‘I can’t swim.’
That was Freddie Bullivant all over. A dear old chap in a thousand ways, but no help to a fellow, if you know what I mean.
He cranked up the piano once more, and I legged it for the open.
I strolled out on the beach and began to think this thing over. I would have liked to consult Jeeves, of course, but Jeeves had disappeared for the morning. There was no doubt that it was hopeless expecting Freddie to do anything for himself in this crisis. I’m not saying that dear old Freddie hasn’t got his strong qualities. He is good at polo, and I have heard him spoken of as a coming man at snooker-pool. But apart from this you couldn’t call him a man of enterprise.
Well, I was rounding some rocks, thinking pretty tensely, when I caught sight of a blue dress, and there was the girl in person. I had never met her, but Freddie had sixteen photographs of her sprinkled round his bedroom, and I knew I couldn’t be mistaken. She was sitting on the sand, helping a small, fat child to build a castle. On a chair close by was an elderly female reading a novel. I heard the girl call her ‘aunt.’ So, getting the reasoning faculties to work, I deduced that the fat child must be her cousin. It struck me that if Freddie had been there he would probably have tried to work up some sentiment about the kid on the strength of it. I couldn’t manage this. I don’t think I ever saw a kid who made me feel less sentimental. He was one of those round, bulging kids.
After he had finished his castle he seemed to get bored with life and began to cry. The girl, who seemed to read him like a book, took him off to where a fellow was selling sweets at a stall. And I walked on.
Now, those who know me, if you ask them, will tell you that I’m a chump. My Aunt Agatha would testify to this effect. So would my Uncle Percy and many more of my nearest and – if you like to use the expression – dearest. Well, I don’t mind. I admit it. I am a chump. But what I do say – and I should like to lay the greatest possible stress on this – is that every now and then, just when the populace has given up hope that I will ever show any real human intelligence – I get what it is idle to pretend is not an inspiration. And that’s what happened now. I doubt if the idea that came to me at this juncture would have occurred to a single one of any dozen of the largest-brained blokes in history. Napoleon might have got it, but I’ll bet Darwin and Shakespeare and Thomas Hardy wouldn’t have thought of it in a thousand years.
It came to me on my return journey. I was walking back along the shore, exercising the old bean fiercely, when I saw the fat child meditatively smacking a jelly-fish with a spade. The girl wasn’t with him. The aunt wasn’t with him. In fact, there wasn’t anybody else in sight. And the solution of the whole trouble between Freddie and his Elizabeth suddenly came to me in a flash.
From what I had seen of the two, the girl was evidently fond of this kid: and, anyhow, he was her cousin, so what I said to myself was this: If I kidnap this young heavyweight for a brief space of time: and if, when the girl has got frightfully anxious about where he can have got to, dear old Freddie suddenly appears leading the infant by the hand and telling a story to the effect that he found him wandering at large about the country and practically saved his life, the girl’s gratitude is bound to make her chuck hostilities and be friends again.
So I gathered up the kid and made off with him.
Freddie, dear old chap, was rather slow at first in getting on to the fine points of the idea. When I appeared at the cottage, carrying the child, and dumped him down in the sitting-room, he showed no joy whatever. The child had started to bellow by this time, not thinking much of the thing, and Freddie seemed to find it rather trying.
‘What the devil’s all this?’ he asked, regarding the little visitor with a good deal of loathing.
The kid loosed off a yell that made the windows rattle, and I saw that this was a time for strategy. I raced to the kitchen and fetched a pot of honey. It was the right idea. The kid stopped bellowing and began to smear his face with the stuff.
‘Well?’ said Freddie, when silence had set in.
I explained the scheme. After a while it began to strike him. The careworn look faded from his face, and for the first time since his arrival at Marvis Bay he smiled almost happily.
‘There’s something in this, Bertie.’
‘It’s the goods.’
‘I think it will work,’ said Freddie.
And, disentangling the child from the honey, he led him out.
‘I expect Elizabeth will be on the beach somewhere,’ he said.
