Bill recovered the use of his vocal cords.
‘Who from?’ he demanded peevishly. ‘You talk as if borrowing money was as simple as falling off a log.’
‘The point his lordship is endeavouring to establish,’ explained Jeeves, ‘is the almost universal tendency of gentlemen to prove uncooperative when an attempt is made to float a loan at their expense.’
‘Especially if what you’re trying to get into their ribs for is a whacking great sum like three thousand and five pounds two and six.’
‘Precisely, m’lord. Confronted by such figures, they become like the deaf adder that hearkens not to the voice of the charmer, charming never so wisely.’
‘So putting the bite on my social circle is off,’ said Bill. ‘It can’t be done. I’m sorry.’
Captain Biggar seemed to blow flame through his nostrils.
‘You’ll be sorrier,’ he said, ‘and I’ll tell you when. When you and this precious clerk of yours are standing in the dock at the Old Bailey, with the Judge looking at you over his bifocals and me in the well of the court making faces at you. Then’s the time when you’ll be sorry… then and shortly afterwards, when the Judge pronounces sentence, accompanied by some strong remarks from the bench, and they lead you off to Wormwood Scrubs to start doing your two years hard or whatever it is.’
Bill gaped.
‘Oh, dash it!’ he protested. ‘You wouldn’t proceed to that… what, Jeeves?’
‘Awful extreme, m’lord.’
‘You surely wouldn’t proceed to that awful extreme?’
‘Wouldn’t I!’
‘One doesn’t want unpleasantness.’
‘What one wants and what one is going to get are two different things,’ said Captain Biggar, and went out, grinding his teeth, to cool off in the garden.
He left behind him one of those silences often called pregnant. Bill was the first to speak.
‘We’re in the soup, Jeeves.’
‘Certainly a somewhat sharp crisis in our affairs would appear to have been precipitated, m’lord.’
‘He wants his pound of flesh.’
‘Yes, m’lord.’
‘And we haven’t any flesh.’
‘No, m’lord. It is a most disagreeable state of affairs.’
‘He’s a tough egg, that Biggar. He looks like a gorilla with stomach-ache.’
‘There is, perhaps, a resemblance to such an animal, afflicted as your lordship suggests.’
‘Did you notice him at dinner?’
‘To which aspect of his demeanour during the meal does your lordship allude?’
‘I was thinking of the sinister way he tucked into the roast duck. He flung himself on it like a tiger on its prey. He gave me the impression of a man without ruth or pity.’
‘Unquestionably a gentleman lacking in the softer emotions, m’lord.’
‘There’s a word that just describes him. Begins with a V. Not vapid. Not vermicelli. Vindictive. The chap’s vindictive. I can understand him being sore about not getting his money, but what good will it do him to ruin me?’
‘No doubt he will derive a certain moody satisfaction from it, m’lord.’
Bill brooded.
‘I suppose there really is nobody one could borrow a bit of cash from?’
‘Nobody who springs immediately to the mind, m’lord.’
‘How about that financier fellow, who lives out Ditchingham way—Sir Somebody Something?’
‘Sir Oscar Wopple, m’lord? He shot himself last Friday.’
‘Oh, then we won’t bother him.’
Jeeves coughed.
‘If I might make a suggestion, m’lord?’
‘Yes, Jeeves?’
A faint ray of hope had stolen into Bill’s sombre eyes. His voice, while still scarcely to be described as animated, no longer resembled that of a corpse speaking from the tomb.
‘It occurred to me as a passing thought, m’lord, that were we to possess ourselves of Captain Biggar’s ticket, our position would be noticeably stabilised.’
Bill shook his head.
‘I don’t get you, Jeeves. Ticket? What ticket? You speak as if this were a railway station.’
‘I refer to the ticket which, in my capacity of your lordship’s clerk, I handed to the gentleman as a record of his wager on Lucy Glitters and Whistler’s Mother, m’lord.’
‘Oh, you mean his ticket?’ said Bill, enlightened.
‘Precisely, m’lord. As he left the racecourse so abruptly, it must still be upon his person, and it is the only evidence that exists that the wager was ever made. Once we had deprived him of it, your lordship would be in a position to make payment at your lordship’s leisure.’
‘I see. Yes, that would be nice. So we get the ticket from him, do we?’
‘Yes, m’lord.’
‘May I say one word, Jeeves?’
‘Certainly, m’lord.’
