With his last hope of wedding Geraldine gone, he told himself, there was nothing now to prevent him writing that strong letter to her father.
For weeks and weeks, you see, Stiffy had been yearning to write an absolute stinker to old Wivelscombe, telling him exactly what he thought of him. And naturally as long as there had been any chance of the other relenting and allowing the marriage to come off such a stinker did not fall within the sphere of practical politics. But now he had nothing to lose he could go ahead and give of his best. He felt in his pocket to see if the five-cent stamp was still there. Then he raced to the writing-table and seized pen and paper.
I don’t know if you have ever had dealings with Stiffy in his capacity of a writer of stinkers. I have. I was with him once when he composed a four-page effort to Oofy Prosser in reply to Oofy’s communication declining to lend him a tenner. It was real, ripe stuff, without a dull line, and I was proud to call the author my friend.
Well, on this occasion, he tells me, he absolutely surpassed himself. It was as if he was inspired. Sheet after sheet he covered, each sheet filled with burning thoughts. He left no aspect of Lord Wivelscombe untouched. He stated in the most precise detail exactly what he felt about the old blighter’s habits, manners, face, ties, trousers, morals, method of drinking soup, ditto of chewing moustache, and a hundred more such matters. To a single pimple on the other’s nose, he tells me he devoted as much as six lines. Then, addressing the envelope, he attached the five-cent stamp and posted the letter personally in the box by the reception desk.
And, being by the reception desk and happening to note standing behind it the manager of the hotel, he thought that this was a good opportunity of putting him abreast of the position of affairs.
‘I say,’ said Stiffy.
‘Sir?’ said the manager.
‘Tell me, my dear old hotel manager,’ said Stiffy, ‘you know that room of mine with bath?’
‘I know it well,’ said the manager.
‘What do you get paid for it?’
‘Six dollars a day.’
Stiffy broke the bad news gently.
‘Not by me you don’t,’ he said. ‘Because I haven’t a penny in the world.’
‘Eh?’ said the manager, not looking any too chirpy.
‘No,’ said Stiffy. ‘Not a penny. My bank’s gone bust.’
‘Which bank is that?’
‘The Inter-State Superlative.’
The manager seemed surprised.
‘It’s the first I’ve heard of it. We bank there ourselves.’
‘Meaning by “we” you and the wife and the tots?’
‘Meaning this hotel.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Stiffy, genuinely moved, for they had treated him with marked civility. ‘But there it is. I was down there just now and the institution had closed its doors.’
‘Didn’t you expect it to on a Sunday?’ asked the manager.
Stiffy’ gaped.
‘On a what?’
‘On a Sunday.’
‘Is today Sunday?’
‘It is.’
‘Then what became of Saturday?’ asked Stiffy, amazed.
‘We had it all right,’ said the manager. ‘Quite a nice Saturday.’
And Stiffy realized that, what with this and what with that, he must have slept right through Saturday. And he also realized – and, as he did so, he paled visibly – that he had just written the supreme stinker of all time to old Wivelscombe and that it had been posted beyond recall.
Yes, that was the position. He, Stiffy, had written him, Wivelscombe, a letter which would make him, Wivelscombe, reject him, Stiffy, as a suitor for his daughter’s hand even if he, Stiffy, had all the money in the world and proposed to hand it over to him, Wivelscombe, as a personal present. Pretty rotten for him, Stiffy, you will admit.
It was a crisis that called for rapid thinking, and that was just what he gave it. For some little time he obtained no results. Then something clicked in his brain.
‘Hotel manager,’ he said.
‘Sir?’ said the manager.
‘If you posted a letter to England, when would it get there?’
‘Much,’ said the manager, ‘would depend on when you posted it.’
‘I dropped it in the box just now.’
The manager consulted a list of sailings.
‘It will go by the Senator J. Freylinghusen Botts on Tuesday.’
‘So shall I,’ said Stiffy.
