Books: Uneasy Money
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P.G. Wodehouse >> Uneasy Money
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It was not immediately that he had arrived at even this sketchy
outline of his feelings. For perhaps a mile he walked as the
scorpion-stung natives run--blindly, wildly, with nothing in his
mind but a desire to walk faster and faster, to walk as no man had
ever walked before. And then--one does not wish to be unduly
realistic, but the fact is too important to be ignored--he began
to perspire. And hard upon that unrefined but wonder-working flow
came a certain healing of spirit. Dimly at first but every moment
more clearly, he found it possible to think.
In a man of Bill's temperament there are so many qualities wounded
by a blow such as he had received, that it is hardly surprising
that his emotions, when he began to examine them, were mixed. Now
one, now another, of his wounds presented itself to his notice.
And then individual wounds would become difficult to distinguish
in the mass of injuries. Spiritually, he was in the position of a
man who has been hit simultaneously in a number of sensitive spots
by a variety of hard and hurtful things. He was as little able,
during the early stages of his meditations, to say where he was
hurt most as a man who had been stabbed in the back, bitten in the
ankle, hit in the eye, smitten with a blackjack, and kicked on the
shin in the same moment of time. All that such a man would be able
to say with certainty would be that unpleasant things had happened
to him; and that was all that Bill was able to say.
Little by little, walking swiftly the while, he began to make a
rough inventory. He sorted out his injuries, catalogued them. It
was perhaps his self-esteem that had suffered least of all, for he
was by nature modest. He had a savage humility, valuable in a
crisis of this sort.
But he looked up to Claire. He had thought her straight. And all
the time that she had been saying those things to him that night
of their last meeting she had been engaged to another man, a fat,
bald, doddering, senile fool, whose only merit was his money.
Scarcely a fair description of Mr Pickering, but in a man in
Bill's position a little bias is excusable.
Bill walked on. He felt as if he could walk for ever. Automobiles
whirred past, hooting peevishly, but he heeded them not. Dogs
trotted out to exchange civilities, but he ignored them. The
poison in his blood drove him on.
And then quite suddenly and unexpectedly the fever passed. Almost
in mid-stride he became another man, a healed, sane man, keenly
aware of a very vivid thirst and a desire to sit down and rest
before attempting the ten miles of cement road that lay between
him and home. Half an hour at a wayside inn completed the cure. It
was a weary but clear-headed Bill who trudged back through the
gathering dusk.
He found himself thinking of Claire as of someone he had known
long ago, someone who had never touched his life. She seemed so
far away that he wondered how she could ever have affected him for
pain or pleasure. He looked at her across a chasm. This is the
real difference between love and infatuation, that infatuation
can be slain cleanly with a single blow. In the hour of clear
vision which had come to him, Bill saw that he had never loved
Claire. It was her beauty that had held him, that and the appeal
which her circumstances had made to his pity. Their minds had not
run smoothly together. Always there had been something that
jarred, a subtle antagonism. And she was crooked.
Almost unconsciously his mind began to build up an image of the
ideal girl, the girl he would have liked Claire to be, the girl
who would conform to all that he demanded of woman. She would be
brave. He realized now that, even though it had moved his pity,
Claire's querulousness had offended something in him.
He had made allowances for her, but the ideal girl would have had
no need of allowances. The ideal girl would be plucky, cheerfully
valiant, a fighter. She would not admit the existence of hard
luck.
She would be honest. Here, too, she would have no need of allowances.
No temptation would be strong enough to make her do a mean act or
think a mean thought, for her courage would give her strength, and
her strength would make her proof against temptation. She would be
kind. That was because she would also be extremely intelligent,
and, being extremely intelligent, would have need of kindness to
enable her to bear with a not very intelligent man like himself.
For the rest, she would be small and alert and pretty, and fair
haired--and brown-eyed--and she would keep a bee farm and her name
would be Elizabeth Boyd.
Having arrived with a sense of mild astonishment at this
conclusion, Bill found, also to his surprise, that he had walked
ten miles without knowing it and that he was turning in at the
farm gate. Somebody came down the drive, and he saw that it was
Elizabeth.
She hurried to meet him, small and shadowy in the uncertain light.
James, the cat, stalked rheumatically at her side. She came up to
Bill, and he saw that her face wore an anxious look. He gazed at
her with a curious feeling that it was a very long time since he
had seen her last.
'Where have you been?' she said, her voice troubled. 'I couldn't
think what had become of you.'