‘How?’
‘By what I might describe as direct action, m’lord.’
Bill stared. This opened up a new line of thought.
‘Set on him, you mean? Scrag him? Choke it out of him?’
‘Your lordship has interpreted my meaning exactly.’
Bill continued to stare.
‘But, Jeeves, have you seen him? That bulging chest, those rippling muscles?’
‘I agree that Captain Biggar is well-nourished, m’lord, but we would have the advantage of surprise. The gentleman went out into the garden. When he returns, one may assume that it will be by way of the french window by which he made his egress. If I draw the curtains, it will be necessary for him to enter through them. We will see him fumbling, and in that moment a sharp tug will cause the curtains to descend upon him, enmeshing him, as it were.’
Bill was impressed, as who would not have been.
‘By Jove, Jeeves! Now you’re talking. You think it would work?’
‘Unquestionably, m’lord. The method is that of the Roman retiarius, with whose technique your lordship is no doubt familiar.’
‘That was the bird who fought with net and trident?’
‘Precisely, m’lord. So if your lordship approves—’
‘You bet I approve.’
‘Very good, m’lord. Then I will draw the curtains now, and we will take up our stations on either side of them.’
It was with deep satisfaction that Bill surveyed the completed preparations. After a rocky start, the sun was coming through the cloud wrack.
‘It’s in the bag, Jeeves!’
‘A very apt image, m’lord.’
‘If he yells, we will stifle his cries with the… what do you call this stuff?’
‘Velours, m’lord.’
‘We will stifle his cries with the velours. And while he’s grovelling on the ground, I shall get a chance to give him a good kick in the tailpiece.’
‘There is that added attraction, m’lord. For blessings ever wait on virtuous deeds, as the playwright Congreve informs us.’
Bill breathed heavily.
‘Were you in the First World War, Jeeves?’
‘I dabbled in it to a certain extent, m’lord.’
‘I missed that one because I wasn’t born, but I was in the Commandos in this last one. This is rather like waiting for zero hour, isn’t it?’
‘The sensation is not dissimilar, m’lord.’
‘He should be coming soon.’
‘Yes, m’lord.’
‘On your toes, Jeeves!’
‘Yes, m’lord.’
‘All set?’
‘Yes, m’lord.’
‘Hi!’ said Captain Biggar in their immediate rear. ‘I want to have another word with you two.’
A lifetime of braving the snares and perils of the wilds develops in those White Hunters over the years a sort of sixth sense warning them of lurking danger. Where the ordinary man, happening upon a tiger trap in the jungle, would fall in base over apex, your White Hunter, saved by his sixth sense, walks round it.
With fiend
ish cunning, Captain Biggar, instead of entering, as expected, through the french window, had circled the house and come in by the front door.
Chapter 12
Although the actual time which had elapsed between Captain Biggar’s departure and return had been only about five minutes, scarcely long enough for him to take half a dozen turns up and down the lawn, pausing in the course of one of them to kick petulantly at a passing frog, it had been ample for his purposes. If you had said to him as he was going through the french window ‘Have you any ideas, Captain?’ he would have been forced to reply ‘No more than a rabbit’. But now his eye was bright and his manner jaunty. He had seen the way.
On occasions of intense spiritual turmoil the brain works quickly. Thwarted passion stimulates the little grey cells, and that painful scene on the rustic seat, when love had collided so disastrously with the code that governs the actions of the men who live on the frontiers of Empire, had stirred up those of Captain Biggar till, if you had X-rayed his skull, you would have seen them leaping and dancing like rice in a saucepan. Not thirty seconds after the frog, rubbing its head, had gone off to warn the other frogs to watch out for atom bombs, he was rewarded with what he recognised immediately as an inspiration.
Here was his position in a nutshell. He loved. Right. He would go further, he loved like the dickens. And unless he had placed a totally wrong construction on her words, her manner and the light in her eyes, the object of his passion loved him. A woman, he meant to say, does not go out of her way to bring the conversation round to the dear old days when a feller used to whack her over the top-knot with clubs and drag her into caves, unless she intends to convey a certain impression. True, a couple of minutes later she had been laughing and giggling with the frightful Rowcester excrescence, but that, it seemed to him now that he had had time to simmer down, had been merely a guest’s conventional civility to a host. He dismissed the Rowcester gum-boil as negligible. He was convinced that, if one went by the form book, he had but to lay his heart at her feet, and she would pick it up.
