Joy in the Morning (12 page)

‘Quite correct. It was his last Friday’s act of kindness.’

‘What a shame!’ said Nobby, with a womanly sympathy that well became her.

Boko, however, looked on the bright side.

‘Personally,’ he said, ‘I consider that Bertie has got off lightly. He appears not to have been even singed. A burned house is a mere bagatelle. Generally, when Edwin is trying to catch up with his acts of kindness, human life is imperilled. The mind flits back to the time when he mended my egg boiler. Occasionally, when I am much occupied with a job of work, sparing no effort to give my public of my best, I rise early, before my housekeeper turns up in the morning. On these occasions, it is my practice to boil myself a refreshing egg, using one of those patent machines for the purpose. You know the sort of thing I mean. It rings an alarm, hopes you’ve slept well, pours water on the coffee, lights a flame underneath and gets action on the egg. Well, the day after Edwin had fixed some trifling flaw in the apparatus, the egg was scarcely in position when it flew at me like a bullet, catching me on the tip of the nose and knocking me base over apex. I bled for hours. So I maintain that if you got off with a mere fire that destroyed your house, you are sitting pretty.’

Nobby speculated as to the chances of somebody some day murdering Edwin, and we agreed that the hour must eventually produce the man.

‘And now,’ said Boko, still with that strange brightness which, knowing the facts, I could not but admire, ‘you will want to hear all about the lunch. Well, it was a great success.’

‘Darling!’

‘Yes, a notable success. I think I have made an excellent start.’

‘Were you bright?’

‘Very bright.’

‘And genial?’

‘The word understates it.’

‘Angel!’ said Nobby, and kissed him about fifteen times in rapid succession.

‘Yes,’ said Boko, ‘I think I have got him on the run. It is difficult to tell with a man like that, who conceals his emotions behind a poker face, but I believe he’s weakening. And we never expected him to fall on my neck right away, did we? It was agreed that the lunch was merely to prepare the soil.’

‘What did you talk about?’

‘Oh, this and that. The subject of spiders, I remember, was one that came up.’

‘Spiders?’

‘He seemed interested in spiders.’

‘I never knew that.’

‘Just a side of his character which he hasn’t happened to reveal to you, I suppose. And then, of course, after talking of this and that, we talked of that and this.’

‘There weren’t any awkward pauses?’

‘I didn’t notice any. No, he rather prattled on, as it were, especially towards the end.’

‘Did you tell him what a lot of money you were making?’

‘Oh, yes, I touched on that.’

‘I hope you explained that you were a steady young fellow and were bound to go on making it? That’s what worries him. He thinks you may blow up at any moment.’

‘Like Wee Nooke.’

‘You see, when he was a young man, just starting in the shipping business, Uncle Percy used to go about with rather a rackety set in London, and he knew a lot of writers who made quite a bit from time to time and spent it all in a couple of days and then had to live on what they could borrow. My darling father was one of them.’

This was news to me. I had never pictured Uncle Percy as a bird who had gone about with rackety sets as a young man. In fact, I had never pictured him as ever having been a young man at all. It’s always the way. If an old buster has a bristling moustache, a solid, lucrative business and the manners of a bear aroused while hibernating, you do not probe into his past and ask yourself whether he, too, in his day may not have been one of the boys.

‘I covered that point,’ said Boko. ‘It was one of the first I stressed. The modern author, I told him, is keen and hard-headed. He is out for the stuff, and when he gets it he salts it away.’

‘That ought to have pleased him.’

‘Oh, it did.’

‘Then everything’s fine.’

‘Splendid.’

‘All we need now is for Bertie to do his act.’

‘Exactly. The future hinges on Bertie.’

‘When he pleads—’

‘Ah, I didn’t mean quite that. I’m afraid you are not abreast of the quick rush and swirl of recent events. I doubt if it would be any good for Bertie to plead now. His name has become mud.’

‘Mud?’

‘“Mud”, I think, is the
mot juste,
Bertie?’

I was obliged to concede that this was more or less so.

‘Uncle Percy,’ I explained, ‘has got it into his head that I aided and encouraged Edwin in his fire-bug activities. This has put me back in the betting a good bit, considered as a pleader. I should find it difficult now to sway him like a reed.’