'I went for a walk.'
'But you've been gone hours and hours.'
'I went to a place called Morrisville.'
'Morrisville!' Elizabeth's eyes opened wide. 'Have you walked
twenty miles?'
'Why, I--I believe I have.'
It was the first time he had been really conscious of it.
Elizabeth looked at him in consternation. Perhaps it was the
association in her mind of unexpected walks with the newly-born
activities of the repentant Nutty that gave her the feeling that
there must be some mental upheaval on a large scale at the back of
this sudden ebullition of long-distance pedestrianism. She
remembered that the thought had come to her once or twice during
the past week that all was not well with her visitor, and that he
had seemed downcast and out of spirits.
She hesitated.
'Is anything the matter, Mr Chalmers?'
'No,' said Bill, decidedly. He would have found a difficulty in
making that answer with any ring of conviction earlier in the day,
but now it was different. There was nothing whatever the matter
with him now. He had never felt happier.
'You're sure?'
'Absolutely. I feel fine.'
'I thought--I've been thinking for some days--that you might be in
trouble of some sort.'
Bill swiftly added another to that list of qualities which he had
been framing on his homeward journey. That girl of his would be
angelically sympathetic.
'It's awfully good of you,' he said, 'but honestly I feel like--I
feel great.'
The little troubled look passed from Elizabeth's face. Her eyes
twinkled.
'You're really feeling happy?'
'Tremendously.'
'Then let me damp you. We're in an awful fix!'
'What! In what way?'
'About the monkey.'
'Has he escaped?'
'That's the trouble--he hasn't.'
'I don't understand.'
'Come and sit down and I'll tell you. It's a shame to keep you
standing after your walk.'
They made their way to the massive stone seat which Mr Flack, the
landlord, had bought at a sale and dumped in a moment of
exuberance on the farm grounds.
'This is the most hideous thing on earth,' said Elizabeth
casually, 'but it will do to sit on. Now tell me: why did you go
to Lady Wetherby's this afternoon?'
It was all so remote, it seemed so long ago that he had wanted to
find an excuse for meeting Claire again, that for a moment Bill
hesitated in actual perplexity, and before he could speak Elizabeth
had answered the question for him.
'I suppose you went out of kindness of heart to relieve the poor
lady's mind,' she said. 'But you certainly did the wrong thing.
You started something!'
'I didn't tell her the animal was here.'
'What did you tell her?'
'I said I had seen it, don't you know.'
'That was enough.'
'I'm awfully sorry.'
'Oh, we shall pull through all right, but we must act at once. We
must be swift and resolute. We must saddle our chargers and up and
away, and all that sort of thing. Show a flash of speed,' she
explained kindly, at the sight of Bill's bewildered face.
'But what has happened?'
'The press is on our trail. I've been interviewing reporters all
the afternoon.'
'Reporters!'
'Millions of them. The place is alive with them. Keen, hatchet-faced
young men, and every one of them was the man who really unravelled
some murder mystery or other, though the police got the credit for
it. They told me so.'
'But, I say, how on earth--'
'--did they get here? I suppose Lady Wetherby invited them,'
'But why?'
'She wants the advertisement, of course. I know it doesn't sound
sensational--a lost monkey; but when it's a celebrity's lost
monkey it makes a difference. Suppose King George had lost a
monkey; wouldn't your London newspapers give it a good deal of
space? Especially if it had thrown eggs at one of the ladies and
bitten the Duke of Norfolk in the leg? That's what our visitor has
been doing apparently. At least, he threw eggs at the scullery-maid
and bit a millionaire. It's practically the same thing. At any
rate, there it is. The newspaper men are here, and they seem
to regard this farm as their centre of operations. I had the
greatest difficulty in inducing them to go home to their well-earned
dinners. They wanted to camp out on the place. As it is, there may
still be some of them round, hiding in the grass with notebooks,
and telling one another in whispers that they were the men who
really solved the murder mystery. What shall we do?'
Bill had no suggestions.
'You realize our position? I wonder if we could be arrested for
kidnapping. The monkey is far more human than most of the
millionaire children who get kidnapped. It's an awful fix. Did you
know that Lady Wetherby is going to offer a reward for the
animal?'
'No, really?'
'Five hundred dollars!'
'Surely not!'
'She is. I suppose she feels she can charge it up to necessary
expenses for publicity and still be ahead of the game, taking into
account the advertising she's going to get.'
