She picked up my book and frowned again. The thing was one I had brought down from the old flat in London, to glance at in the train — a fairly zippy effort in the detective line called The Trail of Blood. She turned the pages with a nasty sneer.
“I can’t understand you liking nonsense of this — ” She stopped suddenly. “Good gracious!”
“What’s the matter?”
“Do you know Bertie Wooster?”
And then I saw that my name was scrawled right across the title page, and my heart did three back somersaults.
“Oh — er — well — that is to say — well, slightly.”
“He must be a perfect horror. I’m surprised that you can make a friend of him. Apart from anything else, the man is practically an imbecile. He was engaged to my Cousin Honoria at one time, and it was broken off because he was next door to insane. You should hear my Uncle Roderick talk about him!”
I wasn’t keen.
“Do you see much of him?”
“A goodish bit.”
“I saw in the paper the other day that he was fined for making a disgraceful disturbance in the street.”
“Yes, I saw that.”
She gazed at me in a foul, motherly way.
“He can’t be a good influence for you,” she said. “I do wish you would drop him. Will you?”
“Well — ” I began. And at this point old Cuthbert, the cat, having presumably found it a bit slow by himself in the bushes, wandered in with a matey expression on his face and jumped on my lap. I welcomed him with a good deal of cordiality. Though but a cat, he did make a sort of third at this party; and he afforded a good excuse for changing the conversation.
“Jolly birds, cats,” I said.
She wasn’t having any.
“Will you drop Bertie Wooster?” she said, absolutely ignoring the cat motif.
“It would be so difficult.”
“Nonsense! It only needs a little will power. The man surely can’t be so interesting a companion as all that. Uncle Roderick says he is an invertebrate waster.”
I could have mentioned a few things that I thought Uncle Roderick was, but my lips were sealed, so to speak.
“You have changed a great deal since we last met,” said the Pringle disease reproachfully. She bent forward and began to scratch the cat under the other ear. “Do you remember, when we were children together, you used to say that you would do anything for me?”
“Did I?”
“I remember once you cried because I was cross and wouldn’t let you kiss me.”
I didn’t believe it at the time, and I don’t believe it now. Sippy is in many ways a good deal of a chump, but surely even at the age of ten he cannot have been such a priceless ass as that. I think the girl was lying, but that didn’t make the position of affairs any better. I edged away a couple of inches and sat staring before me, the old brow beginning to get slightly bedewed.
And then suddenly — well, you know how it is, I mean. I suppose everyone has had that ghastly feeling at one time or another of being urged by some overwhelming force to do some absolutely blithering act. You get it every now and then when you’re in a crowded theater, and something seems to be egging you on to shout “Fire!” and see what happens. Or you’re talking to someone and all at once you feel, “Now, suppose I suddenly biffed this bird in the eye!”
Well, what I’m driving at is this, at this juncture, with her shoulder squashing against mine and her back hair tickling my nose, a perfectly loony impulse came sweeping over me to kiss her.
“No, really?” I croaked.
“Have you forgotten?”
She lifted the old onion and her eyes looked straight into mine. I could feel myself skidding. I shut my eyes. And then from the doorway there spoke the most beautiful voice I had ever heard in my life:
“Give me that cat!”
I opened my eyes. There was good old Aunt Jane, that queen of her sex, standing before me, glaring at me as if I were a vivisectionist and she had surprised me in the middle of an experiment. How this pearl among women had tracked me down I don’t know, but there she stood, bless her dear, intelligent old soul, like the rescue party in the last reel of a motion picture.
I didn’t wait. The spell was broken and I legged it. As I went, I heard that lovely voice again.
“He shot arrows at my Tibby from a bow,” said this most deserving and excellent octogenarian.
For the next few days all was peace. I saw comparatively little of Heloise. I found the strategic value of that water-pipe outside my window beyond praise. I seldom left the house now by any other route. It seemed to me that, if only the luck held like this, I might after all be able to stick this visit out for the full term of the sentence.
