‘No, not dog, you silly ass. Who the dickens strangles dogs? Like a foul snake.’
Pongo might have argued, had he felt like going into the thing, that the number of people who strangle foul snakes must be very limited, but he did not feel like going into the thing. In a sort of coma he watched his companion look askance at him again, stride to the table, mix himself a medium-strong whisky and soda, drain it and stride to the door. It closed, and he was alone.
And he was just beginning to lose that stunned sensation of having been beaten over the head with something hard and solid which must have come to the policeman whom Elsie Bean’s brother Bert had sloshed on the napper with a blunt instrument, when from across the hall, from the direction of the room where Sir Aylmer Bostock kept his collection of African curios, there proceeded an agonized cry, followed by the sound of voices.
Pongo, crouched in his armchair like a hare in its form, his eyes revolving and his heart going into a sort of adagio dance, was unable to catch what these voices were saying, but he recognized them as those of Sir Aylmer and Lord Ickenham. The former appeared to be speaking heatedly, while the intonation of the latter was that of a man endeavouring to pour oil on troubled waters.
Presently the door of the collection room slammed, and a few moments later that of the drawing-room opened, and Lord Ickenham walked in.
Whatever the nature of the exchanges in which he had been taking part, they had done nothing to impair Lord Ickenham’s calm. His demeanour, as he entered, was the easy, unembarrassed demeanour of an English peer who has just remembered that there is a decanter of whisky in a drawing-room. As always at moments when lesser men would have been plucking at their ties and shaking in every limb, this excellent old man preserved the suave imperturbability of a fish on a cake of ice. It seemed to Pongo, though it was difficult for him to hear distinctly, for his heart, in addition to giving its impersonation of Nijinsky, was now making a noise like a motor-cycle, that the head of the family was humming light-heartedly.
‘Ah, Pongo,’ he said, making purposefully for the decanter and seeming in no way surprised to see his nephew. ‘Up and about? One generally finds you not far from the whisky.’ He filled his glass, and sank gracefully into a chair. ‘I always think,’ he said, having refreshed himself with a couple of swallows and a sip, ‘that this is the best hour of the day. The soothing hush, the grateful stimulant, the pleasant conversation on whatever topic may happen to come up. Well, my boy, what’s new? You seem upset about something. Nothing wrong, I hope?’
Pongo uttered a curious hissing sound like the death-rattle of a soda-water syphon. He found the question ironical.
‘I don’t know what you call wrong. I’ve just been told that I’m extremely apt to have my insides ripped out.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘Bill Oakshott.’
‘Was he merely reading your future in the tea leaves, or do you mean that he proposed to do the ripping?’
‘He proposed to do the ripping with his bare hands.’
‘You amaze me. Bill Oakshott? That quiet, lovable young man.’
‘Lovable be blowed. He’s worse than a Faceless Fiend. He could walk straight into the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud’s, and no questions asked. He also said he would pull my head off at the roots, and strangle me like a foul snake.’
‘Difficult to do that, if he had pulled your head off. Assuming, as I think we are entitled to assume, that the neck would come away with the head. But what had you been doing to Bill Oakshott to stir his passions thus?’
‘He didn’t like my being in here with Elsie Bean.’
‘I don’t think I remember who Elsie Bean is. One meets so many people.’
‘The housemaid.’
‘Ah, yes. The one you kiss.’
Pongo raised a tortured face heavenwards, as if he were calling for justice from above.
‘I don’t kiss her! At least, I may have done once — like a brother — in recognition of a signal service which she had rendered me. The way you and Bill Oakshott talk, you’d think this Bean and I spent twenty-four hours a day playing postman’s knock.’
‘My dear boy, don’t get heated. My attitude is wholly sympathetic. I recollect now that Bill told me he had been a little disturbed by the spectacle of the embrace. He has the interests of your fiancée at heart.’
‘He’s in love with her.’
‘Really?’
‘He told me so.’
‘Well, well. Poor lad. It must have been a severe jolt for him when I mentioned in the train that she was engaged to you. I feel a gentle pity for Bill Oakshott.’