'She said nothing about that when I saw her.'
'No, because it won't be offered until to-morrow or the day after.
One of the newspaper men told me that. The idea is, of course, to
make the thing exciting just when it would otherwise be dying as a
news item. Cumulative interest. It's a good scheme, too, but it
makes it very awkward for me. I don't want to be in the position
of keeping a monkey locked up with the idea of waiting until
somebody starts a bull market in monkeys. I consider that that
sort of thing would stain the spotless escutcheon of the Boyds. It
would be a low trick for that old-established family to play. Not
but what poor, dear Nutty would do it like a shot,' she concluded
meditatively.
Bill was impressed.
'It does make it awkward, what?'
'It makes it more than awkward, what! Take another aspect of the
situation. The night before last my precious Nutty, while ruining
his constitution with the demon rum, thought he saw a monkey that
wasn't there, and instantly resolved to lead a new and better
life. He hates walking, but he has now begun to do his five miles
a day. He loathes cold baths, but he now wallows in them. I don't
know his views on Indian clubs, but I should think that he has a
strong prejudice against them, too, but now you can't go near him
without taking a chance of being brained. Are all these good
things to stop as quickly as they began? If I know Nutty, he would
drop them exactly one minute after he heard that it was a real
monkey he saw that night. And how are we to prevent his hearing?
By a merciful miracle he was out taking his walk when the
newspaper men began to infest the place to-day, but that might not
happen another time. What conclusion does all this suggest to you,
Mr Chalmers?'
'We ought to get rid of the animal.'
'This very minute. But don't you bother to come. You must be tired
out, poor thing.'
'I never felt less tired,' said Bill stoutly.
Elizabeth looked at him in silence for a moment.
'You're rather splendid, you know, Mr Chalmers. You make a great
partner for an adventure of this kind. You're nice and solid.'
The outhouse lay in the neighbourhood of the hives, a gaunt,
wooden structure surrounded by bushes. Elizabeth glanced over her
shoulder as she drew the key from her pocket.
'You can't think how nervous I was this afternoon,' she said. 'I
thought every moment one of those newspaper men would look in
here. I--James! James! I thought I heard James in those bushes--I
kept heading them away. Once I thought it was all up.' She
unlocked the door. 'One of them was about a yard from the window,
just going to look in. Thank goodness, a bee stung him at the
psychological moment, and--Oh!'
'What's the matter?'
'Come and get a banana.'
They walked to the house. On the way Elizabeth stopped.
'Why, you haven't had any dinner either!' she said.
'Never mind me,' said Bill, 'I can wait. Let's get this thing
finished first.'
'You really are a sport, Mr Chalmers,' said Elizabeth gratefully.
'It would kill me to wait a minute. I shan't feel happy until I've
got it over. Will you stay here while I go up and see that Nutty's
safe in his room?' she added as they entered the house.
She stopped abruptly. A feline howl had broken the stillness of
the night, followed instantly by a sharp report.
'What was that?'
'It sounded like a car backfiring.'
'No, it was a shot. One of the neighbours, I expect. You can hear
miles away on a night like this. I suppose a cat was after his
chickens. Thank goodness, James isn't a pirate cat. Wait while I
go up and see Nutty.'
She was gone only a moment.
'It's all right,' she said. 'I peeped in. He's doing deep
breathing exercises at his window which looks out the other way.
Come along.'
When they reached the outhouse they found the door open.
'Did you do that?' said Elizabeth. 'Did you leave it open?'
'No.'
'I don't remember doing it myself. It must have swung open. Well,
this saves us a walk. He'll have gone.'
'Better take a look round, what?'
'Yes, I suppose so; but he's sure not to be there. Have you a
match?'
Bill struck one and held it up.
'Good Lord!'
The match went out.
'What is it? What has happened?'
Bill was fumbling for another match.
'There's something on the floor. It looks like--I thought for a
minute--' The small flame shot out of the gloom, flickered, then
burned with a steady glow. Bill stooped, bending over something on
the ground. The match burned down.
Bill's voice came out of the darkness:
'I say, you were right about that noise. It was a shot. The poor
little chap's down there on the floor with a hole in him the size
of my fist.'
17
Boyhood, like measles, is one of those complaints which a man
should catch young and have done with, for when it comes in
middle life it is apt to be serious. Dudley Pickering had escaped
boyhood at the time when his contemporaries were contracting it.
