Books: The Little Nugget
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P.G. Wodehouse >> The Little Nugget
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He stretched himself.
'You talk a lot. What do you reckon you're going to do?'
I eyed him thoughtfully.
'Well, everything's got to have a beginning,' I said. 'What you
seem to me to want most is exercise. I'll take you for a run every
day. You won't know yourself at the end of a week.'
'Say, if you think you're going to get _me_ to run--'
'When I grab your little hand, and start running, you'll find
you'll soon be running too. And, years hence, when you win the
Marathon at the Olympic Games, you'll come to me with tears in
your eyes, and you'll say--'
'Oh, slush!'
'I shouldn't wonder.' I looked at my watch. 'Meanwhile, you had
better go to bed. It's past your proper time.'
He stared at me in open-eyed amazement.
'Bed!'
'Bed.'
He seemed more amused than annoyed.
'Say, what time do you think I usually go to bed?'
'I know what time you go here. Nine o'clock.'
As if to support my words, the door opened, and Mrs Attwell, the
matron, entered.
'I think it's time he came to bed, Mr Burns.'
'Just what I was saying, Mrs Attwell.'
'You're crazy,' observed the Little Nugget. 'Bed nothing!'
Mrs Attwell looked at me despairingly.
'I never saw such a boy!'
The whole machinery of the school was being held up by this legal
infant. Any vacillation now, and Authority would suffer a set-back
from which it would be hard put to it to recover. It seemed to me
a situation that called for action.
I bent down, scooped the Little Nugget out of his chair like an
oyster, and made for the door. Outside he screamed incessantly. He
kicked me in the stomach and then on the knee. He continued to
scream. He screamed all the way upstairs. He was screaming when we
reached his room.
* * * * *
Half an hour later I sat in the study, smoking thoughtfully.
Reports from the seat of war told of a sullen and probably only
temporary acquiescence with Fate on the part of the enemy. He was
in bed, and seemed to have made up his mind to submit to the
position. An air of restrained jubilation prevailed among the
elder members of the establishment. Mr Abney was friendly and Mrs
Attwell openly congratulatory. I was something like the hero of
the hour.
But was I jubilant? No, I was inclined to moodiness. Unforeseen
difficulties had arisen in my path. Till now, I had regarded this
kidnapping as something abstract. Personality had not entered into
the matter. If I had had any picture in my mind's eye, it was of
myself stealing away softly into the night with a docile child,
his little hand laid trustfully in mine. From what I had seen and
heard of Ogden Ford in moments of emotion, it seemed to me that
whoever wanted to kidnap him with any approach to stealth would
need to use chloroform.
Things were getting very complex.
Chapter 3
I have never kept a diary, and I have found it, in consequence,
somewhat difficult, in telling this narrative, to arrange the
minor incidents of my story in their proper sequence. I am writing
by the light of an imperfect memory; and the work is complicated
by the fact that the early days of my sojourn at Sanstead House
are a blur, a confused welter like a Futurist picture, from which
emerge haphazard the figures of boys--boys working, boys eating,
boys playing football, boys whispering, shouting, asking
questions, banging doors, jumping on beds, and clattering upstairs
and along passages, the whole picture faintly scented with a
composite aroma consisting of roast beef, ink, chalk, and that
curious classroom smell which is like nothing else on earth.
I cannot arrange the incidents. I can see Mr Abney, furrowed as to
the brow and drooping at the jaw, trying to separate Ogden Ford
from a half-smoked cigar-stump. I can hear Glossop, feverishly
angry, bellowing at an amused class. A dozen other pictures come
back to me, but I cannot place them in their order; and perhaps,
after all, their sequence is unimportant. This story deals with
affairs which were outside the ordinary school life.
With the war between the Little Nugget and Authority, for
instance, the narrative has little to do. It is a subject for an
epic, but it lies apart from the main channel of the story, and
must be avoided. To tell of his gradual taming, of the chaos his
advent caused until we became able to cope with him, would be to
turn this story into a treatise on education. It is enough to say
that the process of moulding his character and exorcising the
devil which seemed to possess him was slow.
It was Ogden who introduced tobacco-chewing into the school, with
fearful effects one Saturday night on the aristocratic interiors
of Lords Gartridge and Windhall and Honourables Edwin Bellamy and
Hildebrand Kyne. It was the ingenious gambling-game imported by
Ogden which was rapidly undermining the moral sense of twenty-four
innocent English boys when it was pounced upon by Glossop. It was
Ogden who, on the one occasion when Mr Abney reluctantly resorted
to the cane, and administered four mild taps with it, relieved his
feelings by going upstairs and breaking all the windows in all the
bedrooms.