What you might call a quiet happiness suffused me, if that’s the word I want. I was very fond of old Freddie, and it was jolly to think that he was shortly about to click once more. I was leaning back in a chair on the veranda, smoking a peaceful cigarette, when down the road I saw the old boy returning, and, by George, the kid was still with him.
‘Hallo!’ I said. ‘Couldn’t you find her?’
I then perceived that Freddie was looking as if he had been kicked in the stomach.
‘Yes, I found her,’ he replied, with one of those bitter, mirthless laughs you read about.
‘Well, then—?’
He sank into a chair and groaned.
‘This isn’t her cousin, you idiot,’ he said. ‘He’s no relation at all – just a kid she met on the beach. She had never seen him before in her life.’
‘But she was helping him build a sand-castle.’
‘I don’t care. He’s a perfect stranger.’
It seemed to me that, if the modern girl goes about building sand-castles with kids she has only known for five minutes and probably without a proper introduction at that, then all that has been written about her is perfectly true. Brazen is the word that seems to meet the case.
I said as much to Freddie, but he wasn’t listening.
‘Well, who is this ghastly child, then?’ I said.
‘I don’t know. O Lord, I’ve had a time! Thank goodness you will probably spend the next few years of your life in Dartmoor for kidnapping. That’s my only consolation. I’ll come and jeer at you through the bars on visiting days.’
‘Tell me all, old man,’ I said.
He told me all. It took him a good long time to do it, for he broke off in the middle of nearly every sentence to call me names, but I gradually gathered what had happened. The girl Elizabeth had listened like an iceberg while he worked off the story he had prepared, and then – well, she didn’t actually call him a liar in so many words, but she gave him to understand in a general sort of way that he was a worm and an outcast. And then he crawled off with the kid, licked to a splinter.
‘And mind,’ he concluded, ‘this is your affair. I’m not mixed up in it at all. If you want to escape your sentence – or anyway get a portion of it remitted – you’d better go and find the child’s parents and return him before the police come for you.’
‘Who are his parents?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Where do they live?’
‘I don’t know.’
The kid didn’t seem to know, either. A thoroughly vapid and uninformed infant. I got out of him the fact that he had a father, but that was as far as he went. It didn’t seem ever to have occurred to him, chatting of an evening with the old man, to ask him his name and address. So, after a wasted ten minutes, out we went into the great world, more or less what you might call at random.
I give you my word that, until I started to tramp the place with this child, I never had a notion that it was such a difficult job restoring a son to his parents. How kidnappers ever get caught is a mystery to me. I searched Marvis Bay like a bloodhound, but nobody came forward to claim the infant. You would have thought, from the lack of interest in him, that he was stopping there all by himself in a cottage of his own. It wasn’t till, by another inspiration, I thought to ask the sweet-stall man that I got on the track. The sweet-stall man, who seemed to have seen a lot of him, said that the child’s name was Kegworthy, and that his parents lived at a place called Ocean Rest.
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It then remained to find Ocean Rest. And eventually, after visiting Ocean View, Ocean Prospect, Ocean Breeze, Ocean Cottage, Ocean Bungalow, Ocean Nook and Ocean Homestead, I trailed it down.
I knocked at the door. Nobody answered. I knocked again. I could hear movements inside, but nobody appeared. I was just going to get to work with that knocker in such a way that it would filter through these people’s heads that I wasn’t standing there just for the fun of the thing, when a voice from somewhere above shouted ‘Hi!’
I looked up and saw a round, pink face, with grey whiskers east and west of it, staring down at me from an upper window.
‘Hi!’ it shouted again. ‘You can’t come in.’
‘I don’t want to come in.’
‘Because—Oh, is that Tootles?’
‘My name is not Tootles. Are you Mr Kegworthy? I’ve brought back your son.’
‘I see him. Peep-bo, Tootles, Dadda can see ’oo.’
The face disappeared with a jerk. I could hear voices. The face reappeared.
‘Hi!’
I churned the gravel madly. This blighter was giving me the pip.
