I was musing along these lines and trying to think what would be the best way of approaching Pop, handicapped as I would be by the fact that he shuddered like a jelly in a high wind every time he saw me and preferred when in my presence to sit and stare before him without uttering, when the door opened, and Spode came in.
18
* * *
THE FIRST THING that impressed itself on the senses was that he had about as spectacular a black eye as you could meet with in a month of Sundays, and I found myself at a momentary loss to decide how it was best to react to it. I mean, some fellows with bunged-up eyes want sympathy, others prefer that you pretend that you’ve noticed nothing unusual in their appearance. I came to the conclusion that it was wisest to greet him with a careless ‘Ah, Spode,’ and I did so, though I suppose, looking back, that ‘Ah, Sidcup’ would have been more suitable, and it was as I spoke that I became aware that he was glaring at me in a sinister manner with the eye that wasn’t closed. I have spoken of these eyes of his as being capable of opening an oyster at sixty paces, and even when only one of them was functioning the impact of his gaze was disquieting. I have known my Aunt Agatha’s gaze to affect me in the same way.
‘I was looking for you, Wooster,’ he said.
He uttered the words in the unpleasant rasping voice which had once kept his followers on the jump. Before succeeding to his new title he had been one of those Dictators who were fairly common at one time in the metropolis, and had gone about with a mob of underlings wearing black shorts and shouting ‘Heil, Spode!’ or words along those general lines. He gave it up when he became Lord Sidcup, but he was still apt to address all and sundry as if he were ticking off some erring member of his entourage whose shorts had got a patch on them.
‘Oh, were you?’ I said.
‘I was.’ He paused for a moment, continuing to give me the eye, then he said ‘So!’
‘So!’ is another of those things, like ‘You!’ and ‘Ha!’, which it’s never easy to find the right answer to. Nothing in the way of a come-back suggested itself to me, so I merely lit a cigarette in what I intended to be a nonchalant manner, though I may have missed it by a considerable margin, and he proceeded.
‘So I was right!’
‘Eh?’
‘In my suspicions.’
‘Eh?’
‘They have been confirmed.’
‘Eh?’
‘Stop saying “Eh?”, you miserable worm, and listen to me.’
I humoured him. You might have supposed that having so recently seen him knocked base over apex by the Rev. H.P. Pinker and subsequently laid out cold by Emerald Stoker and her basin of beans I would have regarded him with contempt as pretty small-time stuff and rebuked him sharply for calling me a miserable worm, but the idea never so much as crossed my mind. He had suffered reverses, true, but they had left him with his spirit unbroken and the muscles of his brawny arms just as much like iron bands as they had always been, and the way I looked at it was that if he wanted me to go easy on the word ‘Eh?’ he had only to say so.
Continuing to pierce me with the eye that was still on duty, he said:
‘I happened to be passing through the hall just now.’
‘Oh?’
‘I heard you talking on the telephone.’
‘Oh?’
‘You were speaking to your aunt.’
‘Oh?’
‘Don’t keep saying “Oh?”, blast you.’
Well, these restrictions were making it a bit hard for me to hold up my end of the conversation, but there seemed nothing to be done about it. I maintained a rather dignified silence, and he resumed his remarks.
‘Your aunt was urging you to steal Sir Watkyn’s amber statuette.’
‘She wasn’t!’
‘Pardon me. I thought you would try to deny the charge, so I took the precaution of jotting down your actual words. The statuette was mentioned and you said “It’s going to be pretty hard to get away with it.” She then presumably urged you to spare no effort, for you said “Well, I’ll do my best. I know how much Uncle Tom covets that statuette. Rely on me, Aunt Dahlia.” What the devil are you gargling about?’
‘Not gargling,’ I corrected. ‘Laughing lightly. Because you’ve got the whole thing wrong, though I must say the way you’ve managed to record the dialogue does you a good deal of credit. Do you use shorthand?’
‘How do you mean I’ve got it wrong?’
‘Aunt Dahlia was asking me to try to buy the thing from Sir Watkyn.’