‘I don’t. I hope he chokes.’
‘The astonishing thing to my mind is that a man like Mugsy can have a daughter who seems to fascinate one and all. One would have expected Mugsy’s daughter to be something on the lines of the Gorgon, with snakes instead of hair. Did you happen to hear him just now?’
‘Golly, yes. What was all that?’
‘Just Mugsy in one of his tantrums.’
‘Did he catch you going into the collection room?’
‘He was there already. Sleeping among his African curios. All wrong, it seemed to me. Either a man is an African curio, or he is not an African curio. If he is not, he ought not to curl up with them at night.’ A cloud came into Lord Ickenham’s handsome face, and his voice took on a disapproving note. ‘You know, Pongo, there is a kind of low cunning about Mugsy which I do not like to see. Can you conceive the state of mind of a man who would have his bed moved into the collection room and sleep there with a string tied to his big toe and to the handle of the door?’
‘He didn’t?’
‘He certainly did. It’s the deceit of the thing that hurts me. Naturally I assumed, when we all wished each other good night and went our separate ways, that Mugsy was off to his bedroom like any decent householder, so I toddled down to the collection room at zero hour without a thought of unpleasantness in my mind. A nice, easy, agreeable job, I was saying to myself. I sauntered to the door, grasped the handle, turned it and gave it a sharp pull.’
‘Gosh!’
‘I don’t know if you have ever, while walking along a dark street, happened to step on an unseen cat? I once had the experience years ago in Waverly Place, New York, and the picture seemed to rise before my eyes just now, when that awful yowl rent the air.’
‘What on earth did you say?’
‘Well, Mugsy did most of the saying.’
‘I mean, how did you explain?’
‘Oh, that? That was simple enough. I told him I was walking in my sleep.’
‘Did he believe it?’
‘I really don’t know. The point seemed to me of no interest.’
‘Well, this dishes us.’
‘Nonsense. That is the pessimist in you speaking. All that has happened is that we have sustained a slight check —‘
‘Slight!’
‘My dear Pongo, there are a thousand ways of getting around a trifling obstacle like this. Mugsy is sleeping in the collection room, is he? Very well, then we simply sit down and think out a good method of eliminating him. A knock-out drop in his bedtime whisky and soda would, of course, be the best method, but I happen to have come here without my knock-out drops. Idiotic of me. It is madness to come to country houses without one’s bottle of Mickey Finns. One ought to pack them first thing after one’s clean collars. But I’m not worrying about Mugsy. If I can’t outsmart an ex-Governor, what was the use of all my early training in the United States of America? The only thing that bothers me a little is the thought of Sally, bless her heart. She is out there in the garden, watching and waiting like Mariana at the moated grange —Pongo uttered a stricken cry.
‘And so is that blighted Potter out there in the garden, watching and waiting like Mariana at the ruddy moated grange. I’d clean forgotten Elsie Bean told me so. She came in here to get a drink for him.’
Lord Ickenham stroked his chin.
‘H’m. I
did not know that. He’s out in the garden, eh? That may complicate matters a little. I hope —‘
He broke off. Shrilling through the quiet night, the front door-bell had begun to ring, loudly and continuously, as if someone had placed a large, fat thumb on the button and was keeping it there.
Lord Ickenham looked at Pongo. Pongo looked at Lord Ickenham.
‘Potter!’ said Lord Ickenham.
‘The rotter!’ said Pongo.
9
It is a characteristic of England’s splendid police force at which many people have pointed with pride, or would have pointed with pride if they had happened to think of it, that its members, thanks to the rigid discipline which has moulded them since they were slips of boys, are always able to bear with philosophic fortitude the hardships and disappointments inseparable from their chosen walk in life. They can, in a word, take it as well as dish it out.
if, for example, they happen to be lurking in the garden of a country house in the small hours, when even a summer night tends to be a bit chilly, and ask their friends to bring them a drop of something to keep the cold out, and after a longish wait it becomes evident that this drop is not going to materialize, they do not wince nor cry aloud. ‘Duty, stern daughter of the voice of God,’ they say to themselves, and go on lurking.