‘Do you live here?’ asked the face.
‘I have taken a cottage here for a few weeks.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘Wooster.’
‘Fancy that! Do you spell it W-o-r-c-e-s-t-e-r or W-o-o-s-t-e-r?’
‘W-o-o—’
‘I ask because I once knew a Miss Wooster, spelled W-o-o—’
I had had about enough of this spelling-bee.
‘Will you open the door and take this child in?’
‘I mustn’t open the door. This Miss Wooster that I knew married a man named Spenser. Was she any relation?’
‘She is my Aunt Agatha,’ I replied, and I spoke with a good deal of bitterness, trying to suggest by my manner that he was exactly the sort of man, in my opinion, who would know my Aunt Agatha.
He beamed down at me.
‘This is most fortunate. We were wondering what to do with Tootles. You see, we have mumps here. My daughter Bootles has just developed mumps. Tootles must not be exposed to the risk of infection. We could not think what to do with him. It was most fortunate, your finding the dear child. He strayed from his nurse. I would hesitate to trust him to a stranger, but you are different. Any nephew of Mrs Spenser’s has my complete confidence. You must take Tootles into your house. It will be an ideal arrangement. I have written to my brother in London to come and fetch him. He may be here in a few days.’
‘May!’
‘He is a busy man, of course; but he should certainly be here within a week. Till then Tootles can stop with you. It is an excellent plan. Very much obliged to you. Your wife will like Tootles.’
‘I haven’t got a wife!’ I yelled; but the window had closed with a bang, as if the man with the whiskers had found a germ trying to escape and had headed it off just in time.
I breathed a deep breath and wiped the old forehead.
The window flew up again.
‘Hi!’
A package weighing about a ton hit me on the head and burst like a bomb.
‘Did you catch it?’ said the face, reappearing. ‘Dear me, you missed it. Never mind. You can get it at the grocer’s. Ask for Bailey’s Granulated Breakfast Chips. Tootles takes them for breakfast with a little milk. Not cream. Milk. Be sure to get Bailey’s.’
‘Yes, but—’
The face disappeared, and the window was banged down again. I lingered a while, but nothing else happened, so, taking Tootles by the hand, I walked slowly away.
And as we turned up the road we met Freddie’s Elizabeth.
‘Well, baby?’ she said, sighting the kid. ‘So daddy found you again, did he? Your little son and I made great friends on the beach this morning,’ she said to me.
This was the limit. Coming on top of that interview with the whiskered lunatic, it so utterly unnerved me that she had nodded good-bye and was half-way down the road before I caught up with my breath enough to deny the charge of being the infant’s father.
I hadn’t expected Freddie to sing with joy when he saw me looming up with child complete, but I did think he might have showed a little more manly fortitude, a little more of the old British bull-dog spirit. He leaped up when we came in, glared at the kid and clutched his head. He didn’t speak for a long time; but, to make up for it, when he began he did not leave off for a long time.
‘Well,’ he said, when he had finished the body of his remarks, ‘say something! Heavens, man, why don’t you say something?’
‘If you’ll give me a chance, I will,’ I said, and shot the bad news.
‘What are you going to do about it?’ he asked. And it would be idle to deny that his manner was peevish.
‘What can we do about it?’
‘We? What do you mean, we? I’m not going to spend my time taking turns as a nursemaid to this excrescence. I’m going back to London.’
‘Freddie!’ I cried. ‘Freddie, old man!’ My voice shook. ‘Would you desert a pal at a time like this?’
‘Yes, I would,’
‘Freddie,’ I said, ‘you’ve got to stand by me. You must. Do you realise that this child has to be undressed, and bathed, and dressed again? You wouldn’t leave me to do all that single-handed?’
‘Jeeves can help you.’
‘No, sir,’ said Jeeves, who had just rolled in with lunch; ‘I must, I fear, disassociate myself completely from the matter.’ He spoke respectfully but firmly. ‘I have had little or no experience with children.’
‘Now’s the time to start,’ I urged.