‘Then where are we?’ said Nobby, registering anguish.

Boko patted her encouragingly on the shoulder.

‘We’re all right. Don’t you worry.’

‘But if Bertie can’t plead—’

‘Ah, but you’re forgetting how versatile he is. What you are overlooking is the scullery-window-breaking side of his nature. That is what is going to see us through. Brooding tensely over this business, I have had an idea, and it is a pippin. Suppose, I said to myself, I were to save the heavy’s home from being looted by a midnight marauder, that would make him feel I had the right stuffin me, I fancy. He would say “Egad! A fine young fellow, this Fittleworth!” would he not?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘You speak doubtfully.’

‘I was only thinking that there isn’t much chance of that happening. There hasn’t been a burglary in Steeple Bumpleigh for centuries. Stilton was complaining about it only the other day. He said the place gave an ambitious young copper no scope.’

‘These things can be arranged.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘It only needs a little organization. There is going to be a burglary in Steeple Bumpleigh this very night. Bertie will attend to it.’

There was only one comment to make on this, and I made it.

‘Hey!’ I cried.

‘Don’t interrupt, Bertie,’ said Boko reprovingly. ‘It prevents one marshalling one’s thoughts. Here in a nutshell is the scheme I have evolved. Somewhere in the small hours, Bertie and I make our way to the Hall. We approach the scullery window. He busts it. I raise the alarm. He pops off—’

‘Ah!’ I said. It was the first point he had mentioned of which I found myself approving.

‘– while I stay on, to accept the plaudits of all and be fawned on. I don’t see how it can fail. The one thing a sturdy householder of the Worplesdon type dislikes is having the house he is holding broken into, and anyone who nips such a venture in the bud creeps straight into his heart. Before the night is out, I expect to have him promising to dance at our wedding.’

‘Darling! It’s wonderful!’

It was Nobby who said that, not me. I was still chewing the lower lip in open concern. I should have remembered, I was telling myself, that that play of Boko’s, to which I alluded earlier, had been one of those mystery thrillers, and that it was only natural that some such set-up as this should have occurred to his diseased mind.

I mean to say, you get a chap whose thoughts run persistently in the direction of screams in the night and lights going out and mysterious hands appearing through the wall and people rushing about shouting ‘Here comes The Shadow!’ and it is inevitable that that will be the sort of stuff he will dish out in an emergency. I resolved there and then that I would put in a firm
nolle prosequi.
Nobody is more anxious than Bertram Wooster to lend a helping hand to Love’s young dream, but there are limits to what he is prepared to sign on for, and sharply defined limits, at that.

Nobby’s joyous animation had died away a bit. Like me, she was chewing the lip.

‘Yes, it’s wonderful. But—’

‘I don’t like to hear that word “but”.’

‘I was only going to say, How do you explain?’

‘Explain?’

‘Your being there to raise alarms and be fawned on.’

‘Perfectly simple. My love for you is the talk of Steeple Bumpleigh. What more natural than that I should have come to stand beneath your window, gazing up at it?’

‘I see! And then you heard a noise—’

‘A curious noise that sounded like the splintering of glass. And I popped round the house to investigate, and there was a bounder smashing the scullery window.’

‘Of course!’

‘I knew you would see it.’

‘Then everything depends on Bertie.’

‘Everything.’

‘You don’t think he’ll object?’

‘I wish you wouldn’t say things like that. You’ll hurt his feelings. You don’t realize the sort of fellow Bertie is. His nerve is like chilled steel, and when it is a question of helping a pal, he sticks at nothing.’

Nobby drew a deep breath.

‘He’s wonderful, isn’t he?’

‘He stands alone.’

‘I’ve always been devoted to Bertie. When I was a child, he once gave me threepennyworth of acid drops.’

‘Generous to a fault. These splendid fellows always are.’

‘How I admired him!’

‘Me, too. I don’t know a man I admire more.’

‘Doesn’t he remind you rather of Sir Galahad?’

‘The name was on the tip of my tongue.’

‘Of course, he wouldn’t dream of not doing his bit.’

‘Of course not. All settled, eh, Bertie?’