So far, so good. But here the thing began to get more complicated. She was rich and he was poor. That was the hitch. That was the snag. That was what was putting the good old sand in the bally machinery.
The thought that seared his soul and lent additional vigour to the kick he had directed at the frog was that, but for the deplorable financial methods of that black-hearted bookmaker, Honest Patch Rowcester, it would all have been so simple. Three thousand pounds deposited on the nose of Ballymore at the current odds of fifty to one would have meant a return of a hundred and fifty thousand, just like finding it: and surely even Tubby Frobisher and the Subahdar, rigid though their views were, could scarcely accuse a chap of not playing with the straight bat if he married a woman, however wealthy, while himself in possession of a hundred and fifty thousand of the best and brightest.
He groaned in spirit. A sorrow’s crown of sorrow is remembering happier things, and he proceeded to torture himself with the recollection of how her neck had felt beneath his fingers as he fastened her pen—
Captain Biggar uttered a short, sharp exclamation. It was in Swahili, a language which always came most readily to his lips in moments of emotion, but its meaning was as clear as if it had been the ‘Eureka!’ of Archimedes.
Her pendant! Yes, now he saw daylight. Now he could start handling the situation as it should be handled.
Two minutes later, he was at the front door. Two minutes and twenty-five seconds later, he was in the living-room, eyeing the backs of Honest Patch Rowcester and his clerk as they stood—for some silly reason known only to themselves—crouching beside the curtains which they had pulled across the french window.
‘Hi!’ he cried. ‘I want to have another word with you two.’
The effect of the observation on his audience was immediate and impressive. It is always disconcerting, when you are expecting a man from the north-east, to have him suddenly bark at you from the south-west, especially if he does so in a manner that recalls feeding-time in a dog hospital, and Bill went into his quaking and leaping routine with the smoothness that comes from steady practice. Even Jeeves, though his features did not lose their customary impassivity, appeared—if one could judge by the fact that his left eyebrow flickered for a moment as if about to rise—to have been stirred to quite a considerable extent.
‘And don’t stand there looking like a dying duck,’ said the Captain, addressing Bill, who, one is compelled to admit, was giving a rather close impersonation of such a bird in articulo mortis. ‘Since I saw you two beauties last,’ he continued, helping himself to another whisky and soda, ‘I have been thinking over the situation, and I have now got it all taped out. It suddenly came to me, quick as a flash. I said to myself, “The pendant!”’
Bill blinked feebly. His heart, which had crashed against the back of his front teeth, was slowly returning to its base, but it seemed to him that the shock which he had just sustained must have left his hearing impaired. It had sounded exactly as if the Captain had said ‘The pendant!’ which, of course, made no sense whatever.
‘The pendant?’ he echoed, groping.
‘Mrs Spottsworth is wearing a diamond pendant, m’lord,’ said Jeeves. ‘It is to this, no doubt, that the gentleman alludes.’
It was specious, but Bill found himself still far from convinced.
‘You think so?’
‘Yes, m’lord.’
‘He alludes to that, in your opinion?’
‘Yes, m’lord.’
‘But why does he allude to it, Jeeves?’
‘That, one is disposed to imagine, m’lord, one will ascertain when the gentleman has resumed his remarks.’
‘Gone on speaking, you mean?’
‘Precisely, m’lord.’
‘Well, if you say so,’ said Bill doubtfully. ‘But it seems a… what’s the expression you’re always using?’
‘Remote contingency, m’lord?’
‘That’s right. It seems a very remote contingency.’
Captain Biggar had been fuming silently. He now spoke with not a little asperity.
‘If you have quite finished babbling, Patch Rowcester—’
‘Was I babbling?’
‘Certainly you were babbling. You were babbling like a… like a… well, like whatever the dashed things are that babble.’
‘Brooks,’ said Jeeves helpfully, ‘are sometimes described as doing so, sir. In his widely-read poem of that name, the late Lord Tennyson puts the words “Oh, brook, oh, babbling brook” into the mouth of the character Edmund, and later describes the rivulet, speaking in its own person, as observing “I chatter over stony ways in little sharps and trebles, I bubble into eddying bays, I babble on the pebbles”.’
Captain Biggar frowned.
‘Ai deng hahp kamoo for the late Lord Tennyson,’ he said impatiently. ‘What I’m interested in is this pendant.’