‘No, sir; I am sorry to say that I cannot involve myself in any way.’
‘Then you must stand by me, Freddie.’
‘I won’t.’
‘You must. Reflect, old man! We have been pals for years. Your mother likes me.’
‘No, she doesn’t.’
‘Well, anyway, we were at school together and you owe me a tenner.’
‘Oh, well,’ he said in a resigned sort of voice.
‘Besides, old thing,’ I said, ‘I did it all for your sake, you know.’
He looked at me in a curious way, and breathed rather hard for some moments.
‘Bertie,’ he said, ‘one moment. I will stand a good deal, but I will not stand being expected to be grateful.’
Looking back at it, I can see that what saved me from Colney Hatch in this crisis was my bright idea in buying up most of the contents of the local sweetshop. By serving out sweets to the kid practically incessantly we managed to get through the rest of that day pretty satisfactorily. At eight o’clock he fell asleep in a chair; and, having undressed him by unbuttoning every button in sight and, where there were no buttons, pulling till something gave, we carried him up to bed.
Freddie stood looking at the pile of clothes on the floor with a sort of careworn wrinkle between his eyes, and I knew what he was thinking. To get the kid undressed had been simple – a mere matter of muscle. But how were we to get him into his clothes again? I stirred the heap with my foot. There was a long linen arrangement which might have been anything. Also a strip of pink flannel which was like nothing on earth. All most unpleasant.
But in the morning I remembered that there were children in the next bungalow but one, and I went there before breakfast and borrowed their nurse. Women are wonderful, by Jove they are! This nurse had all the spare parts assembled and in the right places in about eight minutes, and there was the kid dressed and looking fit to go to a garden party at Buckingham Palace. I showered wealth upon her, and she promised to come in morning and evening. I sat down to breakfast almost cheerful again. It was the first bit of silver lining that had presented itself to date.
‘And, after all,’ I said, ‘there’s lots to be argued in favour of having a child about the place, if you know what I mean. Kind of cosy and domestic, what?’
Just then the kid upset the milk over Freddie’s trousers, and when he had come back
after changing he lacked sparkle.
It was shortly after breakfast that Jeeves asked if he could have a word in my ear.
Now, though in the anguish of recent events I had rather tended to forget what had been the original idea in bringing Freddie down to this place, I hadn’t forgotten it altogether; and I’m bound to say that, as the days went by, I had found myself a little disappointed in Jeeves. The scheme had been, if you recall, that he should refresh himself with sea-air and simple food and, having thus got his brain into prime working order, evolve some means of bringing Freddie and his Elizabeth together again.
And what had happened? The man had eaten well and he had slept well, but not a step did he appear to have taken towards bringing about the happy ending. The only move that had been made in that direction had been made by me, alone and unaided; and, though I freely admit that it had turned out a good deal of a bloomer, still the fact remains that I had shown zeal and enterprise. Consequently I received him with a bit of hauteur when he blew in. Slightly cold. A trifle frosty.
‘Yes, Jeeves?’ I said. ‘You wished to speak to me?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Say on, Jeeves,’ I said.
‘Thank you, sir. What I desired to say, sir, was this: I attended a performance at the local cinema last night.’
I raised the eyebrows. I was surprised at the man.
With life in the home so frightfully tense and the young master up against it to such a fearful extent, I disapproved of him coming toddling in and prattling about his amusements.
‘I hope you enjoyed yourself,’ I said in rather a nasty manner.
‘Yes, sir, thank you. The management was presenting a super-super-film in seven reels, dealing with life in the wilder and more feverish strata of New York Society, featuring Bertha Blevitch, Orlando Murphy and Baby Bobbie. I found it most entertaining, sir.’
‘That’s good,’ I said. ‘And if you have a nice time this morning on the sands with your spade and bucket, you will come and tell me all about it, won’t you? I have so little on my mind just now that it’s a treat to hear all about your happy holiday.’
Satirical, if you see what I mean. Sarcastic. Almost bitter, as a matter of fact, if you come right down to it.