Books: The Little Nugget
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P.G. Wodehouse >> The Little Nugget
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I stopped and turned on him. 'Look here, you fool,' I cried. 'I
tell you I am not Sam Fisher. Can't you understand that you have
got hold of the wrong man? My name is Burns--_Burns_.'
He expectorated--scornfully this time. He was a man slow by nature
to receive ideas, but slower to rid himself of one that had
contrived to force its way into what he probably called his brain.
He had decided on the evidence that I was Smooth Sam Fisher, and
no denials on my part were going to shake his belief. He looked on
them merely as so many unsportsmanlike quibbles prompted by greed.
'Tell it to Sweeney!' was the form in which he crystallized his
scepticism.
'May be you'll say youse ain't trailin' de Nugget, huh?'
It was a home-thrust. If truth-telling has become a habit, one
gets slowly off the mark when the moment arrives for the prudent
lie. Quite against my will, I hesitated. Observant Mr MacGinnis
perceived my hesitation and expectorated triumphantly.
'Ah ghee!' he remarked. And then with a sudden return to ferocity,
'All right, you Sam, you wait! We'll fix you, and fix you good!
See? Dat goes. You t'ink youse kin put it across us, huh? All
right, you'll get yours. You wait!'
And with these words he slid off into the night. From somewhere in
the murky middle distance came a scornful 'Hawg!' and he was gone,
leaving me with a settled conviction that, while I had frequently
had occasion, since my expedition to Sanstead began, to describe
affairs as complex, their complexity had now reached its height.
With a watchful Pinkerton's man within, and a vengeful gang of
rivals without, Sanstead House seemed likely to become an
unrestful place for a young kidnapper with no previous experience.
The need for swift action had become imperative.
II
White, the butler, looking singularly unlike a detective--which, I
suppose, is how a detective wants to look--was taking the air on
the football field when I left the house next morning for a
before-breakfast stroll. The sight of him filled me with a desire
for first-hand information on the subject of the man Mr MacGinnis
supposed me to be and also of Mr MacGinnis himself. I wanted to be
assured that my friend Buck, despite appearances, was a placid
person whose bark was worse than his bite.
White's manner, at our first conversational exchanges, was
entirely that of the butler. From what I came to know of him
later, I think he took an artistic pride in throwing himself into
whatever role he had to assume.
At the mention of Smooth Sam Fisher, however, his manner peeled
off him like a skin, and he began to talk as himself, a racy and
vigorous self vastly different from the episcopal person he
thought it necessary to be when on duty.
'White,' I said, 'do you know anything of Smooth Sam Fisher?'
He stared at me. I suppose the question, led up to by no previous
remark, was unusual.
'I met a gentleman of the name of Buck MacGinnis--he was our
visitor that night, by the way--and he was full of Sam. Do you
know him?'
'Buck?'
'Either of them.'
'Well, I've never seen Buck, but I know all about him. There's
pepper to Buck.'
'So I should imagine. And Sam?'
'You may take it from me that there's more pepper to Sam's little
finger than there is to Buck's whole body. Sam could make Buck
look like the last run of shad, if it came to a showdown. Buck's
just a common roughneck. Sam's an educated man. He's got brains.'
'So I gathered. Well, I'm glad to hear you speak so well of him,
because that's who I'm supposed to be.'
'How's that?'
'Buck MacGinnis insists that I am Smooth Sam Fisher. Nothing I can
say will shift him.'
White stared. He had very bright humorous brown eyes. Then he
began to laugh.
'Well, what do you know about that?' he exclaimed. 'Wouldn't that
jar you!'
'It would. I may say it did. He called me a hog for wanting to
keep the Little Nugget to myself, and left threatening to "fix
me". What would you say the verb "to fix" signified in Mr
MacGinnis's vocabulary?'
White was still chuckling quietly to himself.
'He's a wonder!' he observed. 'Can you beat it? Taking you for
Smooth Sam!'
'He said he had never seen Smooth Sam. Have you?'
'Lord, yes.'
'Does he look like me?'
'Not a bit.'
'Do you think he's over here in England?'
'Sam? I know he is.'
'Then Buck MacGinnis was right?'
'Dead right, as far as Sam being on the trail goes. Sam's after
the Nugget to get him this time. He's tried often enough before,
but we've been too smart for him. This time he allows he's going
to bring it off.'
'Then why haven't we seen anything of him? Buck MacGinnis seems to
be monopolizing the kidnapping industry in these parts.'