Bill looked at him with a touch of hope.
‘Are you going to explain about that pendant? Throw light upon it, as it were?’
‘I am. It’s worth close on three thousand quid, and,’ said Captain Biggar, throwing out the observation almost casually, ‘you’re going to pinch it, Patch Rowcester.’
Bill gaped.
‘Pinch it?’
‘This very night.’
It is always difficult for a man who is feeling as if he has just been struck over the occiput by a blunt instrument to draw himself to his full height and stare at someone censoriously, but Bill contrived to do so.
‘What!’ he cried, shocked to the core. ‘Are you, a bulwark of the Empire, a man who goes about setting an example to Dyaks seriously suggesting that I rob one of my guests?’
‘Well, I’m one of your guests, and you robbed me.’
‘Only temporarily.’
‘And you’ll be robbing Mrs Spottsworth only temporarily. I shouldn’t have used the word “pinch”. All I want you to do is borrow that pendant till tomorrow afternoon, when it
will be returned.’
Bill clutched his hair.
‘Jeeves!’
‘M’lord?’
‘Rally round, Jeeves. My brain’s tottering. Can you make any sense of what this rhinoceros-biffer is saying?’
‘Yes, m’lord.’
‘You can? Then you’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din.’
‘Captain Biggar’s thought-processes seem to me reasonably clear, m’lord. The gentleman is urgently in need of money with which to back the horse Ballymore in tomorrow’s Derby, and his proposal, as I take it, is that the pendant shall be abstracted and pawned and the proceeds employed for that purpose. Have I outlined your suggestion correctly, sir?’
‘You have.’
‘At the conclusion of the race, one presumes, the object in question would be redeemed, brought back to the house, discovered, possibly by myself, in some spot where the lady might be supposed to have dropped it, and duly returned to her. Do I err in advancing this theory, sir?’
‘You do not.’
‘Then, could one be certain beyond the peradventure of a doubt that Ballymore will win—’
‘He’ll win all right. I told you he had twice broken the course record.’
‘That is official, sir?’
‘Straight from the feed-box.’
‘Then I must confess, m’lord, I see little or no objection to the scheme.’
Bill shook his head, unconvinced.
‘I still call it stealing.’
Captain Biggar clicked his tongue.
‘It isn’t anything of the sort, and I’ll tell you why. In a way, you might say that that pendant was really mine.’
‘Really… what was that last word?’
‘Mine. Let me,’ said Captain Biggar, ‘tell you a little story.’
He sat musing for a while. Coming out of his reverie and discovering with a start that his glass was empty, he refilled it. His attitude was that of a man, who, even if nothing came of the business transaction which he had proposed, intended to save something from the wreck by drinking as much as possible of his host’s whisky. When the refreshing draught had finished its journey down the hatch, he wiped his lips on the back of his hand, and began.
‘Do either of you chaps know the Long Bar at Shanghai? No? Well, it’s the Café de la Paix of the East. They always say that if you sit outside the Café de la Paix in Paris long enough, you’re sure sooner or later to meet all your pals, and it’s the same with the Long Bar. A few years ago, chancing to be in Shanghai, I had dropped in there, never dreaming that Tubby Frobisher and the Subahdar were within a thousand miles of the place, and I’m dashed if the first thing I saw wasn’t the two old bounders sitting on a couple of stools as large as life. “Hullo, there, Bwana, old boy,” they said when I rolled up, and I said, “Hullo, there, Tubby! Hullo there, Subahdar, old chap,” and Tubby said “What’ll you have, old boy?” and I said, “What are you boys having?” and they said stingahs, so I said that would do me all right, so Tubby ordered a round of stingahs, and we started talking about chowluangs and nai bahn rot fais and where we had all met last and whatever became of the poogni at Lampang and all that sort of thing. And when the stingahs were finished, I said, “The next are on me. What for you, Tubby, old boy?” and he said he’d stick to stingahs. “And for you, Subahdar, old boy?” I said, and the Subahdar said he’d stick to stingahs, too, so I wig-wagged the barman and ordered stingahs all round, and, to cut a long story short, the stingahs came, a stingah for Tubby, a stingah for the Subahdar, and a stingah for me. “Luck, old boys!” said Tubby. “Luck, old boys!” said the Subahdar. “Cheerio, old boys!” I said, and we drank the stingahs.’
Ring For Jeeves Page 12