He snorted and said ‘Ha!’ and I thought it a bit unjust that he should say ‘Ha!’ if I wasn’t allowed to say ‘Eh?’ and ‘Oh?’ There should always be a certain give and take in these matters, or where are you?
‘Do you expect me to believe that?’
‘Don’t you believe it?’
‘No, I don’t. I’m not an ass.’
This, of course, was a debatable point, as I once heard Jeeves describe it, but I didn’t press it.
‘I know that aunt of yours,’ he proceeded. ‘She would steal the filling out of your back teeth if she thought she could do it without detection.’ He paused for a moment, and I knew that he was thinking of the cow-creamer. He had always – and, I must admit, not without reason – suspected the old flesh-and-blood of being the motive force behind its disappearance, and I imagine it had been a nasty knock to him that nothing could be proved. ‘Well, I strongly advise you, Wooster, not to let her make a catspaw of you this time, because if you’re caught, as you certainly will be, you’ll be for it. Don’t think that Sir Watkyn will hush the thing up to avoid a scandal. You’ll go to prison, that’s where you’ll go. He dislikes you intensely, and nothing would please him more than to be able to give you a long stretch without the option.’
I thought this showed a vindictive spirit in the old wart hog and one that I deplored, but I felt it would be injudicious to say so. I merely nodded understandingly. I was thankful that there was no danger of this contingency, as Jeeves would have called it, arising. Strong in the knowledge that nothing would induce me to pinch their ruddy statuette, I was able to remain calm and nonchalant, or as calm and nonchalant as you can be when a fellow eight foot six in height with one eye bunged up and the other behaving like an oxyacetylene blowpipe is glaring at you.
‘Yes, sir,’ said Spode, ‘it’ll be chokey for you.’
And he was going on to say that he would derive great pleasure from coming on visiting days and making faces at me through the bars, when Pop Bassett returned.
But a very different Bassett from the fizzy rejoicer who had exited so short a while before. Then he had been all buck and beans, as any father would have been whose daughter was not going to marry Gussie Fink-Nottle. Now his face was drawn and his general demeanour that of an incautious luncher who discovers when there is no time to draw back that he has swallowed a rather too elderly oyster.
‘Madeline tells me,’ he began. Then he saw Spode’s eye, and broke off. It was the sort of eye which, even if you have a lot on your mind, you can’t help noticing. ‘Good gracious, Roderick,’ he said, ‘did you have a fall?’
‘Fall, my foot,’ said Spode, ‘I was socked by a curate.’
‘Good heavens! What curate?’
‘There’s only one in these parts, isn’t there?’
‘You mean you were assaulted by Mr. Pinker? You astound me, Roderick.’
Spode spoke with genuine feeling.
‘Not half as much as he astounded me. He was more or less of a revelation to me, I don’t mind telling you, because I didn’t know curates had left hooks like that. He’s got a knack of feinting you off balance and then coming in with a sort of corkscrew punch which it’s impossible not to admire. I must get him to teach it to me some time.’
‘You speak as though you bore him no animosity.’
‘Of course I don’t. A very pleasant little scrap with no ill feeling on either side. I’ve nothing against Pinker. The one I’ve got it in for is the cook. Sh
e beaned me with a china basin. From behind, of all unsporting things. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll go and have a word with that cook.’
He was so obviously looking forward to telling Emerald Stoker what he thought of her that it gave me quite a pang to have to break it to him that his errand would be bootless.
‘You can’t,’ I pointed out. ‘She is no longer with us.’
‘Don’t be an ass. She’s in the kitchen, isn’t she?’
‘I’m sorry, no. She’s eloped with Gussie Fink-Nottle. A wedding has been arranged and will take place as soon as the Archbish of Canterbury lets him have a special licence.’
Spode reeled. He had only one eye to stare at me with, but he got all the mileage out of it that was possible.
‘Is that true?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Well, that makes up for everything. If Madeline’s back in circulation … Thank you for telling me, Wooster, old chap.’