'Oh, Sam'll show up when he feels good and ready. You can take it
from me that Sam knows what he is doing. Sam's a special pet of
mine. I don't give a flip for Buck MacGinnis.'
'I wish I had your cheery disposition! To me Buck MacGinnis seems
a pretty important citizen. I wonder what he meant by "fix"?'
White, however, declined to leave the subject of Buck's more
gifted rival.
'Sam's a college man, you know. That gives him a pull. He has
brains, and can use them.'
'That was one of the points on which Buck MacGinnis reproached me.
He said it was not fair to use my superior education.'
He laughed.
'Buck's got no sense. That's why you find him carrying on like a
porch-climber. It's his only notion of how to behave when he wants
to do a job. And that's why there's only one man to keep your eye
on in this thing of the Little Nugget, and that's Sam. I wish you
could get to know Sam. You'd like him.'
'You seem to look on him as a personal friend. I certainly don't
like Buck.'
'Oh, Buck!' said White scornfully.
We turned towards the house as the sound of the bell came to us
across the field.
'Then you think we may count on Sam's arrival, sooner or later, as
a certainty?' I said.
'Surest thing you know.'
'You will have a busy time.'
'All in the day's work.'
'I suppose I ought to look at it in that way. But I do wish I knew
exactly what Buck meant by "fix".'
White at last condescended to give his mind to the trivial point.
'I guess he'll try to put one over on you with a sand-bag,' he
said carelessly. He seemed to face the prospect with calm.
'A sand-bag, eh?' I said. 'It sounds exciting.'
'And feels it. I know. I've had some.'
I parted from him at the door. As a comforter he had failed to
qualify. He had not eased my mind to the slightest extent.
Chapter 7
Looking at it now I can see that the days which followed Audrey's
arrival at Sanstead marked the true beginning of our acquaintanceship.
Before, during our engagement, we had been strangers, artificially
tied together, and she had struggled against the chain. But now,
for the first time, we were beginning to know each other, and were
discovering that, after all, we had much in common.
It did not alarm me, this growing feeling of comradeship. Keenly
on the alert as I was for the least sign that would show that I
was in danger of weakening in my loyalty to Cynthia, I did not
detect one in my friendliness for Audrey. On the contrary, I was
hugely relieved, for it seemed to me that the danger was past. I
had not imagined it possible that I could ever experience towards
her such a tranquil emotion as this easy friendliness. For the
last five years my imagination had been playing round her memory,
until I suppose I had built up in my mind some almost superhuman
image, some goddess. What I was passing through now, of course,
though I was unaware of it, was the natural reaction from that
state of mind. Instead of the goddess, I had found a companionable
human being, and I imagined that I had effected the change myself,
and by sheer force of will brought Audrey into a reasonable
relation to the scheme of things.
I suppose a not too intelligent moth has much the same views with
regard to the lamp. His last thought, as he enters the flame, is
probably one of self-congratulation that he has arranged his
dealings with it on such a satisfactory commonsense basis.
And then, when I was feeling particularly safe and complacent,
disaster came.
The day was Wednesday, and my 'afternoon off', but the rain was
driving against the windows, and the attractions of billiards with
the marker at the 'Feathers' had not proved sufficient to make me
face the two-mile walk in the storm. I had settled myself in the
study. There was a noble fire burning in the grate, and the
darkness lit by the glow of the coals, the dripping of the rain,
the good behaviour of my pipe, and the reflection that, as I sat
there, Glossop was engaged downstairs in wrestling with my class,
combined to steep me in a meditative peace. Audrey was playing the
piano in the drawing-room. The sound came to me faintly through
the closed doors. I recognized what she was playing. I wondered if
the melody had the same associations for her that it had for me.
The music stopped. I heard the drawing-room door open. She came
into the study.
'I didn't know there was anyone here,' she said. 'I'm frozen. The
drawing-room fire's out.'
'Come and sit down,' I said. 'You don't mind the smoke?'
I drew a chair up to the fire for her, feeling, as I did so, a
certain pride. Here I was, alone with her in the firelight, and my
pulse was regular and my brain cool. I had a momentary vision of
myself as the Strong Man, the strong, quiet man with the iron grip
on his emotions. I was pleased with myself.
She sat for some minutes, gazing into the fire. Little spurts of
flame whistled comfortably in the heart of the black-red coals.
Outside the storm shrieked faintly, and flurries of rain dashed
themselves against the window.
'It's very nice in here,' she said at last.
'Peaceful.'
I filled my pipe and re-lit it. Her eyes, seen for an instant in
the light of the match, looked dreamy.
