Spode commented on my methods of voice production.
‘Don’t shout like that!’
‘Nearly broke my eardrum,’ grumbled old Bassett.
‘But listen!’ I yelled. ‘Will you listen!’
A certain amount of confused argument then ensued, self trying to put the case for the defence and the opposition rather harping a bit on the row I was making. And in the middle of it all, just as I was showing myself in particularly good voice, the door opened and somebody said ‘Goodness gracious!’
I looked round. Those parted lips … those saucerlike eyes … that slender figure, drooping slightly at the hinges …
Madeline Bassett was in our midst.
‘Goodness gracious!’ she repeated.
I can well imagine that a casual observer, if I had confided to him my qualms at the idea of being married to this girl, would have raised his eyebrows and been at a loss to understand. ‘Bertie,’ he would probably have said, ‘you don’t know what’s good for you,’ adding, possibly, that he wished he had half my complaint. For Madeline Bassett was undeniably of attractive exterior – slim, svelte, if that’s the word, and bountifully equipped with golden hair and all the fixings.
But where the casual observer would have been making his bloomer was in overlooking that squashy soupiness of hers, that subtle air she had of being on the point of talking baby-talk. It was that that froze the blood. She was definitely the sort of girl who puts her hands over a husband’s eyes, as he is crawling in to breakfast with a morning head, and says: ‘Guess who!’
I once stayed at the residence of a newly married pal of mine, and his bride had had carved in large letters over the fire-place in the drawing-room, where it was impossible to miss it, the legend: ‘Two Lovers Built This Nest,’ and I can still recall the look of dumb anguish in the other half of the sketch’s eyes every time he came in and saw it. Whether Madeline Bassett, on entering the marital state, would go to such an awful extreme, I could not say, but it seemed most probable.
She was looking at us with a sort of pretty, wide-eyed wonder.
‘Whatever is all the noise about?’ she said. ‘Why, Bertie! When did you get here?’
‘Oh, hallo. I’ve just arrived.’
‘Did you have a nice journey down?’
‘Oh, rather, thanks. I came in the two-seater.’
‘You must be quite exhausted.’
‘Oh, no, thanks, rather not.’
‘Well, tea will be ready soon. I see you’ve met Daddy.’
‘And Mr Spode.’
‘And Mr Spode.’
‘I don’t know where Augustus is, but he’s sure to be in for tea.’
‘I’ll count the moments.’
Old Bassett had been listening to these courtesies with a dazed expression on the map – gulping a bit from time to time, like a fish that has been hauled out of a pond on a bent pin and isn’t at all sure it is equal to the pressure of events. One followed the mental processes, of course. To him, Bertram was a creature of the underworld who stole bags and umbrellas and, what made it worse, didn’t even steal them well. No father likes to see his ewe lamb on chummy terms with such a one.
‘You don’t mean you know this man?’ he said.
Madeline Bassett laughed the tinkling, silvery laugh which was one of the things that had got her so disliked by the better element.
‘Why, Daddy, you’re too absurd. Of course I know him. Bertie Wooster is an old, old, a very dear old friend of mine. I told you he was coming here today.’
Old Bassett seemed not abreast. Spode didn’t seem any too abreast, either.
‘This isn’t your friend Mr Wooster?’
‘Of course.’
‘But he snatches bags.’
‘Umbrellas,’ prompted Spode, as if he had been the King’s Remembrancer or something.
‘And umbrellas,’ assented old Bassett. ‘And makes daylight raids on antique shops.’
Madeline was not abreast – making three in all.
‘Daddy!’
Old Bassett stuck to it stoutly.
‘He does, I tell you. I’ve caught him at it.’
‘I’ve caught him at it,’ said Spode.
‘We’ve both caught him at it,’ said old Bassett. ‘All over London. Wherever you go in London, there you will find this fellow stealing bags and umbrellas. And now in the heart of Gloucestershire.’
‘Nonsense!’ said Madeline.