It is true that for a few years after leaving the cradle he had
exhibited a certain immatureness, but as soon as he put on
knickerbockers and began to go about a little he outgrew all that.
He avoided altogether the chaotic period which usually lies
between the years of ten and fourteen. At ten he was a thoughtful
and sober-minded young man, at fourteen almost an old fogy.
And now--thirty-odd years overdue--boyhood had come upon him. As
he examined the revolver in his bedroom, wild and unfamiliar
emotions seethed within him. He did not realize it, but they were
the emotions which should have come to him thirty years before and
driven him out to hunt Indians in the garden. An imagination which
might well have become atrophied through disuse had him as
thoroughly in its control as ever he had had his Pickering Giant.
He believed almost with devoutness in the plot which he had
detected for the spoliation of Lord Wetherby's summer-house, that
plot of which he held Lord Dawlish to be the mainspring. And it
must be admitted that circumstances had combined to help his
belief. If the atmosphere in which he was moving was not sinister
then there was no meaning in the word.
Summer homes had been burgled, there was no getting away from
that--half a dozen at least in the past two months. He was a
stranger in the locality, so had no means of knowing that summer
homes were always burgled on Long Island every year, as regularly
as the coming of the mosquito and the advent of the jelly-fish. It
was one of the local industries. People left summer homes lying
about loose in lonely spots, and you just naturally got in through
the cellar window. Such was the Long Islander's simple creed.
This created in Mr Pickering's mind an atmosphere of burglary, a
receptiveness, as it were, toward burglars as phenomena, and the
extremely peculiar behaviour of the person whom in his thoughts he
always referred to as The Man crystallized it. He had seen The Man
hanging about, peering in at windows. He had shouted 'Hi!' and The
Man had run. The Man had got into the house under the pretence of
being a friend of Claire's. At the suggestion that he should meet
Claire he had dashed away in a panic. And Claire, both then and
later, had denied absolutely any knowledge of him.
As for the apparently blameless beekeeping that was going on at
the place where he lived, that was easily discounted. Mr Pickering
had heard somewhere or read somewhere--he rather thought that it
was in those interesting but disturbing chronicles of Raffles--that
the first thing an intelligent burglar did was to assume some
open and innocent occupation to avert possible inquiry into his
real mode of life. Mr Pickering did not put it so to himself, for
he was rarely slangy even in thought, but what he felt was that he
had caught The Man and his confederate with the goods.
If Mr Pickering had had his boyhood at the proper time and
finished with it, he would no doubt have acted otherwise than he
did. He would have contented himself with conducting a war of
defence. He would have notified the police, and considered that
all that remained for him personally to do was to stay in his room
at night with his revolver. But boys will be boys. The only course
that seemed to him in any way satisfactory in this his hour of
rejuvenation was to visit the bee farm, the hotbed of crime, and
keep an eye on it. He wanted to go there and prowl.
He did not anticipate any definite outcome of his visit. In his
boyish, elemental way he just wanted to take a revolver and a
pocketful of cartridges, and prowl.
It was a great night for prowling. A moon so little less than full
that the eye could barely detect its slight tendency to become
concave, shone serenely, creating a desirable combination of black
shadows where the prowler might hide and great stretches of light
in which the prowler might reveal his wickedness without disguise.
Mr Pickering walked briskly along the road, then less briskly as
he drew nearer the farm. An opportune belt of shrubs that ran from
the gate adjoining the road to a point not far from the house gave
him just the cover he needed. He slipped into this belt of shrubs
and began to work his way through them.
Like generals, authors, artists, and others who, after planning
broad effects, have to get down to the detail work, he found that
this was where his troubles began. He had conceived the journey
through the shrubbery in rather an airy mood. He thought he would
just go through the shrubbery. He had not taken into account the
branches, the thorns, the occasional unexpected holes, and he was
both warm and dishevelled when he reached the end of it and found
himself out in the open within a short distance of what he
recognized as beehives. It was not for some time that he was able
to give that selfless attention to exterior objects which is the
prowler's chief asset. For quite a while the only thought of which
he was conscious was that what he needed most was a cold drink and
a cold bath. Then, with a return to clear-headedness, he realized
that he was standing out in the open, visible from three sides to
anyone who might be in the vicinity, and he withdrew into the
shrubbery. He was not fond of the shrubbery, but it was a splendid
place to withdraw into. It swallowed you up.
