'I see it all! It was Bulpitt!'
'I don't know what you mean.'
'You and he are that way. You love the little son of a bachelor.'
'You're quate absurd.'
'You can't get out of it like that. "Quate absurd", forsooth! He's the man. He's the guy. He's the fellow who sent you that jewellery. Is he? Come on, now. This is where we probe that jewellery sequence to the bottom. Is he the bird? Is he? Is he?'
'I refuse to discuss the mattah.'
'You do, do you?'
He turned quickly, and Miss Whittaker uttered a piercing cry.
'Unlock that door!'
'I won't.'
'Mr Vanringham, let me go immediatelah!'
'I'll do nothing of the kind. We're going to sift this – sift it to its foundations. You don't leave here till you have told all. And let me mention that if you persist in this – this—' Tubby paused. He knew that there was a phrase which exactly expressed what he wished to say, and later he remembered that it was 'recalcitrant attitude', but at the moment he could not think of it. He went back and reconstructed his sentence. 'And let me mention that if you persist in refusing to come clean, I'll poke you in the snoot.'
It was a policy which had suggested itself to him once or twice since this interview had begun, and he had found himself more and more drawn to it. It had worked wonders, he reminded himself, in the case of Mr Bulpitt, and who could say that it would not prove equally effective now? Snoot-poking, moreover, is a thing which grows on a man. Once let him acquire the appetite, and he becomes like the tiger that has tasted blood. Just as such a tiger goes about calling for more blood and refusing to be put off with just-as-good substitutes, so does he yearn for more snoots to poke. He gets the feeling that he wants to do it to everyone he meets, sparing neither age nor sex.
Prudence Whittaker's fortitude was ebbing. Kensington trains its daughters well, sending them out into the world equipped for almost every emergency. But there are limits. It requires a poise which even Kensington cannot inculcate to enable a girl to bear herself composedly when confronted with cave men in locked rooms. Prudence Whittaker had an elementary knowledge of ju-jitsu – she knew the grip required for quelling footpads – but she felt herself helpless against a menace like this.
Theodore!' she cried, quailing visibly. She had never been personally poked in the snoot, but she had seen it done in the pictures and had always thought that it looked most unpleasant.
Tubby remained the man of chilled steel.
'Less of the "Theodore",' he replied sternly, 'and more facts about this Bulpitt piece of cheese. How long have you known him? Where did you meet him?'
'I have not met him.'
'Tchah!'
'I haven't.'
'Then why did he send you jewellery?'
'He did not send me jewellery.'
'He did too.'
'He did not.'
'So,' said Tubby, 'you persist in your recalcitrant attitude!'
A throbbing silence fell. Tubby's chest was swelling beneath its towel, and he had begun to flex the muscles of his arms. And so plainly did these phenomena, taken in conjunction with the gleam in his eyes and the way he was puffing out his cheeks, indicate that he was working up steam and would shortly be in a position to begin, that Prudence Whittaker cracked under the strain. With a wailing cry, she flung herself on the bed and burst into tears.
The effect on Tubby was immediate. The toughest male becomes as wax in the presence of a crying woman. He stopped puffing out his cheeks and looked at her uncertainly. It was plain that a situation had arisen which cramped his freedom of action.
'That's all very well,' he said weakly.
The sobbing continued. His discomfort increased. And he was fast approaching the point where the melting process would have been complete, when his eye, roving uneasily about the room, fell on the trousers lying on the floor. He went to them, picked them up, put them on, and instantly felt a marked improvement in his morale.
That's all very well,' he said, more resolutely.
He crossed to the chest of drawers and took out shirt and tie. A few moments later, fully clad, he was his own stern self again.
'That's all very well,' he said, the dominant male once more. 'Just like a girl, thinking she can square anything by crying.'
Words, an observation of some nature, caught his ear through the sobs. He turned sharply.
'What was that?'
It appeared that Miss Whittaker had reproached him for being so unkind, and he took the point up with a forceful briskness which he could never have achieved in a towel and a Union Jack.