We had some difficult young charges at Sanstead House. Abney's
policy of benevolent toleration ensured that. But Ogden Ford stood
alone.
* * * * *
I have said that it is difficult for me to place the lesser events
of my narrative in their proper order. I except three, however
which I will call the Affair of the Strange American, the Adventure
of the Sprinting Butler, and the Episode of the Genial Visitor.
I will describe them singly, as they happened.
It was the custom at Sanstead House for each of the assistant
masters to take half of one day in every week as a holiday. The
allowance was not liberal, and in most schools, I believe, it is
increased; but Mr Abney was a man with peculiar views on other
people's holidays, and Glossop and I were accordingly restricted.
My day was Wednesday; and on the Wednesday of which I write I
strolled towards the village. I had in my mind a game of billiards
at the local inn. Sanstead House and its neighbourhood were
lacking in the fiercer metropolitan excitements, and billiards at
the 'Feathers' constituted for the pleasure-seeker the beginning
and end of the Gay Whirl.
There was a local etiquette governing the game of billiards at the
'Feathers'. You played the marker a hundred up, then you took him
into the bar-parlour and bought him refreshment. He raised his
glass, said, 'To you, sir', and drained it at a gulp. After that
you could, if you wished, play another game, or go home, as your
fancy dictated.
There was only one other occupant of the bar-parlour when we
adjourned thither, and a glance at him told me that he was not
ostentatiously sober. He was lying back in a chair, with his feet
on the side-table, and crooning slowly, in a melancholy voice, the
following words:
_'I don't care--if he wears--a crown,
He--can't--keep kicking my--dawg aroun'.'_
He was a tough, clean-shaven man, with a broken nose, over which
was tilted a soft felt hat. His wiry limbs were clad in what I put
down as a mail-order suit. I could have placed him by his
appearance, if I had not already done so by his voice, as an
East-side New Yorker. And what an East-side New Yorker could be
doing in Sanstead it was beyond me to explain.
We had hardly seated ourselves when he rose and lurched out. I saw
him pass the window, and his assertion that no crowned head should
molest his dog came faintly to my ears as he went down the street.
'American!' said Miss Benjafield, the stately barmaid, with strong
disapproval. 'They're all alike.'
I never contradict Miss Benjafield--one would as soon contradict
the Statue of Liberty--so I merely breathed sympathetically.
'What's he here for I'd like to know?'
It occurred to me that I also should like to know. In another
thirty hours I was to find out.
I shall lay myself open to a charge of denseness such as even
Doctor Watson would have scorned when I say that, though I thought
of the matter a good deal on my way back to the school, I did not
arrive at the obvious solution. Much teaching and taking of duty
had dulled my wits, and the presence at Sanstead House of the
Little Nugget did not even occur to me as a reason why strange
Americans should be prowling in the village.
We now come to the remarkable activity of White, the butler.
It happened that same evening.
It was not late when I started on my way back to the house, but the
short January day was over, and it was very dark as I turned in at
the big gate of the school and made my way up the drive. The drive
at Sanstead House was a fine curving stretch of gravel, about two
hundred yards in length, flanked on either side by fir trees and
rhododendrons. I stepped out briskly, for it had begun to freeze.
Just as I caught sight through the trees of the lights of the
windows, there came to me the sound of running feet.
I stopped. The noise grew louder. There seemed to be two runners,
one moving with short, quick steps, the other, the one in front,
taking a longer stride.
I drew aside instinctively. In another moment, making a great
clatter on the frozen gravel, the first of the pair passed me; and
as he did so, there was a sharp crack, and something sang through
the darkness like a large mosquito.
The effect of the sound on the man who had been running was
immediate. He stopped in his stride and dived into the bushes. His
footsteps thudded faintly on the turf.
The whole incident had lasted only a few seconds, and I was still
standing there when I was aware of the other man approaching. He
had apparently given up the pursuit, for he was walking quite
slowly. He stopped within a few feet of me and I heard him
swearing softly to himself.
'Who's that?' I cried sharply. The crack of the pistol had given a
flick to my nerves. Mine had been a sheltered life, into which
hitherto revolver-shots had not entered, and I was resenting this
abrupt introduction of them. I felt jumpy and irritated.