'I've been sitting here listening to you,' I said. 'I liked that
last thing you played.'
'You always did.'
'You remember that? Do you remember one evening--no, you
wouldn't.'
'Which evening?'
'Oh, you wouldn't remember. It's only one particular evening when
you played that thing. It sticks in my mind. It was at your
father's studio.'
She looked up quickly.
'We went out afterwards and sat in the park.'
I sat up thrilled.
'A man came by with a dog,' I said.
'Two dogs.'
'One surely!'
'Two. A bull-dog and a fox-terrier.'
'I remember the bull-dog, but--by Jove, you're right. A fox-terrier
with a black patch over his left eye.'
'Right eye.'
'Right eye. They came up to us, and you--'
'Gave them chocolates.'
I sank back slowly in my chair.
'You've got a wonderful memory,' I said.
She bent over the fire without speaking. The rain rattled on the
window.
'So you still like my playing, Peter?'
'I like it better than ever; there's something in it now that I
don't believe there used to be. I can't describe it--something--'
'I think it's knowledge, Peter,' she said quietly. 'Experience.
I'm five years older than I was when I used to play to you before,
and I've seen a good deal in those five years. It may not be
altogether pleasant seeing life, but--well, it makes you play the
piano better. Experience goes in at the heart and comes out at the
finger-tips.'
It seemed to me that she spoke a little bitterly.
'Have you had a bad time, Audrey, these last years?' I said.
'Pretty bad.'
'I'm sorry.'
'I'm not--altogether. I've learned a lot.'
She was silent again, her eyes fixed on the fire.
'What are you thinking about?' I said.
'Oh, a great many things.'
'Pleasant?'
'Mixed. The last thing I thought about was pleasant. That was,
that I am very lucky to be doing the work I am doing now. Compared
with some of the things I have done--'
She shivered.
'I wish you would tell me about those years, Audrey,' I said.
'What were some of the things you did?'
She leaned back in her chair and shaded her face from the fire
with a newspaper. Her eyes were in the shadow.
'Well, let me see. I was a nurse for some time at the Lafayette
Hospital in New York.'
'That's hard work?'
'Horribly hard. I had to give it up after a while. But--it teaches
you.... You learn.... You learn--all sorts of things. Realities.
How much of your own trouble is imagination. You get real trouble
in a hospital. You get it thrown at you.'
I said nothing. I was feeling--I don't know why--a little
uncomfortable, a little at a disadvantage, as one feels in the
presence of some one bigger than oneself.
'Then I was a waitress.'
'A waitress?'
'I tell you I did everything. I was a waitress, and a very bad
one. I broke plates. I muddled orders. Finally I was very rude to
a customer and I went on to try something else. I forget what came
next. I think it was the stage. I travelled for a year with a
touring company. That was hard work, too, but I liked it. After
that came dressmaking, which was harder and which I hated. And
then I had my first stroke of real luck.'
'What was that?'
'I met Mr Ford.'
'How did that happen?'
'You wouldn't remember a Miss Vanderley, an American girl who was
over in London five or six years ago? My father taught her
painting. She was very rich, but she was wild at that time to be
Bohemian. I think that's why she chose Father as a teacher. Well,
she was always at the studio, and we became great friends, and one
day, after all these things I have been telling you of, I thought
I would write to her, and see if she could not find me something
to do. She was a _dear_.' Her voice trembled, and she lowered
the newspaper till her whole face was hidden. 'She wanted me to
come to their home and live on her for ever, but I couldn't have
that. I told her I must work. So she sent me to Mr Ford, whom the
Vanderleys knew very well, and I became Ogden's governess.'
'Great Scott!' I cried. 'What!'
She laughed rather shakily.
'I don't think I was a very good governess. I knew next to
nothing. I ought to have been having a governess myself. But I
managed somehow.'
'But Ogden?' I said. 'That little fiend, didn't he worry the life
out of you?'
'Oh, I had luck there again. He happened to take a mild liking to
me, and he was as good as gold--for him; that's to say, if I
didn't interfere with him too much, and I didn't. I was horribly
weak; he let me alone. It was the happiest time I had had for
ages.'
'And when he came here, you came too, as a sort of ex-governess,
to continue exerting your moral influence over him?'
She laughed.
'More or less that.'
We sat in silence for a while, and then she put into words the
thought which was in both our minds.
'How odd it seems, you and I sitting together chatting like this,
Peter, after all--all these years.'
'Like a dream!'