I saw that it was time to put an end to all this rot. I was about fed up with that bag-snatching stuff. Naturally, one does not expect a magistrate to have all the details about the customers at his fingers’ ends – pretty good, of course, remembering his clientèle at all – but one can’t just keep passing a thing like that off tactfully.
‘Of course it’s nonsense,’ I thundered. ‘The whole thing is one of those laughable misunderstandings.’
I must say I was expecting that my explanation would have gone better than it did. What I had anticipated was that after a few words from myself, outlining the situation, there would have been roars of jolly mirth, followed by apologies and backslappings. But old Bassett, like so many of these police court magistrates, was a difficult man to convince. Magistrates’ natures soon get warped. He kept interrupting and asking questions, and cocking an eye at me as he asked them. You know what I mean – questions beginning with ‘Just a moment –’ and ‘You say –’ and ‘Then you are asking us to believe –’ Offensive, very.
However, after a good deal of tedious spadework, I managed to get him straight on the umbrella, and he conceded that he might have judged me unjustly about that.
‘But how about the bags?’
‘There weren’t any bags.’
‘I certainly sentenced you for something at Bosher Street. I remember it vividly.’
‘I pinched a policeman’s helmet.’
‘That’s just as bad as snatching bags.’
Roderick Spode intervened unexpectedly. Throughout this – well, dash it, this absolute Trial of Mary Dugan – he had been standing by, thoughtfully sucking the muzzle of his gun and listening to my statement as if he thought it all pretty thin; but now a flicker of human feeling came into his granite face.
‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t think you can go so far as that. When I was at Oxford, I once stole a policeman’s helmet myself.’
I was astounded. Nothing in my relations with this man had given me the idea that he, too, had, so to speak, once lived in Arcady. It just showed, as I often say, that there is good in the worst of us.
Old Bassett was plainly taken aback. Then he perked up.
‘Well, how about that affair at the antique shop? Hey? Didn’t we catch him in the act of running off with my cow-creamer? What has he got to say to that?’
Spode seemed to see the force of this. He removed the gun, which he had replaced between his lips, and nodded.
‘The bloke at the shop had given it to me to look at,’ I said shortly. ‘He advised me to take it outside, where the light was better.’
‘You were rushing out.’
‘Staggering out. I trod on the cat.’
‘What cat?’
‘It appeared to be an animal attached to the personnel of the emporium.’
‘H’m! I saw no cat. Did you see a cat, Roderick?’
‘No, no cat.’
‘Ha! Well, we will pass over the cat –’
‘But I didn’t,’ I said, with one of my lightning flashes.
‘We will pass over the cat,’ repeated old Bassett, ignoring the gag and leaving it lying there, ‘and come to another point. What were you doing with that cow-creamer? You say you were looking at it. You are asking us to believe that you were merely subjecting it to a perfectly innocent scrutiny. Why? What was your motive? What possible interest could it have for a man like you?’
‘Exactly,’ said Spode. ‘The very question I was going to ask myself.’
This bit of backing-up from a pal had the worst effect on old
Bassett. It encouraged him to so great an extent that he now yielded completely to the illusion that he was back in his bally police court.
‘You say the proprietor of the shop handed it to you. I put it to you that you snatched it up and were making off with it. And now Mr Spode catches you here, with the thing in your hands. How do you explain that? What’s your answer to that? Hey?’
‘Why, Daddy!’ said Madeline.
I dare say you have been wondering at this pancake’s silence during all the cut-and-thrust stuff which had been going on. It is readily explained. What had occurred was that shortly after saying ‘Nonsense!’ in the earlier portion of the proceedings, she had happened to inhale some form of insect life, and since then had been choking quietly in the background. And as the situation was far too tense for us to pay any attention to choking girls, she had been left to carry on under her own steam while the men threshed out the subject on the agenda paper.
She now came forward, her eyes still watering a bit.
‘Why, Daddy,’ she said, ‘naturally your silver would be the first thing Bertie would want to look at. Of course, he is interested in it. Bertie is Mr Travers’s nephew.’