It’s odd what a few kind words will do. Until now, I had, as I say, been all ready with the
nolle prosequi,
and had indeed opened my lips to shoot it across with all the emphasis at my disposal. But as I caught Nobby’s eye, fixed on me in a devout sort of way, and at the same time was conscious of Boko shaking my hand and kneading my shoulder, something seemed to check me. I mean, there really didn’t seem to be any way of
nolle-prosequi
-ing without spoiling the spirit of the party.

‘Oh, rather,’ I said. ‘Absolutely.’

But not blithely. Not with any real chirpiness.

CHAPTER 13

N
o, not with any real chirpiness. And this shortage of c., I must confess, continued to make its presence felt right up to zero hour. All through the quiet evenfall, the frugal dinner and the long, weary waiting for midnight to strike on the village clock, I was conscious of a growing concern. And when the moment arrived and Boko and self passed through the silent gardens of Bumpleigh Hall on our way to start the doings, it was going stronger than ever.

Boko was in gay and effervescent mood, speaking from time to time in a low but enthusiastic voice of the beauties of Nature and drawing my attention in a cautious whisper to the agreeable niffiness of the flowers past which we flitted, but it was far different with Bertram. Bertram, and I do not attempt to conceal it, was not at his fizziest. His spine crawled, and his heart was bowed down with weight of woe. The word of a Wooster was pledged; I had placed my services at the disposal of the young couple and there was no question of my doing a quick sneak and edging out of the enterprise, but nothing was going to make me like it.

I think I have mentioned before my dislike for creeping about strange gardens in the dark. Too many painful episodes in my past have been connected with other people’s dark gardens, notably the time when circumstances compelled me to slide out in the small hours and ring the fire bell at Brinkley Court and that other occasion when Roberta Wickham induced me against my better judgement to climb a tree and drop a flower-pot through the roof of a greenhouse, in order to create a diversion which would enable her cousin Clementina, who was A.W.O.L. from her school, to ooze back into it unobserved.

Of all these experiences, the last named had been, to date, the most soul searing, because it had culminated in the sudden appearance of a policeman saying ‘What’s all this?’ And it was the thought that there might quite possibly be a repetition of this routine, and the realization that if a policeman did come muscling in now it would be Stilton, that curdled the blood and made me feel a dry, fluttering feeling in the pit of the stomach, as if I had swallowed a heaping tablespoonful of butterflies.

So pronounced was this sensation that I found myself clutching Boko’s arm in ill-concealed panic and drawing him beneath a passing tree.

‘Boko,’ I gurgled, ‘what about Stilton? Have you considered the Stilton angle?’

‘Eh?’

‘Suppose he’s on duty at night? Suppose he’s prowling? Suppose he suddenly pops out at us, complete with whistle and notebook?’

‘Nonsense.’

‘It would be an awful thing to be pinched by a chap you were boys together with. And he would spring to the task. He’s got it in for me.’

‘Nonsense, nonsense,’ said Boko, continuing debonair to the gills. ‘You mustn’t allow your thoughts to take this morbid trend, Bertie. These tremors are unworthy of you. Don’t you worry about Stilton. You have only to look at him – that clear eye, those rosy cheeks – to know that he is a man who makes a point of getting his regular eight hours. Early to bed and early to rise, is his slogan. Stilton is tucked up between the sheets, sleeping like a little child, and won’t start functioning again till his alarm clock explodes at seven-thirty.’

Well, that was all right, as far as it went. His reasoning was specious, and did much to reassure me. Stilton’s cheeks unquestionably were rosy. But it was only for a moment that I was strengthened. After all, I reflected, Stilton was merely a part of the menace. Even leaving him out of it, there was the Uncle Percy-Aunt Agatha side of the business. You couldn’t get away from it that these gardens and messuages whose privacy we were violating belonged to the former, and that the latter had a joint interest in them. I might, that is to say, be safe from the dragon, but what about the hippogriffs? That was the question I asked myself. What price the hippogriffs?

If anything were to go wrong, if this frightful binge on which I had embarked were in the slightest detail to slip a cog, what would be the upshot? I’ll tell you what would jolly well be the upshot. Not only should I be placed in the position of having to explain to a slavering uncle, justly incensed at being deprived of his beauty sleep, why I was going about the place breaking his scullery windows, but the whole story would be told to Aunt Agatha on her return with a wealth of detail, and then what?