‘Don’t mention it, Spode, old man, or, rather, Lord Sidcup, old man.’
For the first time Pop Bassett appeared to become aware that the slight, distinguished-looking young fellow standing on one leg by the sofa was Bertram.
‘Mr. Wooster,’ he said. Then he stopped, swallowed once or twice and groped his way to the table where the drinks were. His manner was feverish. Having passed a liberal snootful down the hatch, he was able to resume. ‘I have just seen Madeline.’
‘Oh, yes?’ I said courteously. ‘How is she?’
‘Off her head, in my opinion. She says she is going to marry you.’
Well, I had more or less steeled myself to something along these lines, so except for quivering like a stricken blancmange and letting my lower jaw fall perhaps six inches I betrayed no sign of discomposure, in which respect I differed radically from Spode, who reeled for the second time and uttered a cry like that of a cinnamon bear that has stubbed its toe on a passing rock.
‘You’re joking!’
Pop Bassett shook his head regretfully. His face was haggard.
‘I wish I were, Roderick. I am not surprised that you are upset. I feel the same myself. I am distraught. I can see no light on the horizon. When she told me, it was as if I had been struck by a thunderbolt.’
Spode was staring at me, aghast. Even now, it seemed, he was unable to take in the full horror of the situation. There was incredulity in his one good eye.
‘But she can’t marry that!’
‘She seems resolved to.’
‘But he’s worse than that fishfaced blighter.’
‘I agree with you. Far worse. No comparison.’
‘I’ll go and talk to her,’ said Spode, and left us before I could express my resentment at being called that.
It was perhaps fortunate that only half a minute later Stiffy and Stinker entered, for if I had been left alone with Pop Bassett, I would have been hard put to it to hit on a topic of conversation calculated to interest, elevate and amuse.
19
* * *
STINKER’S NOSE, AS was only to be expected, had swollen a good deal since last heard from, but he seemed in excellent spirits, and Stiffy couldn’t have been merrier and brighter. Both were obviously thinking in terms of the happy ending, and my heart bled freely for the unfortunate young slobs. I had observed Pop Bassett closely while Spode was telling him about Stinker’s left hook, and what I had read on his countenance had not been encouraging.
These patrons of livings with vicarages to bestow always hold rather rigid views as regards the qualifications they demand from the curates they are thinking of promoting to fields of higher activity, and left hooks, however adroit, are not among them. If Pop Bassett had been a fight promoter on the look-out for talent and Stinker a promising novice anxious to be put on his next programme for a six-round preliminary bout, he would no doubt have gazed on him with a kindly eye. As it was, the eye he was now directing at him was as cold and bleak as if an old crony had been standing before him in the dock, charged with having moved pigs without a permit or failed to abate a smoky chimney. I could see trouble looming, and I wouldn’t have risked a bet on the happy e. even at the most liberal odds.
The stickiness of the atmosphere, so patent to my keener sense, had not communicated itself to Stiffy. No voice was whispering in her ear that she was about to be let down with a thud which would jar her to the back teeth. She was all smiles and viv-whatever-the-word-is, plainly convinced that the signing on the dotted line was now a mere formality.
‘Here we are, Uncle Watkyn,’ she said, beaming freely.
‘So I see.’
‘I’ve brought Harold.’
‘So I perceive.’
‘We’ve talked it over, and we think we ought to have the thing embodied in the form of a letter.’
Pop Bassett’s eye grew colder and bleaker, and the feeling I had that we were all back in Bosher Street police court deepened. Nothing, it seemed to me, was needed to complete the illusion except a magistrate’s clerk with a cold in the head, a fug you could cut with a knife and a few young barristers hanging about hoping for dock briefs.
‘I fear I do not understand you,’ he said.
‘Oh, come, Uncle Watkyn, you know you’re brighter than that. I’m talking about Harold’s vicarage.’
‘I was not aware that Mr. Pinker had a vicarage.’
‘The one you’re going to give him, I mean.’