'Just like a dream ... I'm so glad.... You don't know how I've
hated myself sometimes for--for--'
'Audrey! You mustn't talk like that. Don't let's think of it.
Besides, it was my fault.'
She shook her head.
'Well, put it that we didn't understand one another.'
She nodded slowly.
'No, we didn't understand one another.'
'But we do now,' I said. 'We're friends, Audrey.'
She did not answer. For a long time we sat in silence. And then the
newspaper must have moved--a gleam from the fire fell upon her face,
lighting up her eyes; and at the sight something in me began to
throb, like a drum warning a city against danger. The next moment
the shadow had covered them again.
I sat there, tense, gripping the arms of my chair. I was tingling.
Something was happening to me. I had a curious sensation of being
on the threshold of something wonderful and perilous.
From downstairs there came the sound of boys' voices. Work was
over, and with it this talk by the firelight. In a few minutes
somebody, Glossop, or Mr Abney, would be breaking in on our
retreat.
We both rose, and then--it happened. She must have tripped in the
darkness. She stumbled forward, her hand caught at my coat, and
she was in my arms.
It was a thing of an instant. She recovered herself, moved to the
door, and was gone.
But I stood where I was, motionless, aghast at the revelation
which had come to me in that brief moment. It was the physical
contact, the feel of her, warm and alive, that had shattered for
ever that flimsy structure of friendship which I had fancied so
strong. I had said to Love, 'Thus far, and no farther', and Love
had swept over me, the more powerful for being checked. The time
of self-deception was over. I knew myself.
Chapter 8
I
That Buck MacGinnis was not the man to let the grass grow under
his feet in a situation like the present one, I would have
gathered from White's remarks if I had not already done so from
personal observation. The world is divided into dreamers and men
of action. From what little I had seen of him I placed Buck
MacGinnis in the latter class. Every day I expected him to act,
and was agreeably surprised as each twenty-four hours passed and
left me still unfixed. But I knew the hour would come, and it did.
I looked for frontal attack from Buck, not subtlety; but, when the
attack came, it was so excessively frontal that my chief emotion
was a sort of paralysed amazement. It seemed incredible that such
peculiarly Wild Western events could happen in peaceful England,
even in so isolated a spot as Sanstead House.
It had been one of those interminable days which occur only at
schools. A school, more than any other institution, is dependent
on the weather. Every small boy rises from his bed of a morning
charged with a definite quantity of devilry; and this, if he is to
sleep the sound sleep of health, he has got to work off somehow
before bedtime. That is why the summer term is the one a master
longs for, when the intervals between classes can be spent in the
open. There is no pleasanter sight for an assistant-master at a
private school than that of a number of boys expending their venom
harmlessly in the sunshine.
On this particular day, snow had begun to fall early in the
morning, and, while his pupils would have been only too delighted
to go out and roll in it by the hour, they were prevented from
doing so by Mr Abney's strict orders. No schoolmaster enjoys
seeing his pupils running risks of catching cold, and just then Mr
Abney was especially definite on the subject. The Saturnalia which
had followed Mr MacGinnis' nocturnal visit to the school had had
the effect of giving violent colds to three lords, a baronet, and
the younger son of an honourable. And, in addition to that, Mr
Abney himself, his penetrating tenor changed to a guttural croak,
was in his bed looking on the world with watering eyes. His views,
therefore, on playing in the snow as an occupation for boys were
naturally prejudiced.
The result was that Glossop and I had to try and keep order among
a mob of small boys, none of whom had had any chance of working
off his superfluous energy. How Glossop fared I can only imagine.
Judging by the fact that I, who usually kept fair order without
excessive effort, was almost overwhelmed, I should fancy he fared
badly. His classroom was on the opposite side of the hall from
mine, and at frequent intervals his voice would penetrate my door,
raised to a frenzied fortissimo.
Little by little, however, we had won through the day, and the
boys had subsided into comparative quiet over their evening
preparation, when from outside the front door there sounded the
purring of the engine of a large automobile. The bell rang.
I did not, I remember, pay much attention to this at the moment. I
supposed that somebody from one of the big houses in the
neighbourhood had called, or, taking the lateness of the hour into
consideration, that a motoring party had come, as they did
sometimes--Sanstead House standing some miles from anywhere in the
middle of an intricate system of by-roads--to inquire the way to
Portsmouth or London. If my class had allowed me, I would have
ignored the sound. But for them it supplied just that break in the
monotony of things which they had needed. They welcomed it
vociferously.
A voice: 'Sir, please, sir, there's a motor outside.'