It gave me a malicious pleasure to see that I had startled the
unknown dispenser of shocks quite as much as he had startled me.
The movement he made as he faced towards my direction was almost a
leap; and it suddenly flashed upon me that I had better at once
establish my identity as a non-combatant. I appeared to have
wandered inadvertently into the midst of a private quarrel, one
party to which--the one standing a couple of yards from me with a
loaded revolver in his hand--was evidently a man of impulse, the
sort of man who would shoot first and inquire afterwards.
'I'm Mr Burns,' I said. 'I'm one of the assistant-masters. Who are
you?'
'Mr Burns?'
Surely that rich voice was familiar.
'White?' I said.
'Yes, sir.'
'What on earth do you think you're doing? Have you gone mad? Who
was that man?'
'I wish I could tell you, sir. A very doubtful character. I found
him prowling at the back of the house very suspiciously. He took
to his heels and I followed him.'
'But'--I spoke querulously, my orderly nature was shocked--'you
can't go shooting at people like that just because you find them
at the back of the house. He might have been a tradesman.'
'I think not, sir.'
'Well, so do I, if it comes to that. He didn't behave like one. But
all the same--'
'I take your point, sir. But I was merely intending to frighten
him.'
'You succeeded all right. He went through those bushes like a
cannon-ball.'
I heard him chuckle.
'I think I may have scared him a little, sir.'
'We must phone to the police-station. Could you describe the man?'
'I think not, sir. It was very dark. And, if I may make the
suggestion, it would be better not to inform the police. I have a
very poor opinion of these country constables.'
'But we can't have men prowling--'
'If you will permit me, sir. I say--let them prowl. It's the only
way to catch them.'
'If you think this sort of thing is likely to happen again I must
tell Mr Abney.'
'Pardon me, sir, I think it would be better not. He impresses me
as a somewhat nervous gentleman, and it would only disturb him.'
At this moment it suddenly struck me that, in my interest in the
mysterious fugitive, I had omitted to notice what was really the
most remarkable point in the whole affair. How did White happen to
have a revolver at all? I have met many butlers who behaved
unexpectedly in their spare time. One I knew played the fiddle;
another preached Socialism in Hyde Park. But I had never yet come
across a butler who fired pistols.
'What were you doing with a revolver?' I asked.
He hesitated.
'May I ask you to keep it to yourself, sir, if I tell you
something?' he said at last.
'What do you mean?'
'I'm a detective.'
'What!'
'A Pinkerton's man, Mr Burns.'
I felt like one who sees the 'danger' board over thin ice. But for
this information, who knew what rash move I might not have made,
under the assumption that the Little Nugget was unguarded? At the
same time, I could not help reflecting that, if things had been
complex before, they had become far more so in the light of this
discovery. To spirit Ogden away had never struck me, since his
arrival at the school, as an easy task. It seemed more difficult
now than ever.
I had the sense to affect astonishment. I made my imitation of an
innocent assistant-master astounded by the news that the butler is
a detective in disguise as realistic as I was able. It appeared to
be satisfactory, for he began to explain.
'I am employed by Mr Elmer Ford to guard his son. There are
several parties after that boy, Mr Burns. Naturally he is a
considerable prize. Mr Ford would pay a large sum to get back his
only son if he were kidnapped. So it stands to reason he takes
precautions.'
'Does Mr Abney know what you are?'
'No, sir. Mr Abney thinks I am an ordinary butler. You are the
only person who knows, and I have only told you because you have
happened to catch me in a rather queer position for a butler to be
in. You will keep it to yourself, sir? It doesn't do for it to get
about. These things have to be done quietly. It would be bad for
the school if my presence here were advertised. The other parents
wouldn't like it. They would think that their sons were in danger,
you see. It would be disturbing for them. So if you will just
forget what I've been telling you, Mr Burns--'
I assured him that I would. But I was very far from meaning it. If
there was one thing which I intended to bear in mind, it was the
fact that watchful eyes besides mine were upon that Little Nugget.