‘What!’
‘Didn’t you know that? Your uncle has a wonderful collection hasn’t he, Bertie? I suppose he has often spoken to you of Daddy’s.’
There was a pause. Old Bassett was breathing heavily. I didn’t like the look of him at all. He glanced from me to the cow-creamer, and from the cow-creamer to me, then back from me to the cow-creamer again, and it would have taken a far less astute observer than Bertram to fail to read what was passing in his mind. If ever I saw a bimbo engaged in putting two and two together, that bimbo was Sir Watkyn Bassett.
‘Oh!’ he said.
Just that. Nothing more. But it was enough.
‘I say,’ I said, ‘could I send a telegram?’
‘You can telephone it from the library,’ said Madeline. ‘I’ll take you there.’
She conducted me to the instrument and left me, saying that she would be waiting in the hall when I had finished. I leaped at it, established connection with the post office, and after a brief conversation with what appeared to be the village idiot, telephoned as follows:
Mrs Travers,
47, Charles Street,
Berkeley Square,
London.
I paused for a moment, assembling the ideas, then proceeded thus:
Deeply regret quite impossible carry out assignment re you know what. Atmosphere one of keenest suspicion and any sort of action instantly fatal. You ought to have seen old Bassett’s eye just now on learning of blood relationship of self and Uncle Tom. Like ambassador finding veiled woman snooping round safe containing secret treaty. Sorry and all that, but nothing doing. Love.
BERTIE.
I then went down to the hall to join Madeline Bassett.
She was standing by the barometer, which, if it had had an ounce of sense in its head, would have been pointing to ‘Stormy’ instead of ‘Set Fair’: and as I hove alongside she turned and gazed at me with a tender goggle which sent a thrill of dread creeping down the Wooster spine. The thought that there stood one who was on distant terms with Gussie and might ’ere long return the ring and presents afflicted me with a nameless horror.
I resolved that if a few quiet words from a man of the world could heal the breach, they should be spoken.
‘Oh, Bertie,’ she said, in a low voice like beer trickling out of a jug, ‘you ought not to be here!’
My recent interview with old Bassett and Roderick Spode had rather set me thinking along those lines myself. But I hadn’t time to explain that this was no idle social visit, and that if Gussie hadn’t been sending out SOSs I wouldn’t have dreamed of coming within a hundred miles of the frightful place. She went on, looking at me as if I were a rabbit which she was expecting shortly to turn into a gnome.
‘Why did you come? Oh, I know what you are going to say. You felt that, cost what it might, you had to see me again, just once. You could not resist the urge to take away with you one last memory, which you could cherish down the lonely years. Oh, Bertie, you remind me of Rudel.’
The name was new to me.
‘Rudel?’
‘The Seigneur Geoffrey Rudel, Prince of Blay-en-Saintonge.’
I shook my head.
‘Never met him, I’m afraid. Pal of yours?’
‘He lived in the Middle Ages. He was a great poet. And he fell in love with the wife of the Lord of Tripoli.’
I stirred uneasily. I hoped she was going to keep it clean.
‘For years he loved her, and at last he could resist no longer. He took ship to Tripoli, and his servants carried him ashore.’
‘Not feeling so good?’ I said, groping. ‘Rough crossing?’
‘He was dying. Of love.’
‘Oh, ah.’
‘They bore him into the Lady Melisande’s presence on a litter, and he had just strength enough to reach out and touch her hand. Then he died.’
She paused, and heaved a sigh that seemed to come straight up from the cami-knickers. A silence ensued.
‘Terrific,’ I said, feeling I had to say something, though personally I didn’t think the story a patch on the one about the travelling salesman and the farmer’s daughter. Different, of course, if one had known the chap.
She sighed again.
