As if painted inflame, the picture of the whisky decanter which he had left standing on the round table in the drawing-room, at least half of its elixir still within it, started to rise before his mental retina, and he sat up, the light of hope dawning in his eyes. He had tested the magic properties of that decanter before, and they had in no way fallen short of his dreams, and now there came upon him the urge to test them again. Reason told him that he would never need one for the tonsils more than in the present pass to which he had been reduced. In fact, added Reason, the first thing any good specialist, seeing him, would recommend — nay, insist on — was a little something in a glass.
Thirty seconds later he had begun his journey to the promised land, and a couple of minutes after that was sitting in his favourite armchair with his feet up, almost calm again. It was very pleasant in the quiet drawing-room, very pleasant and restorative and soothing. At least, it was for perhaps a quarter of an hour. At the end of that period Sir Aylmer Bostock entered in his dressing-gown. Tossing on his pillow after having had his beauty sleep twice broken, Sir Aylmer had bethought him of the decanter and it had drawn him like a magnet. Experience had taught him that the most stubborn insomnia can often be corrected by means of a couple of quick ones.
His emotions on beholding Pongo established at the fountain-head were sharp and poignant. Although he had been compelled to abandon his view of this young man as a rat of the underworld, he still considered him a rat, and the last thing he desired was a jolly party with him at half-past two in the morning, the glasses clinking and the conversation flowing free. Life, he was thinking, was difficult enough without finding Pongo under one’s feet wherever one went. If Sir Aylmer Bostock after two days of his future son-in-law’s society had been asked to sketch out a brief description of his ideal world, he would have replied that he was not a fussy man and did not expect perfection but that he did insist on one thing, that it should contain fewer and better Twistletons.
‘Ugh!’ he said. ‘You!’
There are extraordinarily few good answers to the ejaculation ‘You!’ especially when preceded by the monosyllable ‘Ugh!’ Pongo could not think of any of them. The other’s entry had caused him to repeat that sitting high jump of his, and on descending from the neighbourhood of the ceiling he had found his mind a blank. The best he could achieve was a nervous giggle.
This was unfortunate, for we have made no secret of Sir Aylmer Bostock’s views on nervous gigglers. The ex-Governor had never actually fallen on a nervous giggler and torn him limb from limb, but that was simply because he had not wanted to get himself involved in a lot of red tape. But he definitely did not like them. He glared at Pongo, and as he glared observed the glass in the latter’s hand, and it was as if someone had whispered in his ear ‘What is wrong with this picture?’
‘Gar!’ he exclaimed, once more calling on one of those tribal gods. ‘I thought you told me you were a teetotaller.’
‘Eh?’
‘Teetotaller.’
‘Oh, yes, that’s right.’
‘How the devil can you be a teetotaller, if you sit swigging whisky all the time?’
‘Medicinal.’
‘What?’
‘I take a drop occasionally for my health,’ said Pongo. ‘Doctor’s orders.’
There are moments in life when, after offering frank and manly explanations of our actions, we are compelled to pause and wonder if they have got by. This was one of them. And it was while Pongo was anxiously scrutinizing his host’s face and trying, without much success, to read in its rugged features an expression of childlike trust that Lady Bostock entered the room.
There are critics to whom it will seem one of those strained coincidences which are so inartistic that on this troubled night no fewer than six of the residents of Ashenden Manor should have been seized independently of each other with the idea of going to the drawing-room in order to establish contact with the decanter placed there earlier in the evening by Jane, the parlourmaid, while others will see in the thing that inevitability which was such a feature of the best Greek tragedy. Aeschylus once said to Euripides ‘You can’t beat inevitability,’ and Euripides said he had often thought so, too.
Be that as it may, it was the decanter which had brought Lady Bostock to the spot. Finding a difficulty in getting to sleep after the recent strain upon her nerves, she had thought that a weak whisky and water might prove the specific which she needed.
She, too, was surprised on discovering that she had boon companions.