It had been so with Constable Potter. In their recent Romeo and Juliet scene Elsie Bean had spoken hopefully of whisky in the drawing-room, but he quite realized that obstacles might arise to prevent her connecting with it. And as the minutes went by and she did not appear, he assumed that these obstacles had arisen and with a couple of ‘Coo’s’ and a stifled oath dismissed the whole subject of whisky from his mind.
In surroundings such as those in which he was keeping his vigil a more spiritual man might have felt the urge to try his hand at roughing out a little verse, so much was there that was romantic and inspirational in the garden of Ashenden Manor at this hour. Soft breezes sighed through the trees, bringing with them the scent of stock and tobacco plant. Owls tu-whitted, other owls tu-whooed. Add the silent grandeur of the fine old house and the shimmer of distant water reflecting the twinkling stars above, and you had a set-up well calculated to produce another policeman-poet.
But Harold Potter had never been much of a man for poetry. Even when alone with Elsie Bean in the moonlight he seldom got much further in that direction than a description of the effect which regulation boots had on his corns. What he thought of was beef sandwiches. And he was just sketching out in his mind the beef sandwich supreme which he would eat on returning to his cottage, when in the darkness before him he discerned a dim form. Like himself, it appeared to be lurking.
He pursed his lips disapprovingly. He had taken an instant dislike to this dim form. It was not the fact that it was dim that offended him. In the garden of Ashenden Manor at one in the morning a form had got to be dim. It had no option. The point, as Constable Potter saw it, was that forms, dim or otherwise, had no business to be in the garden of Ashenden Manor at one in the morning, and he stepped forward, his blood circulating briskly. This might or might not be big stuff, but it had all the appearance of big stuff. ‘Intrepid Officer Traps Nocturnal Marauder’ seemed to him about the angle from which to look at the thing.
‘‘Ullo,’ he boomed. He should have said: ‘What’s all this?’ which is the formula laid down for use on these occasions in ‘What Every Young Policeman Ought to Know,’ but, as so often happens, excitement had made him blow up in his lines.’ ‘Ullo. What are you doing here?’
The next morning any doubt which he might have entertained as to the bigness of the stuff was resolved. With a startled squeak the dim figure, which had leaped some six inches into the air on being addressed, broke into hurried flight, and with the deep bay, so like a bloodhound’s, of the policeman engaged in the execution of his duty he immediately proceeded to bound after it. ‘Night Chase in Darkened Garden,’ he was feeling as he dropped into his stride.
Into races of a cross-country nature the element of luck always enters largely. One notices this in the Grand National. Had the affair been taking place on a cinder track, few punters would have cared to invest their money on the constable, for he was built for endurance rather than speed and his quarry was showing itself exceptionally nippy on its feet. But in this more difficult going nimbleness was not everything. Some unseen obstacle tripped the dim form. It stumbled, nearly fell. Constable Potter charged up, reached out, seized something. There was a rending sound and he fell back, momentarily deprived of his balance. When he recovered it, he was alone with the owls and the stars. The dim form had disappeared, and he stood there with his hands full of what seemed to be the major part of a woman’s dress.
It was at this point that he felt justified, despite the advanced hour, in going to the front door and ringing the bell. And it was not long afterwards that the door opened and he strode masterfully into the hall.
He found himself playing to a gratifyingly full house. He was, indeed, doing absolute capacity. You cannot punch front door-bells in the small hours without attracting attention, and Ashenden Manor had turned out en masse to greet him. In addition to such members of his personal circle as Mrs Gooch, the cook, Elsie Bean, his betrothed, Jane, the parlourmaid, and Percy, the boy who cleaned the knives and boots, he noticed Sir Aylmer Bostock, looking like Clemenceau on one of his bad mornings, Lady Bostock, looking like a horse, and their nephew William, looking large and vermilion. There was also present, and a shudder ran through him as he saw them, the scum of the East Dulwich underworld in the person of the scoundrels George Robinson and Edwin Smith. The former was, as ever, debonair; the latter seemed agitated.