This was the last move of the first part of Mr Pickering's active
campaign. He stayed where he was, in the middle of a bush, and
waited for the enemy to do something. What he expected him to do
he did not know. The subconscious thought that animated him was
that on a night like this something was bound to happen sooner or
later. Just such a thought on similarly stimulating nights had
animated men of his acquaintance thirty years ago, men who were
as elderly and stolid and unadventurous now as Mr Pickering had
been then. He would have resented the suggestion profoundly, but
the truth of the matter was that Dudley Pickering, after a late
start, had begun to play Indians.
Nothing had happened for a long time--for such a long time that,
in spite of the ferment within him, Mr Pickering almost began to
believe that nothing would happen. The moon shone with unutterable
calm. The crickets and the tree frogs performed their interminable
duet, apparently unconscious that they were attacking it in
different keys--a fact that, after a while, began to infuriate
Mr Pickering. Mosquitoes added their reedy tenor to the concert.
A twig on which he was standing snapped with a report like a pistol.
The moon went on shining.
Away in the distance a dog began to howl. An automobile passed in
the road. For a few moments Mr Pickering was able to occupy
himself pleasantly with speculations as to its make; and then he
became aware that something was walking down the back of his neck
just beyond the point where his fingers could reach it. Discomfort
enveloped Mr Pickering. At various times by day he had seen
long-winged black creatures with slim waists and unpleasant faces.
Could it be one of these? Or a caterpillar? Or--and the maddening
thing was that he did not dare to slap at it, for who knew what
desperate characters the sound might not attract?
Well, it wasn't stinging him; that was something.
A second howling dog joined the first one. A wave of sadness was
apparently afflicting the canine population of the district to-night.
Mr Pickering's vitality began to ebb. He was ageing, and
imagination slackened its grip. And then, just as he had begun to
contemplate the possibility of abandoning the whole adventure and
returning home, he was jerked back to boyhood again by the sound
of voices.
He shrank farther back into the bushes. A man--The Man--was
approaching, accompanied by his female associate. They passed so
close to him that he could have stretched out a hand and touched
them.
The female associate was speaking, and her first words set all Mr
Pickering's suspicions dancing a dance of triumph. The girl gave
herself away with her opening sentence.
'You can't think how nervous I was this afternoon,' he heard her
say. She had a soft pleasant voice; but soft, pleasant voices may
be the vehicles for conveying criminal thoughts. 'I thought every
moment one of those newspaper men would look in here.'
Where was here? Ah, that outhouse! Mr Pickering had had his
suspicions of that outhouse already. It was one of those
structures that look at you furtively as if something were hiding
in them.
'James! James! I thought I heard James in those bushes.'
The girl was looking straight at the spot occupied by Mr
Pickering, and it had been the start caused by her first words and
the resultant rustle of branches that had directed her attention
to him. He froze. The danger passed. She went on speaking. Mr
Pickering pondered on James. Who was James? Another of the gang,
of course. How many of them were there?
'Once I thought it was all up. One of them was about a yard from
the window, just going to look in.'
Mr Pickering thrilled. There was something hidden in the outhouse,
then! Swag?
'Thank goodness, a bee stung him at the psychological moment,
and--oh!'
She stopped, and The Man spoke:
'What's the matter?'
It interested Mr Pickering that The Man retained his English
accent even when talking privately with his associates. For
practice, no doubt.
'Come and get a banana,' said the girl. And they went off together
in the direction of the house, leaving Mr Pickering bewildered.
Why a banana? Was it a slang term of the underworld for a pistol?
It must be that.
But he had no time for speculation. Now was his chance, the only
chance he would ever get of looking into that outhouse and finding
out its mysterious contents. He had seen the girl unlock the door.
A few steps would take him there. All it needed was nerve. With a
strong effort Mr Pickering succeeded in obtaining the nerve. He
burst from his bush and trotted to the outhouse door, opened it,
and looked in. And at that moment something touched his leg.
At the right time and in the right frame of mind man is capable of
stoic endurances that excite wonder and admiration. Mr Pickering
was no weakling. He had once upset his automobile in a ditch, and
had waited for twenty minutes until help came to relieve a broken
arm, and he had done it without a murmur. But on the present
occasion there was a difference. His mind was not adjusted for the
occurrence. There are times when it is unseasonable to touch a man
on the leg. This was a moment when it was unseasonable in the case
of Mr Pickering. He bounded silently into the air, his whole being
rent asunder as by a cataclysm.
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