He had seen the way out. He had been secretary to old Wivelscombe long enough to know the procedure as regarded the arrival of letters at the family seat. The postman shot them into the box at the front door, and Gascoigne, the butler, hoiked them out and placed them on the breakfast table in the morning-room, to be opened by the addressee when he or she came down to shove his or her nose in the trough.
It would be a simple task to get to the house, lurk in the shrubbery outside the morning-room and, when Gascoigne had completed his duties, to nip in through the french windows and snitch the fatal papers. It was simply a matter of buzzing over to England by the same boat on which the letter travelled.
On the Tuesday, accordingly, those assembled to give the Senator J. Freylinghusen Botts a send-off might have observed a young man with a set, resolute face striding up the gang-plank, and I daresay some of them did.
I don’t suppose you want to hear all about Stiffy’s trip across. The salient point is that he did get across. He landed at Liverpool in due season and hit London towards the evenfall, at an hour when the last train for Upton Snodsbury, which is the station for Wivelscombe Court, had left. It seemed to him that his best plan was to hire a car and put up at Worcester for the night. This he did, leaving orders that he was to be called at six sharp in the morning.
Well, you know what it’s like when you’ve got anything on your mind similar to what Stiffy had on his. You sleep fitfully. You rise with dawn. It wasn’t six-thirty when he started out for the Court, and it couldn’t have been much more than seven when he found himself standing on the old familiar lawn. And, as there wasn’t a chance of the postman blowing in before eight-fifteen at the earliest, he thought he might as well take a stroll to keep the circulation brisk.
I have never been up as early as seven myself, but Stiffy tells me it is quite a pleasant hour to be abroad. You get Nature in its pristine freshness and all that sort of thing. The dew was still on the grass, the sun was shining nicely, and there were a goodish few birds tootling away in the shrubberies. All dashed pleasant, no doubt, for those who like these things. Stiffy did. The general effect of it all, he says, was to make him feel not a little romantic. I mean to say, the old spot, the scene of his great love, and so on and so forth. At any rate, he tells me that his bosom swelled, and I see no reason to disbelieve him.
And little by little, as the dew glistened and the sun shone and the birds tootled, there crept over him a feeling that in the existing circs. there was only one thing for a red-blooded young lover to do, viz. trickle round underneath Geraldine’s window and bung gravel at it. This would result in her popping her head out, and then he would blow a silent kiss and she would blow a silent kiss and he would tell her in the language of the eyes that his heart was still hers and what not. A very jolly method of passing the time of waiting, felt Stiffy, and he collected a fistful of mud and pebbles and let it go with a will.
Now, slinging gravel at windows is a tricky business. If you’re in form, fine. But if you haven’t done it for a goodish time your aim is likely to suffer. This is what happened to Stiffy.
He had drawn a bead on his loved one’s window, but instead of landing there the entire consignment went several feet to the left and sloshed up against the next one – the room in which Ferdinand James Delamere, sixth Earl of Wivelscombe, was sleeping.
At least, he wasn’t sleeping, because it so happened that on the previous night he had taken the chair at the annual dinner of the Loyal Sons of Worcestershire and, despite doctor’s orders, had do
ne himself so well that he had woken early with that strange, jumpy feeling which always came to him the morning after this particular banquet. He was in the sort of overwrought state when a fly treading a little too heavily on the carpet is enough to make a man think he’s one of the extras in All Quiet On The Western Front.
The effect, therefore, of about a quarter of a pound of mixed solids on the windowpane was to bring him leaping out of bed as if a skewer had suddenly come through the mattress. He reached the window in two jumps, and was just in time to see his late employee, Adolphus Stiffham, disappearing into the bushes. For Stiffy, observing that he had nearly cracked the wrong window, and remembering whose that window was, had not loitered.
Now, I want you to follow me very closely here, while I explain why old Wivelscombe took the view of the matter which he did. You see, the way he looked at it, his visitor could not possibly be Adolphus Stiffham in the flesh. He had studied human nature pretty closely and he knew that a man who has been kicked eleven feet, two inches does not willingly return to the spot where the incident occurred. He was aware, moreover, that Stiffy had gone to America. Furthermore, he was, as I say, in a highly nervous condition as the upshot or aftermath of the banquet of the Society of the Loyal Sons of Worcestershire. The result was that a moment later he was charging into Geraldine’s room with consternation and concern written on every feature.
