers chairs, pictures on the walls of fellows in cocked hats bending over females in muslin and ringlets and over at the far side a cupboard or armoire in which you could have hidden a dozen corpses. In short, there was so much space and so many things to shove things behind that most people, called on to find a silver cow-creamer there, would have said ‘Oh, what’s the use?’ and thrown in the towel.
But where I had the bulge on the ordinary searcher was that I am a man of wide reading. Starting in early boyhood, long before they were called novels of suspense, I’ve read more mystery stories than you could shake a stick at, and they have taught me something – viz. that anybody with anything to hide invariably puts it on top of the cupboard or, if you prefer it, the armoire. This is what happened in Murder at Mistleigh Manor, Three Dead on Tuesday, Excuse my Gat, Guess Who and a dozen more standard works, and I saw no reason to suppose that Wilbert Cream would have deviated from routine. My first move, accordingly, was to take a chair and prop it against the armoire, and I had climbed on this and was preparing to subject the top to a close scrutiny, when Bobbie Wickham, entering on noiseless feet and speaking from about eighteen inches behind me, said:
‘How are you getting on?’
Really, one sometimes despairs of the modern girl. You’d have thought that this Wickham would have learned at her mother’s knee that the last thing a fellow in a highly nervous condition wants, when he’s searching someone’s room, is a disembodied voice in his immediate ear asking him how he’s getting on. The upshot, I need scarcely say, was that I came down like a sack of coals. The pulse was rapid, the blood pressure high, and for awhile the Blue Room pirouetted about me like an adagio dancer.
When Reason returned to its throne, I found that Bobbie, no doubt feeling after that resounding crash that she was better elsewhere, had left me and that I was closely entangled in the chair, my position being in some respects similar to that of Kipper Herring when he got both legs wrapped round his neck in Switzerland. It seemed improbable that I would ever get loose without the aid of powerful machinery.
However, by pulling this way and pushing that, I made progress, and I’d just contrived to de-chair myself and was about to rise, when another voice spoke.
‘For Pete’s sake!’ it said, and, looking up, I found that it was not, as I had for a moment supposed, from the lips of the Brinkley Court ghost that the words had proceeded, but from those of Mrs. Homer Cream. She was looking at me, as Sir Roderick Glossop had recently looked at Bobbie, with a wild surmise, her whole air that of a woman who is not abreast. This time, I noticed, she had an ink spot on her chin.
‘Mr. Wooster!’ she yipped.
Well, there’s nothing much you can say in reply to ‘Mr. Wooster!’ except ‘Oh, hullo,’ so I said it.
‘You are doubtless surprised,’ I was continuing, when she hogged the conversation again, asking me (a) what I was doing in her son’s room and (b) what in the name of goodness I thought I was up to.
‘For the love of Mike,’ she added, driving her point home.
It is frequently said of Bertram Wooster that he is a man who can think on his feet, and if the necessity arises he can also use his loaf when on all fours. On the present occasion I was fortunate in having had that get-together with the housemaid and the cat Augustus, for it gave me what they call in France a point d’appui. Removing a portion of chair which had got entangled in my back hair, I said with a candour that became me well:
‘I was looking for a mouse.’
If she had replied, ‘Ah, yes, indeed. I understand now. A mouse, to be sure. Quite,’ everything would have been nice and smooth, but she didn’t.
‘A mouse?’ she said. ‘What do you mean?’
Well, of course, if she didn’t know what a mouse was, there was evidently a good deal of tedious spadework before us, and one would scarcely have known where to start. It was a relief when her next words showed that that ‘What do you mean?’ had not been a query but more in the nature of a sort of heart-cry.
‘What makes you think there is a mouse in this room?’
‘The evidence points that way.’
‘Have you seen it?’
‘Actually, no. It’s been lying what the French call perdu.’
‘What made you come and look for it?’
‘Oh, I thought I would.’
‘And why were you standing on a chair?’
‘Sort of just trying to get a bird’s-eye view, as it were.’