'A fellow's got a licence to be unkind when the girl he loves starts cheating on him,' he said austerely. 'I can tell you it pretty near broke me up when I found you were two-timing me that way. Letting another guy send you jewellery. And Bulpitt of all people.'
'He didn't send me jewellery. Nobody sent me jewellery.'
'I was there when the package arrived.'
'There wasn't jewellery in that parcel. It – it was something else.'
'Then why wouldn't you let me see it?'
'Because I didn't want you to.'
'Ha!' said Tubby, with one of those hacking laughs of his.
A far less spirited girl than Prudence Whittaker would have resented having 'Ha!' said to her in such a tone. Add a hacking laugh, and it is not to be wondered at that she ceased to weep and sat up with cold defiance in her eye.
'If you really wish to know,' she said, 'it was a nose thing.'
Ever since three o'clock that afternoon when, pausing at the second milestone on the Walsingford Road and making a noise as nearly resembling the rough song of the linnet as was within the scope of one who had never been a good bird imitator, he had observed Mr Bulpitt bound from the bushes at the roadside, Tubby Vanringham had been under a severe and continuous mental strain. It was possibly this that now rendered him slow at the uptake. He did not know what a nose thing was, and said so.
Prudence Whittaker's face was pale and drawn. She was revealing a secret which she had hoped to withhold from the world – one, indeed, which she had supposed only wild horses would have had the power to draw from her – and the agony was intense. But she spoke out bravely.
'A thing for changing the shape of the nose.'
'What?'
'I saw an advertisement in a magazine,' she went on in a low, toneless voice. 'Ugly noses of all kinds remedied, it said. Scientific yet simple. Can be worn during sleep. You had to fill up the coupon and send it off with ten shillings, so I filled it up and sent it off. And the thing arrived while we were talking. How could I tell you what it was?' Her voice broke and her eyes started to fill with tears again. 'I thought you would have trusted me.'
The reproach was a keen one, and at another time Tubby would have winced beneath it. But now he was too bewildered to be aware of reproaches.
'But what the heck did you want to change the shape of your nose for?'
She averted her face and picked at the coverlet.
'It turns up at the end,' she whispered, almost inaudibly.
He stared, amazed.
'But I like it turning up at the end.'
She looked at him quickly, incredulously, a new light dawning in her eyes.
'Do you?'
'Of course I do. Gee, whiz! That's what makes it so wonderful.'
'Oh, Theodore!'
'Why, it's great. It's swell. You don't want to touch a nose like that. Leave it be. It's perfect. It's terrific. It's colossal. Do you mean that that was really all there was in that packet?'
He was groping his way to where she sat, stumbling like a blind man. Once again, he was puffing out his cheeks, but in how different a spirit.
'Oh, hell, what a fool I've been!'
'No, you haven't.'
'Yes, I have.'
'It wasn't your fault.'
'Yes, it was.'
'No, it wasn't. I should have told you.'
'No, y
ou shouldn't.'
'Yes, I should.'
'No, you shouldn't. I ought to have trusted you. I ought to have known that you would never—Oh, Prue, I've been so miserable.'
Her head was on his shoulder, and he buried his face in her hair. They clung together, and as they clung something flicked at Tubby's mind. He had a sense that there was something he was forgetting, some task which he was leaving undone.
Not kissing her, because he was kissing her.
Not hugging her, because he was hugging her.
Then he remembered. Adrian Peake was still sitting in the cupboard in Sir Buckstone's study, waiting for him to bring his clothes.
He hesitated. Then an arm stole about his neck, and he hesitated no longer. This golden moment must not be marred by thoughts of Adrian Peake. Adrian was all right. Probably perfectly boop-a-doop. Later on would be plenty of time for thinking about Adrian.
True, listen. I'll never say "Yup" again.'
He had said the one thing needed to complete her happiness, removed the one obstacle that stood between them. Greatly as she loved him, she had always winced at the thought of what he was going to reply at the altar, when the clergyman said, 'Wilt thou, Theodore, take this Prudence?' A 'Yup' at such a moment would have jarred her sensitive soul to its foundations. She raised her lips to his. Continue along these lines, she was feeling, and there might quite conceivably come a time when she would even be able to persuade him to eat his boiled eggs from the shell instead of broken up in a glass.