But meanwhile, as they used to say in the movies — The whole family appeared to be present and correct as I came down to the drawing-room a couple of nights later. The Prof, Mrs. Prof, the two Exhibits and the girl Heloise were scattered about at intervals. The cat slept on the rug, the canary in its cage. There was nothing, in short, to indicate that this was not just one of our ordinary evenings.
“Well, well, well!” I said cheerily. “Hullo-ullo-ullo!”
I always like to make something in the nature of an entrance speech, it seeming to me to lend a chummy tone to the proceedings.
The girl Heloise looked at me reproachfully.
“Where have you been all day?” she asked.
“I went to my room after lunch.”
“You weren’t there at five.”
“No. After putting in a spell of work on the good old colleges I went for a stroll. Fellow must have exercise if he means to keep fit.”
“Mens Sana in corpora sano, ” observed the prof.
“I shouldn’t wonder,” I said cordially.
At this point, when everything was going as sweet as a nut and I was feeling on top of my form, Mrs. Pringle suddenly soaked me on the base of the skull with a sandbag. Not actually, I don’t mean. No, no. I speak figuratively, as it were.
“Roderick is very late,” she said.
You may think it strange that the sound of that name should have sloshed into my nerve centres like a half-brick. But, take it from me, to a man who has had any dealings with Sir Roderick Glossop there is only one Roderick in the world — and that is one too many.
“Roderick?” I gurgled.
“My brother-in-law. Sir Roderick Glossop, comes to Cambridge to-night,” said the prof. “He lectures at St. Luke’s to-morrow. He is coming here to dinner.”
And while I stood there, feeling like the hero when he discovers that he is trapped in the den of the Secret Nine, the door opened.
“Sir Roderick Glossop,” announced the maid or some such person, and in he came.
One of the things that get this old crumb so generally disliked among the better element of the community is the fact that he has a head like the dome of St. Paul’s and eyebrows that want bobbing or shingling to reduce them to anything like reasonable size. It is a nasty experience to see this bald and bushy bloke advancing on you when you haven’t prepared the strategic railways in your rear.
As he came into the room I backed behind a sofa and commended my soul to God. I didn’t need to have my hand read to know that trouble was coming to me through a dark man.
He didn’t spot me at first. He shook hands with the prof and wife, kissed Heloise and waggled his head at the Exhibits.
“I fear I am somewhat late,” he said. “A slight accident on the road, affecting what my chauffeur termed the — ”
And then he saw me lurking on the outskirts and gave a startled grunt, as if I hurt him a good deal internally.
‘This — ” began the prof, waving in my direction.
“I am already acquainted with Mr. Wooster.”
“This,” went on the prof, “is Miss Sipperley’s nephew, Oliver. You remember Miss Sipperley?”
“What do you mean?” barked Sir Roderick. Having had so much to do with loonies
has given him a rather sharp and authoritative manner on occasion. “This is that wretched young man, Bertram Wooster. What is all this nonsense about Olivers and Sipperleys?”
The prof was eyeing me with some natural surprise. So were the others. I beamed a bit weakly.
“Well, as a matter of fact — ” I said.
The prof was wrestling with the situation. You could hear his brain buzzing.
“He said he was Oliver Sipperley,” he moaned.
“Come here!” bellowed Sir Roderick. “Am I to understand that you have inflicted yourself on this household under the pretence of being the nephew of an old friend?”
It seemed a pretty accurate description of the facts.
“Well — er — yes,” I said.
Sir Roderick shot an eye at me. It entered the body somewhere about the top stud, roamed around inside for a bit and went out at the back.
“Insane! Quite insane, as I knew from the first moment I saw him.”
“What did he say?” asked Aunt Jane.
“Roderick says this young man is insane,” roared the prof.
“Ah!” said Aunt Jane, nodding. “I thought so. He climbs down water-pipes.”
“Does what?”
“I’ve seen him — ah, many a time!”