‘Aylmer!’ she said. ‘You here? And Reginald?’ The glass in Pongo’s hand attracted her attention, producing reactions identical with those of her husband. ‘I thought you were a teetotaller, Reginald.’
Sir Aylmer snorted. A most unpleasant, cynical snort, a sort of nasal ‘Oh, yeah.’
‘He takes a drop occasionally for his health.’
‘Oh, yes?’
‘Yes,’ said Sir Aylmer. ‘Medicinal. Doctor’s orders.’
His intonation was so extremely disagreeable, suggesting as it did contempt, disgust and that revolted loathing which temperate men feel when confronted with the world’s drink-sodden wrecks, that Pongo, though his sitting high jump had caused him to spill practically all the contents of his glass and he would much have liked to refill it, felt that this was not the moment. Stronger than his desire for one for the road was the passionate wish to be somewhere where Sir Aylmer and Lady Bostock were not.
‘Well — er — good night,’ he mumbled.
‘You’re leaving us?’ said Sir Aylmer grimly.
‘Er — yes. Good night.’
‘Good night,’ said Sir Aylmer.
‘Good night,’ said Lady Bostock.
There was an expression of concern on her face as the door closed. She looked like a horse that is worried about the quality of its oats.
‘Oh, dear,’ she said. ‘I do hope Reginald is not a drinker.’ A thought occurred to her, and she brightened. ‘But, of course, I was forgetting. He isn’t Reginald, is he? He’s just somebody pretending to be Reginald.’
Sir Aylmer, though reluctant to present himself in the light of one who had been in error, felt obliged to put her abreast of his latest findings.
‘Yes, he’s Reginald. I’ve been into that matter, and it now seems pretty well established that he’s Reginald all right. Apparently, at those Dog Races where Potter arrested him, he gave a false name and address.’
‘That does not sound very nice.
‘It was not very nice. It wasn’t nice at all. It was disgraceful and it throws a blinding light on the true character of Reginald Twistleton. Shows you what sort of a fellow he is. And as to him being a drinker, of course he’s a drinker. You can tell it by those shifty eyes and that weak giggle. I knew there was something wrong with the young toad the first time I saw him. Dipsomaniac is written all over him. No doubt he had been absorbing the stuff like a sponge whenever our backs were turned. I don’t suppose he has drawn a sober breath since he came here. God help Hermione, married to a chap like that. He’ll be seeing pink snakes on the honeymoon. Orange spiders,’ said Sir Aylmer, allowing his imagination free rein. ‘Gamboge elephants. Purple penguins.’
It is never difficult to touch a mother’s heart with this sort of thing. Lady Bostock uttered a stricken neigh.
‘Hermione must be warned!’
‘Exactly what I was about to suggest myself. You’d better write to her.’
‘I’ll go and see her.’
‘Very well, go and see her.’
‘Tomorrow morning!’
‘The sooner, the better. Well, if you’re going to London in the morning, you’d better go to bed and get some sleep. Can’t imagine why you aren’t there now.’
‘I came down to get a weak whisky. I couldn’t sleep.’
‘I came to get a strong whisky. I couldn’t sleep, either. How the devil can anyone be expected to sleep in a house where fools are incessantly breaking in on you, saying they’re somnambul
ists, and policemen ring door-bells all the time? Did you get those women to bed?’
‘Yes, dear. They kept giving their notices all the way upstairs.’
‘Curse them. Say when, Emily.’
‘When. 0 dear, 0 dear, 0 dear.’
‘What’s the matter now?’
‘I was only thinking of Reginald,’ said Lady Bostock. ‘I wonder if the gold cure would do any good.’
Unaware of the exact nature of what was being said about him by the parents of the girl he loved, but suspecting that his case might have come upon the agenda paper after his withdrawal, Pongo had tottered up the stairs to his room. While not in tip-top form, he found himself enjoying the novel sensation of being separated for a while from members of the human race, a race for which the events of the night had caused him to acquire a rather marked distaste. ‘Alone at last,’ he was saying to himself, as he opened the door.