The third and last of this chain of occurrences, the Episode of
the Genial Visitor, took place on the following day, and may be
passed over briefly. All that happened was that a well-dressed
man, who gave his name as Arthur Gordon, of Philadelphia, dropped
in unexpectedly to inspect the school. He apologized for not
having written to make an appointment, but explained that he was
leaving England almost immediately. He was looking for a school
for his sister's son, and, happening to meet his business
acquaintance, Mr Elmer Ford, in London, he had been recommended to
Mr Abney. He made himself exceedingly pleasant. He was a breezy,
genial man, who joked with Mr Abney, chaffed the boys, prodded the
Little Nugget in the ribs, to that overfed youth's discomfort,
made a rollicking tour of the house, in the course of which he
inspected Ogden's bedroom--in order, he told Mr Abney, to be able
to report conscientiously to his friend Ford that the son and heir
was not being pampered too much, and departed in a whirl of
good-humour, leaving every one enthusiastic over his charming
personality. His last words were that everything was thoroughly
satisfactory, and that he had learned all he wanted to know.
Which, as was proved that same night, was the simple truth.
Chapter 4
I
I owed it to my colleague Glossop that I was in the centre of the
surprising things that occurred that night. By sheer weight of
boredom, Glossop drove me from the house, so that it came about
that, at half past nine, the time at which the affair began, I was
patrolling the gravel in front of the porch.
It was the practice of the staff of Sanstead House School to
assemble after dinner in Mr Abney's study for coffee. The room was
called the study, but it was really more of a master's common
room. Mr Abney had a smaller sanctum of his own, reserved
exclusively for himself.
On this particular night he went there early, leaving me alone
with Glossop. It is one of the drawbacks of the desert-island
atmosphere of a private school that everybody is always meeting
everybody else. To avoid a man for long is impossible. I had been
avoiding Glossop as long as I could, for I knew that he wanted to
corner me with a view to a heart-to-heart talk on Life Insurance.
These amateur Life Insurance agents are a curious band. The world
is full of them. I have met them at country-houses, at seaside
hotels, on ships, everywhere; and it has always amazed me that
they should find the game worth the candle. What they add to their
incomes I do not know, but it cannot be very much, and the trouble
they have to take is colossal. Nobody loves them, and they must
see it; yet they persevere. Glossop, for instance, had been trying
to buttonhole me every time there was a five minutes' break in the
day's work.
He had his chance now, and he did not mean to waste it. Mr Abney
had scarcely left the room when he began to exude pamphlets and
booklets at every pocket.
I eyed him sourly, as he droned on about 'reactionable endowment',
'surrender-value', and 'interest accumulating on the tontine
policy', and tried, as I did so, to analyse the loathing I felt
for him. I came to the conclusion that it was partly due to his
pose of doing the whole thing from purely altruistic motives,
entirely for my good, and partly because he forced me to face the
fact that I was not always going to be young. In an abstract
fashion I had already realized that I should in time cease to be
thirty, but the way in which Glossop spoke of my sixty-fifth
birthday made me feel as if it was due tomorrow. He was a man with
a manner suggestive of a funeral mute suffering from suppressed
jaundice, and I had never before been so weighed down with a sense
of the inevitability of decay and the remorseless passage of time.
I could feel my hair whitening.
A need for solitude became imperative; and, murmuring something
about thinking it over, I escaped from the room.
Except for my bedroom, whither he was quite capable of following
me, I had no refuge but the grounds. I unbolted the front door and
went out.
It was still freezing, and, though the stars shone, the trees grew
so closely about the house that it was too dark for me to see more
than a few feet in front of me.
I began to stroll up and down. The night was wonderfully still. I
could hear somebody walking up the drive--one of the maids, I
supposed, returning from her evening out. I could even hear a bird
rustling in the ivy on the walls of the stables.
I fell into a train of thought. I think my mind must still have
been under Glossop's gloom-breeding spell, for I was filled with a
sense of the infinite pathos of Life. What was the good of it all?
Why was a man given chances of happiness without the sense to
realize and use them? If Nature had made me so self-satisfied that
I had lost Audrey because of my self-satisfaction why had she not
made me so self-satisfied that I could lose her without a pang?
Audrey! It annoyed me that, whenever I was free for a moment from
active work, my thoughts should keep turning to her. It frightened
me, too. Engaged to Cynthia, I had no right to have such thoughts.
Perhaps it was the mystery which hung about her that kept her in
my mind. I did not know where she was. I did not know how she
fared. I did not know what sort of a man it was whom she had
preferred to me. That, it struck me, was the crux of the matter.
She had vanished absolutely with another man whom I had never seen
and whose very name I did not know. I had been beaten by an unseen
foe.