Myself (austerely): T know there's a motor outside. Get on with
your work.'
Various voices: 'Sir, have you ever ridden in a motor?'
'Sir, my father let me help drive our motor last Easter, sir.'
'Sir, who do you think it is?'
An isolated genius (imitating the engine): 'Pr-prr! Pr-prr! Pr-prr!'
I was on the point of distributing bad marks (the schoolmaster's
stand-by) broadcast, when a curious sound checked me. It followed
directly upon the opening of the front door. I heard White's
footsteps crossing the hall, then the click of the latch, and
then--a sound that I could not define. The closed door of the
classroom deadened it, but for all that it was audible. It
resembled the thud of a falling body, but I knew it could not be
that, for in peaceful England butlers opening front doors did not
fall with thuds.
My class, eager listeners, found fresh material in the sound for
friendly conversation.
'Sir, what was that, sir?'
'Did you hear that, sir?'
'What do you think's happened, sir?'
'Be quiet,' I shouted. 'Will you be--'
There was a quick footstep outside, the door flew open, and on the
threshold stood a short, sturdy man in a motoring coat and cap.
The upper part of his face was covered by a strip of white linen,
with holes for the eyes, and there was a Browning pistol in his
hand.
It is my belief that, if assistant-masters were allowed to wear
white masks and carry automatic pistols, keeping order in a school
would become child's play. A silence such as no threat of bad
marks had ever been able to produce fell instantaneously upon the
classroom. Out of the corner of my eye, as I turned to face our
visitor, I could see small boys goggling rapturously at this
miraculous realization of all the dreams induced by juvenile
adventure fiction. As far as I could ascertain, on subsequent
inquiry, not one of them felt a tremor of fear. It was all too
tremendously exciting for that. For their exclusive benefit an
illustration from a weekly paper for boys had come to life, and
they had no time to waste in being frightened.
As for me, I was dazed. Motor bandits may terrorize France, and
desperadoes hold up trains in America, but this was peaceful
England. The fact that Buck MacGinnis was at large in the
neighbourhood did not make the thing any the less incredible. I
had looked on my affair with Buck as a thing of the open air and
the darkness. I had figured him lying in wait in lonely roads,
possibly, even, lurking about the grounds; but in my most
apprehensive moments I had not imagined him calling at the front
door and holding me up with a revolver in my own classroom.
And yet it was the simple, even the obvious, thing for him to do.
Given an automobile, success was certain. Sanstead House stood
absolutely alone. There was not even a cottage within half a mile.
A train broken down in the middle of the Bad Lands was not more
cut off.
Consider, too, the peculiar helplessness of a school in such a
case. A school lives on the confidence of parents, a nebulous
foundation which the slightest breath can destroy. Everything
connected with it must be done with exaggerated discretion. I do
not suppose Mr MacGinnis had thought the thing out in all its
bearings, but he could not have made a sounder move if he had been
a Napoleon. Where the owner of an ordinary country-house raided by
masked men can raise the countryside in pursuit, a schoolmaster
must do precisely the opposite. From his point of view, the fewer
people that know of the affair the better. Parents are a jumpy
race. A man may be the ideal schoolmaster, yet will a connection
with melodrama damn him in the eyes of parents. They do not
inquire. They are too panic-stricken for that. Golden-haired
Willie may be receiving the finest education conceivable, yet if
men with Browning pistols are familiar objects at his shrine of
learning they will remove him. Fortunately for schoolmasters it is
seldom that such visitors call upon them. Indeed, I imagine Mr
MacGinnis's effort to have been the first of its kind.
I do not, as I say, suppose that Buck, whose forte was action
rather than brain-work, had thought all this out. He had trusted
to luck, and luck had stood by him. There would be no raising of
the countryside in his case. On the contrary, I could see Mr Abney
becoming one of the busiest persons on record in his endeavour to
hush the thing up and prevent it getting into the papers. The man
with the pistol spoke. He sighted me--I was standing with my back
to the mantelpiece, parallel with the door--made a sharp turn, and
raised his weapon.
'Put 'em up, sport,' he said.
It was not the voice of Buck MacGinnis. I put my hands up.
'Say, which of dese is de Nugget?'
He half turned his head to the class.
'Which of youse kids is Ogden Ford?'
The class was beyond speech. The silence continued.
'Ogden Ford is not here,' I said.
Our visitor had not that simple faith which is so much better than
Norman blood. He did not believe me. Without moving his head he
gave a long whistle. Steps sounded outside. Another, short, sturdy
form, entered the room.
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