A moment later he saw that he had been too optimistic. Seated on the bed was his Uncle Frederick, enjoying a mild cigar, and in the armchair, clad in a flowered dressing-gown, a girl at the sight of whom his heart, already, as we have seen, on several occasions tonight compelled to rival the feverish mobility of a one-armed paperhanger with the hives, executed a leap and a bound surpassing all previous efforts by a wide margin.
‘Ah, Pongo,’ said Lord Ickenham. ‘Come along in. Here’s Sally. We climbed up the water pipe.’
It was not immediately that Pongo found himself able to speak. Strong emotion often has the effect of tying the vocal cords into a reefer knot, and he was in the grip of not one strong emotion, but two.
As always when confronted with some new manifestation of his uncle’s activities, he was filled with a nameless fear, saying to himself, as so often in similar circumstances, ‘What will the harvest be?’: and in addition to this nameless fear he was experiencing the embarrassment which cannot but come to a young man of sensibility when he encounters unexpectedly a former fiancée from whom he has severed relations in a scene marked on both sides by raised voices and harsh words.
Fortunately women handle these situations more adroitly than the uncouth male. In Sally’s demeanour there was no suggestion that she found in this meeting any cause for discomfort. Her eyes, bright and beautiful as he had always remembered them, shone with a friendly light. Her voice, when she spoke, was cordial. And she accompanied her words with a dazzling smile.
‘Hullo, Pongo.’
‘Hullo, Sally.’
‘It’s nice to see you again.’
‘What ho.’
‘You look very well.’
‘Oh, rather,’ said Pongo.
He spoke absently, for he was distrait. What with going to New York to attend to his financial interests and getting engaged to Hermione Bostock and all the other excitements of what had recently been a full life, he had rather allowed the peculiar properties of Sally’s smile to fade from his mind, and getting it between the eyes like this had had a shaking effect, inducing a feeling somewhat similar to that which must have come to Lord Ickenham’s friend Bream Rockmeteller in the course of those distant Fourth of July celebrations.
Sally’s smile ….
That smile of Sally’s …
Yes, he had forgotten just what it could do to your system, suddenly flashing out at you like the lights of a village pub seen through rain and darkness at the end of a ten-mile hike and transporting you into a world of cosiness and joy and laughter. He blinked, and not even his great love for Hermione Bostock could keep him from experiencing a momentary twinge of nostalgia, a swift pang of that self-reproach which comes to a man conscious of having been on a good thing and of having omitted to push it along.
The weakness passed. He thought — hard — of Hermione Bostock, and it did the trick. It was a Reginald Twistleton who was himself again, a strong, firm Reginald Twistleton with not a chink in his armour, who now put the question which he would have put a good deal earlier but for the mental upheaval which we have just been analysing.
‘What’s all this?’ he asked, and Constable Potter himself, addressing a suspicious loiterer, could not have spoken in a colder, more level voice. ‘What’s the idea, Uncle Fred?’
‘The idea?’
‘What’s Sally doing here?’
‘Seeking sanctuary.’
‘In my room?’
‘Just for the time being, till we can make other arrangements.’
Pongo placed a hand on either side of his head to shore it up. That old, familiar sensation that it was coming unstuck had swept over him.
‘Oh, God!’
‘Why do you say “Oh, God!” my boy? What seems to you to be the difficulty?’
‘How the dickens can she stay in my room?’
‘Why not? You will have a shakedown in mine. I can’t offer you a bed, but you remember that very comfortable chaise-longue.’
‘I don’t mean that. I mean, well, dash it, what about people coming in?’
‘Where?’
‘Here.’
‘When?’
‘Tomorrow morning.’
‘Nobody will come in tomorrow morning except the housemaid. And before nightfall I hope to get the poor child safely away. She tells me she stowed the car in the local garage. I shall take it out and drive over to Ickenham first thing, and bring her back some of my wife’s reach-me-downs. She will then be free to go where she lists. A word,’ said Lord Ickenham thoughtfully, ‘which I have never been able to understand. Why lists? How do lists come into it? However, that is neither here nor there. Getting back to what you were saying, nobody is going to muscle in except the housemaid, and all that is needed, therefore, is to square the housemaid. I wonder if you have ever reflected that if only he could square the housemaid, every visitor at a country house would be able to take in paying guests and make a good deal of money.’