‘Why, Father,’ said Geraldine, sitting up in bed, ‘what’s the matter? You look as if you had seen a ghost.’
‘I have seen a ghost.’
‘The White Lady of Wivelscombe?’
‘No, the Pink Secretary of Wivelscombe. I give you my word, Geraldine, that not two minutes ago I heard a sort of uncanny tapping on my window and I looked out and there was the wraith of that young fathead, Adolphus Stiffham.’
‘What do you mean, that young fathead, Adolphus Stiffham?’ demanded Geraldine with a womanly warmth which became her well. ‘Where do you get that young fathead stuff? You are speaking of the man I love.’
‘Well, you had better dashed well stop loving him,’ rejoined her father with equal heat, ‘because he has passed beyond the veil.’
‘Are you sure it was his ghost?’
‘Of course it was his ghost. Do you think I don’t know a ghost when I see one? I’ve been psychic all my life. All my family have been psychic. My mother was a Ballindalloch of Portknockie and used to see her friends in winding-sheets. It got her disliked in the county. Besides, you told me Stiffham was in America. Obviously what has happened is that somewhere out in those great open spaces the unhappy half-wit has handed in his dinner-pail.’
Geraldine faced him with burning eyes.
‘And whose fault was it that he went to America? Yours.’
‘Eh? What do you mean, dash it? I never asked him to go to America.’
‘He went there as the direct result of your hard-heartedness and inhumanity. And now, I suppose, he has been shot by gangsters, like everybody else in America. Was there a bullet-wound in his forehead?’
‘I couldn’t tell you. He got away too quick. Just smiled a hideous sort of smile and seemed to melt into the bushes. Phew!’ said Lord Wivelscombe. ‘I’m going down to get a bite of breakfast. I need coffee. Strong, hot coffee with a kick in it. Put on a dressing-gown and come along.’
‘I shall do nothing of the kind,’ said Geraldine coldly. ‘Breakfast, forsooth! It would choke me. I shall remain up here and try to get Adolphus on the ouija-board.’
Stiffy, meanwhile, after removing some twigs from his hair and brushing a few of the local beetles off his face, had come cautiously out of the bushes and made his way snakily to the french windows of the morning-room. A glance at his watch had told him that at any moment now the postman would be arriving. And, sure enough, he had not been there more than about two minutes when the door of the morning-room opened and the butler came in and placed a bundle of correspondence beside Lord Wivelscombe’s plate. He then withdrew, and Stiffy, abandoning the role of snake, gave a spirited impersonation of a pouncing leopard. He was in through the windows in a matter of one and three-fifth seconds. It took him perhaps another second to locate and pouch the letter. And he was just about to buzz off, which would have taken him possibly another second and a quarter, when he heard a footstep outside.
There was no time for the smooth getaway. Already the door was beginning to open. With considerable presence of mind Stiffy revised his whole plan of campaign at a moment’s notice and shot silently under the table.
And there for a while the matter rested.
As far as Stiffy could gather from the look of the legs moving about in his vicinity, it was the butler who had returned, presumably with coffee and foodstuffs. He could just see the lower section of a pair of striped trousers, as worn by butlers.
Then the door opened once more, this time to admit a pair of pyjamaed legs terminating in bedroom slippers, and reason told him that this must be old Wivelscombe. When the pyjamas passed from his view to appear again under the table within a couple of inches of his nose, their owner having sunk heavily into a chair, he knew that he had been right, and he is not ashamed to confess that he was conscious of a certain qualm. Seeing at such close range the foot which had once landed so forcefully on his trouser seat was, he tells me, an unnerving experience.
A bit of dialogue now unshipped itself in the upper regions. The butler started it.
‘Good morning, m’lord. Shall I assist your lordship to a little eggs and bacon?’
The table shook as the aged peer shuddered strongly.