'Nor "mustash". And from now on, when I dig into a plate of cold beef, it'll be with tomarto ketchup on the side.'
A sudden quiver ran through Tubby. The words had started a train of thought. It was as if his stomach had been a Sleeping Beauty and that crack about cold beef the kiss that had wakened it to life. For there was no mistake about it having been wakened to life. It was up and shouting. Until this moment, having been practically pure spirit, he had been able to ignore the frequent complaints which it had been endeavouring to communicate with G.H.Q., but now connection was established. He continued to fold her in his arms, but it was with a growing feeling that he wished she had been a steak smothered in onions.
She was nestling against him, her eyes closed, a blissful smile on her lips.
'I could sit like this for ever,' she murmured.
'Me, too,' said Tubby, 'if I wasn't so darned hungry. I haven't had a thing since lunch.'
'What?'
'Not a thing. I got back to that houseboat at haff past – harf parst three, and ever since then—'
Prudence Whittaker could be a dreamer, but she knew when to be practical.
'You must be starving!'
A 'Yup' trembled on Tubby's lips. He crushed it down.
'Yay-ess,' he said. 'How's chances for a bite to eat?'
'We'll go and find Pollen. He will get you something.'
And so it came about that Pollen, relaxing in his pantry over a glass of port after serving coffee to the diners above-stairs, found his sacred moment interrupted. He was uprooted and sent to forage. And presently he returned with a groaning tray, and Tubby fell on its contents with gleaming eyes.
And it was while the others were standing watching over him, Prudence Whittaker like a mother, and Pollen as much like a father as could be expected of a butler who has had his after-dinner port drinking cut short, that there suddenly came swelling through the house, reverberating, down back stairs and along stone-flagged passages till it reached the pantry, a noise – a brassy, booming noise so like the Last Trump that Prudence Whittaker and Pollen, after looking at each other for an instant with a wild surmise, hurried from the room to investigate.
Tubby remained where he was. In competition with the knuckle end of a ham, plenty of bread and a pitcher of beer, mysterious noises meant nothing to him.
CHAPTER 25
THE momentary impression which the butler and Prudence Whittaker had received that what they had heard was the Last Trump was a mistaken one. The noise had come from the foot of the main staircase which connected the hall with the bedrooms, and what had caused it had been the circumstance of Colonel Percival Tanner beating the gong which stood there. And it may be said at once that the verdict of History will be that he was perfectly justified in doing so. The motivating force behind his action had been the discovery of Adrian Peake in the cupboard in his bedroom.
It is one of the inevitable drawbacks to a narrative like this one that the chronicler, in order to follow the fortunes of certain individuals, is compelled to concentrate his attention on them and so to neglect others equally deserving of notice. As a result of this, Colonel Tanner has until now been somewhat thrust into the background. So much so, indeed, that it is possible that the reader may have forgotten his existence, and it may be necessary at this point to refresh his memory by mentioning that he was the gentleman who, on the morning when the story began, was talking to Mr Waugh-Bonner about life in Poona.
He was a man who talked a great deal about life in Poona, and he liked, when possible, to supplement the spoken word with a display of photographic snapshots illustrating conditions in those parts. He held, and rightly, that there is nothing like seeing the thing for driving home a description of a banyan tree and that an anecdote about old Boko Paunceford-Smith of the East Surreys gains in point if the auditor is enabled to see old Boko in his habit as he lived; the same thing applying, of course, to an anecdote about young Buffy Vokes of the Bengal Lancers. And it was because he thought that these photographs would interest the Princess Dwornitzchek, to whom he had been talking about life in Poona during dinner, that, at the conclusion of the meal, he had gone to his room to fetch his album.
And the first thing he had seen on opening the door of the cupboard in which he kept it was Adrian Peake. Enough to make a retired Indian Army officer beat a dozen gongs.