‘You see now why I said you reminded me of Rudel. Like him, you came to take one glimpse of the woman you loved. It was dear of you, Bertie, and I shall never forget it. It will always remain with me as a fragrant memory, like a flower pressed between the leaves of an old album. But was it wise? Should you not have been strong? Would it not have been better to have ended it all cleanly, that day when we said goodbye at Brinkley Court, and not to have reopened the wound? We had met, and you had loved me, and I had had to tell you that my heart was another’s. That should have been our farewell.’
‘Absolutely,’ I said. I mean to say, all that was perfectly sound, as far as it went. If her heart really was another’s, fine. Nobody more pleased than Bertram. The whole nub of the thing was – was it? ‘But I had a communication from Gussie, more or less indicating that you and he were p’fft.’
She looked at me like someone who has just solved the crossword puzzle with a shrewd ‘Emu’ in the top right-hand corner.
‘So that was why you came! You thought that there might still be hope? Oh, Bertie, I’m sorry … sorry … so sorry.’ Her eyes were misty with the unshed, and about the size of soup plates. ‘No, Bertie, really there is no hope, none. You must not build dream castles. It can only cause you pain. I love Augustus. He is my man.’
‘And you haven’t parted brass rags?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Then what did he mean by saying “Serious rift Madeline and self”?’
‘Oh, that?’ She laughed another tinkling, silvery one. ‘That was nothing. It was all too perfectly silly and ridiculous. Just the teeniest, weeniest little misunderstanding. I thought I had found him flirting with my cousin Stephanie, and I was silly and jealous. But he explained everything this morning. He was only taking a fly out of her eye.’
I suppose I might legitimately have been a bit shirty on learning that I had been hauled all the way down here for nothing, but I wasn’t. I was amazingly braced. As I have indicated, that telegram of Gussie’s had shaken me to my foundations, causing me to fear the worst. And now the All Clear had been blown, and I had received absolute inside information straight from the horse’s mouth that all was hotsy-totsy between this blister and himself.
‘So everything’s all right, is it?’
‘Everything. I have never loved Augustus more than I do now.’
‘Haven’t you, by Jove?’
‘Each moment I am with him, his wonderful nature seems to open before me like some lovely flower.’
‘Does it, egad?’
‘Every day I find myself discovering some new facet of his extrao
rdinary character. For instance … you have seen him quite lately, have you not?’
‘Oh, rather. I gave him a dinner at the Drones only the night before last.’
‘I wonder if you noticed any difference in him?’
I threw my mind back to the binge in question. As far as I could recollect, Gussie had been the same fish-face freak I had always known.
‘Difference? No, I don’t think so. Of course, at that dinner I hadn’t the chance to observe him very closely – subject his character to the final analysis, if you know what I mean. He sat next to me, and we talked of this and that, but you know how it is when you’re a host – you have all sorts of thing to divert your attention … keeping an eye on the waiters, trying to make the conversation general, heading Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright off from giving his imitation of Beatrice Lillie … a hundred little duties. But he seemed to me much the same. What sort of difference?’
‘An improvement, if such a thing were possible. Have you not sometimes felt in the past, Bertie, that, if Augustus had a fault, it was a tendency to be a little timid?’
I saw what she meant.
‘Oh, ah, yes, of course, definitely.’ I remembered something Jeeves had once called Gussie. ‘A sensitive plant, what?’
‘Exactly. You know your Shelley, Bertie.’
‘Oh, do I?’
‘That is what I have always thought him – a sensitive plant, hardly fit for the rough and tumble of life. But recently – in this last week, in fact – he has shown, together with that wonderful dreamy sweetness of his, a force of character which I had not suspected that he possessed. He seems completely to have lost his diffidence.’
‘By Jove, yes,’ I said, remembering. ‘That’s right. Do you know, he actually made a speech at that dinner of mine, and a most admirable one. And, what is more –’
I paused. I had been on the point of saying that, what was more, he had made it from start to finish on orange juice, and not – as had been the case at the Market Snodsbury prize giving – with about three quarts of mixed alcoholic stimulants lapping about inside him: and I saw that the statement might be injudicious. That Market Snodsbury exhibition on the part of the adored object was, no doubt, something which she was trying to forget.
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