‘Don’t try to be funny, Gascoigne. There is a time to speak of eggs and a time not to speak of eggs. At the moment, I would prefer to try to forget that there are such things in the world. What you can bring me – and dashed quick, too – is a very hot, very strong cup of coffee, liberally laced with old brandy, and a very dry slice of toast.’
The butler coughed in rather an unpleasant and censorious manner.
‘Did your lordship exceed last night?’
‘Certainly not.’
‘Did your lordship imbibe champagne?’
‘The merest spot.’
‘A bottle?’
‘It may have been a bottle.’
‘Two bottles?’
‘Yes. Possibly two bottles.’
The butler coughed again.
‘I shall inform Doctor Spelvin.’
‘Don’t be a cad, Gascoigne.’
‘He has expressly forbidden your lordship champagne.’
‘Tchah!’
‘I need scarcely remind your lordship that champagne brings your lordship out in spots.’
Old Wivelscombe barked querulously.
‘I wish to goodness you wouldn’t stand there babbling about champagne. It is a word that I do not wish to have mentioned in my presence.’
‘Very good, m’lord,’ said the butler stiffly. ‘Your coffee, m’lord. The dry toast is at your lordship’s elbow.’
There was a pause. From the sloshing sound which broke out above him at this point, Stiffy deduced that old Wivelscombe was drinking the coffee. The theory was borne out by the fact that when he spoke again it was in a stronger voice.
‘It’s no good your looking like that, Gascoigne. After all, what’s an occasional binge? It’s a poor heart that never rejoices.’
‘At your lordship’s age, all binges are highly injudicious.’
‘What do you mean, my age? A man is as old as he feels.’
‘Very good, m’lord.’
‘Where you go wrong, Gascoigne – where you make your bloomer is in assuming that I have a hangover this morning. Nothing could be further from the truth. I feel like a two-year-old. Look at my hand. Steady as a rock.’
Apparently, at this point, old Wivelscombe ventured on a physical demonstration. A napkin came fluttering down on the floor.
‘Very wobbly, m’lord.’
‘Nothing of the kind,’ said old Wivelscombe testily. ‘I dropped that napkin
on purpose, just to show you how easily I could pick it up. See, Gascoigne. I will now pick up the napkin.’
But he didn’t. He stooped down and his fingers touched the thing, but as they did so he suddenly found himself looking into Stiffy’s bulging eyes. There was an embarrassing pause for a moment: then his face shot up out of sight and Stiffy heard him gulp.
‘Gascoigne!’
‘M’lord?’
‘Gascoigne, there’s a ghost under the table.’
‘Very good, m’lord.’
‘What do you mean, “Very good, m’lord”? Don’t stand there saying, “Very good, m’lord.” Do something about it, man, do something about it.’
‘I beg your lordship’s pardon, but I cannot comprehend just what it is that your lordship desires me to do.’
‘Why, shoo it out.’
‘Really, m’lord!’
Old Wivelscombe’s voice grew tense.
‘Gascoigne, do you hear me telling you that the room is overrun with ghosts?’
‘Yes, m’lord.’
‘Don’t you believe me?’
‘No, m’lord.’
‘Well, look for yourself. I tell you it’s there. The dashed thing’s been following me about all the morning. Lift the cloth, Gascoigne, and take a dekko.’
‘Very good, m’lord, if your lordship insists. But I do not anticipate that I shall be able to observe the spectre to which your lordship alludes.’
He did, of course. The first thing that met his eye was young Stiffy. But by this time Stiffy, who, chump though he is, can act on occasion with a good deal of rugged sense, was holding the forefinger of his left hand to his lips and stretching out the other hand with a fiver in it.
The butler scooped the fiver and straightened himself.
‘Well, Gascoigne?’
‘The light under the table is a little uncertain, m’lord. I will take another look.’
He bent down once more, and Stiffy repeated the business with fiver.
‘No, m’lord. There is nothing there.’
‘No spectres, Gascoigne?’
‘No spectres, m’lord.’
Old Wivelscombe groaned in a hollow sort of way, and there was the sound of a chair being pushed back.