Sir Roderick snorted violently.
“He ought to be under proper restraint. It is abominable that a person in his mental condition should be permitted to roam the world at large. The next stage may quite easily be homicidal.”
It seemed to me that, even at the expense of giving old Sippy away, I must be cleared of this frightful charge. After all, Sippy’s number was up anyway.
“Let me explain,” I said. “Sippy asked me to come here.”
“What do you mean?”
“He couldn’t come himself, because he was jugged for biffling a cop on Boat-Race Night.”
Well, it wasn’t easy to make them get the hang of the story, and even when I’d done it it didn’t seem to make them any chummier towards me. A certain coldness about expresses it, and when dinner was announced I counted myself out and pushed off rapidly to my room. I could have done with a bit of dinner, but the atmosphere didn’t seem just right.
“Jeeves,” I said, having shot in and pressed the bell, “we’re sunk.”
“Sir?”
“Hell’s foundations are quivering and the game is up.”
He listened attentively.
“The contingency was one always to have been anticipated as a possibility, sir. It only remains to take the obvious step.”
“What’s that?”
“Go and see Miss Sipperley, sir.”
“What on earth for?”
“I think it would be judicious to apprise her of the facts yourself, sir. instead of allowing her to hear of them through the medium of a letter from Professor Pringle. That is to say, if you are still anxious to do all in your power to assist Mr. Sipperley.”
“I can’t let Sippy down. If you think it’s any good — ”
“We can but try it, sir. I have an idea, sir, that we may find Miss Sipperley disposed to look leniently upon Mr. Sipperley’s misdemeanour.”
“What makes you think that?”
“It is just a feeling that I have, sir.”
“Well, if you think it would be worth trying — How do we get there?”
“The distance is about a hundred and fifty miles, sir. Our best plan would be to hire a car.”
“Get it at once,” I said.
The idea of being a hundred and fifty miles away from Heloise Pringle, not to mention Aunt Jane and Sir Roderick Glossop, sounded about as good to me as anything I had ever heard.
The Paddock, Beckley-on-the-Moor, was about a couple of parasangs from the village, and I set out for it next morning, after partaking of a hearty breakfast at the local inn, practically without a tremor. I suppose when a fellow has been through it as I had in the last two weeks his system becomes hardened. After all, I felt, whatever this aunt of Sippy’s might be like, she wasn’t Sir Roderick Glossop, so I was that much on velvet from the start.
The Paddock was one of those medium-sized houses with a goodish bit of very tidy garden and a carefully rolled gravel drive curving past a shrubbery that looked as if it had just come back from the dry cleaner — the sort of house you take one look at and say to yourself, “Somebody’s aunt lives there.” I pushed on up the drive, and as I turned the bend I observed in the middle distance a woman messing about by a flower-bed with a trowel in her hand. If this wasn’t the female I was after, I was very much mistaken, so I halted, cleared the throat and gave tongue.
“Miss Sipperley?”
She had had her back to me, and at the sound of my voice she executed a sort of leap or bound, not unlike a barefoot dancer who steps on a tin-tack halfway through the Vision of Salome. She came to earth and goggled at me in a rather goofy manner. A large, stout female with a reddish face.
“Hope I didn’t startle you,” I said.
“Who are you?’’
“My name’s Wooster. I’m a pal of your nephew, Oliver.”
Her breathing had become more regular.
“Oh?” she said. “When I heard your voice I thought you were someone else.”
“No, that’s who I am. I came up here to tell you about Oliver.”
“What about him?”
I hesitated. Now that we were approaching what you might call the nub, or crux, of the situation, a good deal of my breezy confidence seemed to have slipped from me.
“Well, it’s rather a painful tale, I must warn you.”
“Oliver isn’t ill? He hasn’t had an accident?”
She spoke anxiously, and I was pleased at this evidence of human feeling. I decided to shoot the works with no more delay.
“Oh, no, he isn’t ill,” I said; “and as regards having accidents, it depends on what you call an accident. He’s in chokey.”