‘Do you often go looking for mice in other people’s rooms?’
‘I wouldn’t say often. Just when the spirit moves me, don’t you know?’
‘I see. Well …’
When people say ‘Well’ to you like that, it usually means that they think you are outstaying your welcome and that the time has come to call it a day. She felt, I could see, that Woosters were not required in her son’s sleeping apartment, and realizing that there might be something in this, I rose, dusted the knees of the trousers, and after a courteous word to the effect that I hoped the spine-freezer on which she was engaged was coming out well, left the presence. Happening to glance back as I reached the door, I saw her looking after me, that wild surmise still functioning on all twelve cylinders. It was plain that she considered my behaviour odd, and I’m not saying it wasn’t. The behaviour of those who allow their actions to be guided by Roberta Wickham is nearly always odd.
The thing I wanted most at this juncture was to have a heart-to-heart talk with that young femme fatale, and after roaming hither and thither for awhile I found her in my chair on the lawn, reading the Ma Cream book in which I had been engrossed when these doings had started. She greeted me with a bright smile, and said:
‘Back already? Did you find it?’
With a strong effort I mastered my emotion and replied curtly but civilly that the answer was in the negative.
‘No,’ I said, ‘I did not find it.’
‘You can’t have looked properly.’
Again I was compelled to pause and remind myself that an English gentleman does not slosh a sitting redhead, no matter what the provocation.
‘I hadn’t time to look properly. I was impeded in my movements by half-witted females sneaking up behind me and asking how I was getting on.’
‘Well, I wanted to know.’ A giggle escaped her. ‘You did come down a wallop, didn’t you? How art thou fallen from heaven, oh Lucifer, son of the morning, I said to myself. You’re so terribly neurotic, Bertie. You must try to be less jumpy. What you need is a good nerve tonic. I’m sure Sir Roderick would shake you up one, if you asked him. And meanwhile?’
‘How do you mean, “And meanwhile”?’
‘What are your plans now?’
‘I propose to hoik you out of that chair and seat myself in it and take that book, the early chapters of which I found most gripping, and start catching up with my reading and try to forget.’
‘You mean you aren’t going to have another bash?’
‘I am not. Bertram is through. You may give this to the press, if you wish.’
‘But the cow-creamer. How about your Uncle Tom’s grief and agony when he learns of his bereavement?’
‘Let Uncle Tom eat cake.’
‘Bertie! Your manner is str
ange.’
‘Your manner would be strange if you’d been sitting on the floor of Wilbert Cream’s sleeping apartment with a chair round your neck, and Ma Cream had come in.’
‘Golly! Did she?’
‘In person.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I said I was looking for a mouse.’
‘Couldn’t you think of anything better than that?’
‘No.’
‘And how did it all come out in the end?’
‘I melted away, leaving her plainly convinced that I was off my rocker. And so, young Bobbie, when you speak of having another bash, I merely laugh bitterly,’ I said, doing so. ‘Catch me going into that sinister room again! Not for a million pounds sterling, cash down in small notes.’
She made what I believe, though I wouldn’t swear to it, is called a moue. Putting the lips together and shoving them out, if you know what I mean. The impression I got was that she was disappointed in Bertram, having expected better things, and this was borne out by her next words.
‘Is this the daredevil spirit of the Woosters?’
‘As of even date, yes.’
‘Are you man or mouse?’
‘Kindly do not mention that word “mouse” in my presence.’
‘I do think you might try again. Don’t spoil the ship for a ha’porth of tar. I’ll help you this time.’
‘Ha!’
‘Haven’t I heard that word before somewhere?’
‘You may confidently expect to hear it again.’
‘No, but listen, Bertie. Nothing can possibly go wrong if we work together. Mrs. Cream won’t show up this time. Lightning never strikes twice in the same place.’
‘Who made that rule?’
‘And if she does … Here’s what I thought we’d do. You go in and start searching, and I’ll stand outside the door.’