‘Oh?’ said Pop Bassett, and I have seldom heard an ‘Oh?’ that had a nastier sound. ‘I have just seen Roderick,’ he added, getting down to the res.
At the mention of Spode’s name Stiffy giggled, and I could have told her it was a mistake. There is a time for girlish frivolity, and a time when it is misplaced. It had not escaped my notice that Pop Bassett had begun to swell like one of those curious circular fish you catch down in Florida, and in addition to this he was rumbling as I imagine volcanoes do before starting in on the neighbouring householders and making them wish they had settled elsewhere.
But even now Stiffy seemed to have no sense of impending doom. She uttered another silvery laugh. I’ve noticed this slowness in getting hep to atmospheric conditions in other girls. The young of the gentler sex never appear to realize that there are moments when the last thing required by their audience is the silvery laugh.
‘I’ll bet he had a shiner.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Was his eye black?’
‘It was.’
‘I thought it would be. Harold’s strength is as the strength of ten, because his heart is pure. Well, how about that embodying letter? I have a fountain pen. Let’s get the show on the road.’
I was expecting Pop Bassett to give an impersonation of a bomb falling on an ammunition dump, but he didn’t. Instead, he continued to exhibit that sort of chilly stiffness which you see in magistrates when they’re fining people five quid for boyish peccadilloes.
‘You appear to be under a misapprehension, Stephanie,’ he said in the metallic voice he had once used when addressing the prisoner Wooster. ‘I have no intention of entrusting Mr. Pinker with a vicarage.’
Stiffy took it big. She shook from wind-swept-hair-do to shoe-sole, and if she hadn’t clutched at Stinker’s arm might have taken a toss. One could understand her emotion. She had been coasting along, confident that she had it made, and suddenly out of a blue and smiling sky these words of doom. No doubt it was the suddenness and unexpectedness of the wallop that unmanned her, if you can call it unmanning when it happens to a girl. I suppose she was feeling very much as Spode had felt when Emerald Stoker’s basin had connected with his occiput. Her eyes bulged, and her voice came out in a passionate squeak.
‘But, Uncle Watkyn! You promised!’
I could have told her she was wasting her breath trying to appeal to the old buzzard’s better feelings, because magistrates, even when ex, don’t have any. The tremolo in her voice might have been expected to melt what is usually called a heart of stone, but it had no more effect on Pop Bassett than t
he chirping of the household canary.
‘Provisionally only,’ he said. ‘I was not aware, when I did so, that Mr. Pinker had brutally assaulted Roderick.’
At these words Stinker, who had been listening to the exchanges in a rigid sort of way, creating the illusion that he had been stuffed by a good taxidermist, came suddenly to life, though as all he did was make a sound like the last drops of water going out of a bath tub, it was hardly worth the trouble and expense. He succeeded, however, in attracting Pop Bassett’s attention, and the latter gave him the eye.
‘Yes, Mr. Pinker?’
It was a moment or two before Stinker followed up the gurgling noise with speech. And even then it wasn’t much in the way of speech. He said:
‘I – er – He – er –’
‘Proceed, Mr. Pinker.’
‘It was – I mean it wasn’t –’
‘If you could make yourself a little plainer, Mr. Pinker, it would be of great assistance to our investigations into the matter under discussion. I must confess to finding you far from lucid.’
It was the type of crack he had been accustomed in the old Bosher Street days to seeing in print with ‘laughter’ after it in brackets, but on this occasion it fell flatter than a Dover sole. It didn’t get a snicker out of me, nor out of Stinker, who merely knocked over a small china ornament and turned a deeper vermilion, while Stiffy came back at him in great shape.
‘There’s no need to talk like a magistrate, Uncle Watkyn.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘In fact, it would be better if you stopped talking at all and let me explain. What Harold’s trying to tell you is that he didn’t brutally assault Roderick, Roderick brutally assaulted him.’
‘Indeed? That was not the way I heard the story.’
‘Well, it’s the way it happened.’
‘I am perfectly willing to hear your version of the deplorable incident.’