“In what?”
“In prison.”
“In prison!”
“It was entirely my fault. We were strolling along on BoatRace Night and I advised him to pinch a policeman’s helmet.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Well, he seemed depressed, don’t you know; and rightly or wrongly, I thought it might cheer him up if he stepped across the street and collared a policeman’s helmet. He thought it a good idea, too, so he started doing it, and the man made a fuss and Oliver sloshed him.”
“Sloshed him?”
“Biffed him — smote him a blow — in the stomach.” “My nephew Oliver hit a policeman in the stomach?” “Absolutely in the stomach. And next morning the beak sent him to the bastille for thirty days without the option.”
I was looking at her a bit anxiously all this while to see how she was taking the thing, and at this moment her face seemed suddenly to split in half. For an instant she appeared to be all mouth, and then she was staggering about the grass, shouting with laughter and waving the trowel madly.
It seemed to me a bit of luck for her that Sir Roderick Glossop wasn’t on the spot. He would have been calling for the strait-waistcoat in the first half-minute.
“You aren’t annoyed?” I said.
“Annoyed?” She chuckled happily. “I’ve never heard such a splendid thing in my life.”
I was pleased and relieved. I had hoped the news wouldn’t upset her too much, but I had never expected it to go with such a roar as this.
“I’m proud of him,” she said.
“That’s fine.”
“If every young man in England went about hitting policemen in the stomach, it would be a better country to live in.”
I couldn’t follow her reasoning, but everything seemed to be all right; so after a few more cheery words I said good-bye and legged it.
“Jeeves,” I said when I got back to the inn, “everything’s fine. But I am far from understanding why.”
“What actually occurred when you met Miss Sipperley, sir?”
“
I told her Sippy was in the jug for assaulting the police. Upon which she burst into hearty laughter, waved her trowel in a pleased manner and said she was proud of him.”
“I think I can explain her apparently eccentric behaviour, sir. I am informed that Miss Sipperley has had a good deal of annoyance at the hands of the local constable during the past two weeks. This has doubtless resulted in a prejudice on her part against the force as a whole.”
“Really? How was that?”
“The constable has been somewhat over-zealous in the performance of his duties, sir. On no fewer than three occasions in the last ten days he has served summonses upon Miss Sipperley — for exceeding the speed limit in her car; for allowing her dog to appear in public without a collar; and for failing to abate a smoky chimney. Being in the nature of an autocrat, if I may use the term, in the village. Miss Sipperley has been accustomed to do these things in the past with impunity, and the constable’s unexpected zeal has made her somewhat ill-disposed to policemen as a class and consequently disposed to look upon such assaults as Mr. Sipperley ‘s in a kindly and broadminded spirit.”
I saw his point.
“What an amazing bit of luck, Jeeves!”
“Yes, sir.”
“Where did you hear all this?”
“My informant was the constable himself, sir. He is my cousin.”
I gaped at the man. I saw, so to speak, all.
“Good Lord, Jeeves! You didn’t bribe him?”
“Oh, no, sir. But it was his birthday last week, and I gave him a little present. I have always been fond of Egbert, sir.”
“How much?”
“A matter of five pounds, sir.”
I felt in my pocket.
“Here you are,” I said. “And another fiver for luck.”
“Thank you very much, sir.”
“Jeeves,” I said, “you move in a mysterious way your wonders to perform. You don’t mind if I sing a bit, do you?”
“Not at all, sir,” said Jeeves.
THE ROMANCE OF A BULB-SQUEEZER
SOMEBODY HAD LEFT A COPY OF AN ILLUSTRATED weekly paper in the bar-parlour of the Anglers’ Rest; and, glancing through it, I came upon the ninth full-page photograph of a celebrated musical comedy actress that I had seen since the preceding Wednesday. This one showed her looking archly over her shoulder with a rose between her teeth, and I flung the periodical from me with a stifled cry.
Wodehouse On Crime Page 19