Constable Potter fondled his moustache. This was his hour, the high spot in his life when he was going to be fawned on by one and all. Or he thought it was until, just as he was about to speak, Sir Aylmer, who after the incursion of Lord Ickenham had managed to get to sleep again and had woken up cross, exploded like a bomb.
‘POTTER!’
‘Sir?’ said the zealous officer, somewhat taken aback by his manner.
‘Was it YOU making that infernal noise?’
‘Sir?’
‘Ringing the damned bell at this hour! Waking everybody up! Ruining my night’s rest! WHAT THE DEVIL DO YOU MEAN BY IT?’
‘But, sir, I’ve caught a marauder.’
‘A what?’
‘A nocturnal marauder, sir.’
‘Then where is he? Don’t tell me you let him get away?’
‘Well, yes, sir.’
‘Ass! Fool! Idiot! Imbecile!’ said Sir Aylmer.
Constable Potter was wounded.
‘It wasn’t my fault, sir. The garments give when I clutched them.’
With the manner of Counsel putting in Exhibit A, he thrust beneath his interlocutor’s eyes the flimsy fragment which he was holding, and Sir Aylmer inspected it closely.
‘This is a woman’s dress,’ he said.
‘A female’s,’ corrected Constable Potter, always indefatigable in his quest for exactitude. ‘I observed her engaged in suspicious loitering, and when I up and apprehended her she come apart in my hands.’
At this dramatic recital of events which, even if colourlessly related, could scarcely have failed to chill the spine, there proceeded from the group of female members of the staff, huddled together for mutual support, a cry, or as Constable Potter would probably have preferred to put it, an ejaculation, consisting of the monosyllable ‘OW!’ Weighing the evidence, one would say that the speaker was not Elsie Bean, who would have said ‘Coo!’ but is more likely to have been Mrs Gooch or Jane the parlourmaid. The interruption had the unfortunate effect of attracting Sir Aylmer’s attention to the group, and he started immediately to make his presence felt.
‘EMILY!’
‘Yes, dear?’
‘What are all these women doing here?’ Sir Aylmer’s reddening eye passed from Mrs Gooch to Jane the parlourmaid, from Jane the parlourmaid to Elsie Bean. ‘Good God! Th
e place is full of damned woman. Send ‘em to bed.’
‘Yes, dear.’
‘Dishpot!’ cried a clear young voice, this time unmistakably that of Miss Bean. She had been looking forward to spending most of the rest of the night in the hall, listening to tales of stirring events and commenting on them in her friendly way, and to get the bum’s rush like this in the first five minutes was very bitter to her independent spirit. Not since the evening of her seventh birthday when, excitement having induced an attack of retching and nausea, she had been led out of the Bottleton East Theatre Royal half-way through her first pantomime, had she experienced such a sense of disappointment and frustration.
Sir Aylmer started. These were fighting words.
‘Who called me a dishpot?’
‘I did,’ replied Elsie Bean with quiet fortitude. ‘An overbearing dishpot, that’s what you are, and I would like to give my month’s notice.’
‘I would like to give my month’s notice,’ said Mrs Gooch, struck by the happy thought.
‘So would I like to give my month’s notice,’ said Jane the parlourmaid, falling in with the mob spirit.
Sir Aylmer clutched his dressing-gown. For a moment it seemed as if it were his intention to rend it, like a minor prophet of the Old Testament.
‘EMILY!’
‘Yes, dear?’
‘Are you or are you not going to throw these women out?’
‘Yes, dear. At once, dear.’
Briskly, though with a leaden heart, for none knew better than she the difficulty of obtaining domestic help in the country, Lady Bostock shepherded the rebels through the door. Of the wage-earning members of the household only Percy, the knives and boots boy, remained, a pimpled youth with a rather supercilious manner. He had lighted a cigarette, and his whole demeanour showed his satisfaction that the women had gone and that the men could now get together and thresh the thing out in peace.
Sir Aylmer drew a deep breath like a speaker at a public meeting after the hecklers have been ejected.
‘Potter.’