The fact that Adrian, who had started the evening in one cupboard, was finishing it in another is readily explained. It was not so much that he was fond of cupboards as because, finding himself in this room and hearing footsteps approaching the door, the cupboard had seemed to him the logical place in which to hide.
In supposing that his vigil in Sir Buckstone's study would leave Adrian Peake in a condition capable of being described as boop-a-doop, Tubby had erred. He had not been there long before he began to have an illusion that he had been sitting on the bound volume of the 'Illustrated Country Gentleman's Gazette' since he was a small child. He became a victim to what Mr Bulpitt would have described as onwee, and more and more it began to impress itself upon him that as a force for supplying him with clothes Tubby was not to be relied on, and that if anything constructive was to be done in that direction, he must do it himself.
He had emerged, accordingly, and made for the stairs. Unacquainted though he was with the topography of Walsingford Hall, he was aware that in every country house the bedrooms are on the upper floors and, hastening upstairs, he had chosen at random the first door that presented itself, hoping that it would contain suits and not frocks.
It had not only contained suits, but suits that might have been made to his measure, and the speed with which he inserted himself into one of them would have drawn favourable comment from a quick-change artist. For the first time since his encounter with Tubby on the deck of the houseboat Mignonette, there came to him something which might be termed a lightening of the spirit. It would be an exaggeration to describe it as happiness, for the future, he recognized, was still dark and uncertain. But it was unquestionably relief. T-shaped depressions might be lowering on the horizon, but at least his nakedness was covered.
It was at this point that he heard the footsteps outside.
Adrian Peake was far from being the type that remains cool and calm in every crisis, but a man who has once taken to hiding in cupboards acquires a certain knack. Where another might have stood congealed, he acted. Another moment and he was inside, trying not to breathe. And he was standing there, festooned in summer suits, when t
he cupboard door opened. A hand came groping in, apparently reaching for the shelf above his head, but before it could arrive there, it touched his face. Upon which, a voice uttered a sound like a paper bag bursting, and the hand drew back as if it had rested on something red-hot. Adrian received the impression that his visitor was startled.
And such was indeed the case. Colonel Tanner was a man who in his years of service under the English raj had grown accustomed to finding strange objects in his sleeping quarters, accepting without disquietude the tendency of such Indian fauna as Afridis, snakes, scorpions and even tigers to stroll into his tent as if it had been a country club to which they had paid the entrance fee. A cobra, eh?' or 'An Afridi, what?' he had said to himself, and had proceeded to deal with each case on its merits.
But retirement had robbed him of this easy nonchalance. After all these peaceful years in the old homeland, this thing came on him as a complete surprise, and in his emotion he jumped back some six feet, finishing by tripping over a footstool and falling into the fireplace.
It was the crash of his body in the fender and the accompanying clatter of fire-irons that brought to Adrian the reflection that by swift action on his part an embarrassing interview might be avoided. Whoever had touched his face was plainly fully occupied at the moment in sorting himself out from pokers and tongs, and so in no frame of mind to arrest a sudden dash for safety. He had burst from the cupboard and was through the door and in the passage before the colonel had finished taking coal out of his hair. He turned to the right and came, at the end of the passage, to a door. He opened it, and found himself on stairs. Back stairs, apparently, which were just the sort he wanted. He passed through, closing the door behind him.
Colonel Tanner, having at last extricated himself from the fireplace, brushed the coal dust from his trousers and went down the hall and started beating the gong. It seemed to his direct, soldierly mind the simplest and most effective method at his disposal for rousing the house and informing its occupants that there were burglars on the premises.
The beating of the gong in a country house is so exclusively the prerogative of the butler, and so rigidly confined to the half hour before dinner and the moment when that dinner is ready to be served, that when its note rings out after dinner has been concluded, the natural inference on the part of those who hear it is that the bulter must have gone mad. And as a mad butler is a sight which only the most blasé would ignore, it is not surprising that within a few moments of the commencement of Colonel Tanner's performance the hall had become full of interested spectators.