‘And how are you going to square the housemaid?’
‘Odd how when one keeps repeating that it sounds like one of those forgotten sports of the past. Squaring the housemaid. One can picture William the Conqueror being rather good at it. My dear Pongo, have no uneasiness. The housemaid is already squared. Perhaps I had better tell you the story from the beginning. It won’t bore you, Sally?’
‘Not at all, Uncle Fred.’
‘Capital. Well, when I left you, Pongo, I started to make a systematic search of the grounds, exploring every avenue and leaving no stone unturned. I was handicapped by having no bloodhounds, another thing which one ought always to bring with one to a country house, but eventually I located Sally in the potting shed, watering the geraniums with her tears.’
‘I wasn’t,’ said Sally indignantly, and Lord Ickenham rose, kissed the top of her head paternally and returned to the bed.
‘I was only making a good story of it, my dear. Actually, your attitude was heroic. I was proud of you. She laughed, Pongo, when she heard my voice. Laughed heartily.’
‘I wish I could.’
‘Can’t you? Not at this happy ending?’
‘What do you mean, happy ending?’
‘Well, it looks like a happy ending to me. I see Sally as a little storm-tossed boat that has put into harbour after the dickens of a gruelling from the winds and waves, and can now take it easy for a bit. Where was I, Sally?’
‘Potting shed.’
‘That’s right. I found her in the potting shed. I draped her in the dressing-gown, and we crept out into the night. Did you ever hear of Chingachgook?’
‘No.’
‘A red Indian of some celebrity in my younger days. I suppose nobody reads Fenimore Cooper now.’
‘What about him?’
‘I was only going to say that that was what we crept like; softly and silently, as if we were wearing moccasins. And while we were creeping, we heard voices.’
‘And did I jump!’
‘I, too. I soared up like a rocket. For one of the voices was Constable Potter’s. The other was that of the housemaid, Elsie Bean. A rather pleasant f
eature of life at Ashenden Manor is the way you can always find housemaids sauntering about the grounds at half-past two in the morning. It was she who was doing most of the speaking. She seemed to be reproaching the officer for his professional activities. She was telling him that she had given her month’s notice and that before her time expired he must make his decision about resigning from the Force. She said she hadn’t any patience, and so alien did she appear to his aims and ideals that I felt that we had found a sympathizer. I was right. Presently, the constable left, his manner that of a man who has had his ears pinned back, and with a slight snort she turned, presumably to re-enter the house. It was at this point that we emerged and contacted her.’
‘With a cheery “Hoy!”‘
‘With, as you say, a cheery “Hoy!” Well, after that everything went with the most delightful smoothness. I think she was a little surprised to see us — indeed, she stated later that that ghastly sound proceeding from the darkness had scared her out of a year’s growth — but she soon recovered her poise and showed herself the soul of consideration. It was she who pointed out the water pipe and after I had helped Sally to climb it gave me that preliminary leg-up which a man needs at my time of life, if he is to negotiate water pipes successfully. I don’t know when I have met a nicer girl, and I don’t wonder you —‘You don’t wonder I what?’
‘Oh, nothing. So here we are, thanks to her, and she has guaranteed that she will give us all the aid and comfort at her disposal. She said she would look in shortly and confer with us. I suppose she feels that there are one or two details which need discussing.’
Sally clasped her hands.
‘My breakfast!’
‘That, no doubt, was one of them.’
‘I’m starving already.’
‘Poor child. In a few minutes I will take you down to the larder and we will knock together a bite of supper which will keep you going till the morning. I could do with a couple of boiled eggs myself. These late hours give one an appetite. Ah, here is Miss Bean. Come in, Miss Bean. I think you know everybody. A cigarette?’