I was deep in a very slough of despond when suddenly things began
to happen. I might have known that Sanstead House would never
permit solitary brooding on Life for long. It was a place of
incident, not of abstract speculation.
I had reached the end of my 'beat', and had stopped to relight my
pipe, when drama broke loose with the swift unexpectedness which
was characteristic of the place. The stillness of the night was
split by a sound which I could have heard in a gale and recognized
among a hundred conflicting noises. It was a scream, a shrill,
piercing squeal that did not rise to a crescendo, but started at
its maximum and held the note; a squeal which could only proceed
from one throat: the deafening war-cry of the Little Nugget.
I had grown accustomed, since my arrival at Sanstead House, to a
certain quickening of the pace of life, but tonight events
succeeded one another with a rapidity which surprised me. A whole
cinematograph-drama was enacted during the space of time it takes
for a wooden match to burn.
At the moment when the Little Nugget gave tongue, I had just
struck one, and I stood, startled into rigidity, holding it in the
air as if I had decided to constitute myself a sort of limelight
man to the performance.
It cannot have been more than a few seconds later before some
person unknown nearly destroyed me.
I was standing, holding my match and listening to the sounds of
confusion indoors, when this person, rounding the angle of the
house in a desperate hurry, emerged from the bushes and rammed me
squarely.
He was a short man, or he must have crouched as he ran, for his
shoulder--a hard, bony shoulder--was precisely the same distance
from the ground as my solar plexus. In the brief impact which
ensued between the two, the shoulder had the advantage of being in
motion, while the solar plexus was stationary, and there was no
room for any shadow of doubt as to which had the worst of it.
That the mysterious unknown was not unshaken by the encounter was
made clear by a sharp yelp of surprise and pain. He staggered.
What happened to him after that was not a matter of interest to
me. I gather that he escaped into the night. But I was too
occupied with my own affairs to follow his movements.
Of all cures for melancholy introspection a violent blow in the
solar plexus is the most immediate. If Mr Corbett had any abstract
worries that day at Carson City, I fancy they ceased to occupy his
mind from the moment when Mr Fitzsimmons administered that historic
left jab. In my case the cure was instantaneous. I can remember
reeling across the gravel and falling in a heap and trying to
breathe and knowing that I should never again be able to, and
then for some minutes all interest in the affairs of this world
left me.
How long it was before my breath returned, hesitatingly, like some
timid Prodigal Son trying to muster up courage to enter the old
home, I do not know; but it cannot have been many minutes, for the
house was only just beginning to disgorge its occupants as I sat
up. Disconnected cries and questions filled the air. Dim forms
moved about in the darkness.
I had started to struggle to my feet, feeling very sick and
boneless, when it was borne in upon me that the sensations of this
remarkable night were not yet over. As I reached a sitting
position, and paused before adventuring further, to allow a wave
of nausea to pass, a hand was placed on my shoulder and a voice
behind me said, 'Don't move!'
II
I was not in a condition to argue. Beyond a fleeting feeling that
a liberty was being taken with me and that I was being treated
unjustly, I do not remember resenting the command. I had no notion
who the speaker might be, and no curiosity. Breathing just then
had all the glamour of a difficult feat cleverly performed. I
concentrated my whole attention upon it. I was pleased, and
surprised, to find myself getting on so well. I remember having
much the same sensation when I first learned to ride a bicycle--a
kind of dazed feeling that I seemed to be doing it, but Heaven
alone knew how.
A minute or so later, when I had leisure to observe outside
matters, I perceived that among the other actors in the drama
confusion still reigned. There was much scuttering about and much
meaningless shouting. Mr Abney's reedy tenor voice was issuing
directions, each of which reached a dizzier height of futility
than the last. Glossop was repeating over and over again the
words, 'Shall I telephone for the police?' to which nobody
appeared to pay the least attention. One or two boys were darting
about like rabbits and squealing unintelligibly. A female voice--I
think Mrs Attwell's--was saying, 'Can you see him?'
Up to this point, my match, long since extinguished, had been the
only illumination the affair had received; but now somebody, who
proved to be White, the butler, came from the direction of the
stable-yard with a carriage-lamp. Every one seemed calmer and
happier for it. The boys stopped squealing, Mrs Attwell and
Glossop subsided, and Mr Abney said 'Ah!' in a self-satisfied
voice, as if he had directed this move and was congratulating
himself on the success with which it had been carried out.
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