The Girl on the Boat
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Pelham Grenville Wodehouse >> The Girl on the Boat
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"That's good," said Eustace cordially. "But it's going to be an awful
jar for mother!"
"Don't you worry about that. I'll break the news to your mother. I'm
sure she will be quite reasonable about it."
Eustace opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again.
"Lie back quite comfortably, and don't worry," said Jane Hubbard. "I'm
going to my room to get a book to read you to sleep. I shan't be five
minutes. And forget about your mother. I'll look after her."
Eustace closed his eyes. After all, this girl had fought lions, tigers,
pumas, cannibals, and alligators in her time with a good deal of
success. There might be a sporting chance of victory for her when she
moved a step up in the animal kingdom and tackled his mother. He was not
unduly optimistic, for he thought she was going out of her class; but he
felt faintly hopeful. He allowed himself to drift into pleasant
meditation.
There was a scrambling sound outside the door. The handle turned.
"Hullo! Back already?" said Eustace, opening his eyes.
The next moment he opened them wider. His mouth gaped slowly like a hole
in a sliding cliff. Mrs. Horace Hignett was standing at his bedside.
Sec. 3
In the moment which elapsed before either of the two could calm their
agitated brains to speech, Eustace became aware, as never before, of the
truth of that well-known line--"Peace, perfect peace, with loved ones
far away." There was certainly little hope of peace with loved ones in
his bedroom. Dully, he realised that in a few minutes Jane Hubbard
would be returning with her book, but his imagination refused to
envisage the scene which would then occur.
"Eustace!"
Mrs. Hignett gasped, hand on heart.
"Eustace!" For the first time Mrs. Hignett seemed to become aware that
it was a changed face that confronted hers. "Good gracious! How stout
you've grown!"
"It's mumps."
"Mumps!"
"Yes, I've got mumps."
Mrs. Hignett's mind was too fully occupied with other matters to allow
her to dwell on this subject.
"Eustace, there are men in the house!"
This fact was just what Eustace had been wondering how to break to her.
"I know," he said uneasily.
"You know!" Mrs. Hignett stared. "Did you hear them?"
"Hear them?" said Eustace, puzzled.
"The drawing-room window was left open, and there are two burglars in
the hall!"
"Oh, I say, no! That's rather rotten!" said Eustace.
"I saw them and heard them! I--oh!" Mrs. Hignett's sentence trailed off
into a suppressed shriek, as the door opened and Jane Hubbard came in.
Jane Hubbard was a girl who by nature and training was well adapted to
bear shocks. Her guiding motto in life was that helpful line of
Horace--_Aequam memento rebus in arduis servare mentem_. (For the
benefit of those who have not, like myself, enjoyed an expensive
classical education,--memento--Take my
tip--servare--preserve--aequam--an unruffled--mentem--mind--rebus in
arduis--in every crisis). She had only been out of the room a few
minutes, and in that brief period a middle-aged lady of commanding
aspect had apparently come up through a trap. It would have been enough
to upset most girls, but Jane Hubbard bore it calmly. All through her
vivid life her bedroom had been a sort of cosy corner for murderers,
alligators, tarantulas, scorpions, and every variety of snake, so she
accepted the middle-aged lady without comment.
"Good evening," she said placidly.
Mrs. Hignett, having rallied from her moment of weakness, glared at the
new arrival dumbly. She could not place Jane. From the airy way in which
she had strolled into the room, she appeared to be some sort of a nurse;
but she wore no nurse's uniform.
"Who are you?" she asked stiffly.
"Who are _you_?" asked Jane.
"I," said Mrs. Hignett portentously, "am the owner of this house, and I
should be glad to know what you are doing in it. I am Mrs. Horace
Hignett."
A charming smile spread itself over Jane's finely-cut face.
"I'm so glad to meet you," she said. "I have heard so much about you."
"Indeed?" said Mrs. Hignett coldly. "And now I should like to hear a
little about you."
"I've read all your books," said Jane. "I think they're wonderful."
In spite of herself, in spite of a feeling that this young woman was
straying from the point, Mrs. Hignett could not check a slight influx of
amiability. She was an authoress who received a good deal of incense
from admirers, but she could always do with a bit more. Besides, most of
the incense came by post. Living a quiet and retired life in the
country, it was rarely that she got it handed to her face to face. She
melted quite perceptibly. She did not cease to look like a basilisk, but
she began to look like a basilisk who has had a good lunch.
"My favourite," said Jane, who for a week had been sitting daily in a
chair in the drawing-room adjoining the table on which the authoress's
complete works were assembled, "is 'The Spreading Light.' I _do_ like
'The Spreading Light!'"
"It was written some years ago," said Mrs. Hignett with something
approaching cordiality, "and I have since revised some of the views I
state in it, but I still consider it quite a good text-book."
"Of course, I can see that 'What of the Morrow?' is more profound," said
Jane. "But I read 'The Spreading Light' first, and of course that makes
a difference."
"I can quite see that it would," agreed Mrs. Hignett. "One's first step
across the threshold of a new mind, one's first glimpse...."
"Yes, it makes you feel...."
"Like some watcher of the skies," said Mrs. Hignett, "when a new planet
swims into his ken, or like...."
"Yes, doesn't it!" said Jane.
Eustace, who had been listening to the conversation with every muscle
tense, in much the same mental attitude as that of a peaceful citizen in
a Wild West Saloon who holds himself in readiness to dive under a table
directly the shooting begins, began to relax. What he had shrinkingly
anticipated would be the biggest thing since the Dempsey-Carpentier
fight seemed to be turning into a pleasant social and literary evening
not unlike what he imagined a meeting of old Girton students must be.
For the first time since his mother had come into the room he indulged
in the luxury of a deep breath.
"But what are you doing here?" asked Mrs. Hignett, returning almost
reluctantly to the main issue.
Eustace perceived that he had breathed too soon. In an unobtrusive way
he subsided into the bed and softly pulled the sheets over his head,
following the excellent tactics of the great Duke of Wellington in his
Peninsular campaign. "When in doubt," the Duke used to say, "retire and
dig yourself in."
"I'm nursing dear Eustace," said Jane.
Mrs. Hignett quivered, and cast an eye on the hump in the bedclothes
which represented dear Eustace. A cold fear had come upon her.
"'Dear Eustace!'" she repeated mechanically.
"We're engaged," said Jane.
"Engaged! Eustace, is this true?"
"Yes," said a muffled voice from the interior of the bed.
"And poor Eustace is so worried," continued Jane, "about the house." She
went on quickly. "He doesn't want to deprive you of it, because he knows
what it means to you. So he is hoping--we are both hoping--that you will
accept it as a present when we are married. We really shan't want it,
you know. We are going to live in London. So you will take it, won't
you--to please us?"
We all of us, even the greatest of us, have our moments of weakness.
Only a short while back, in this very room, we have seen Jane Hubbard,
that indomitable girl, sobbing brokenly on the carpet. Let us then not
express any surprise at the sudden collapse of one of the world's
greatest female thinkers. As the meaning of this speech smote on Mrs.
Horace Hignett's understanding, she sank weeping into a chair. The
ever-present fear that had haunted her had been exorcised. Windles was
hers in perpetuity. The relief was too great. She sat in her chair and
gulped; and Eustace, greatly encouraged, emerged slowly from the
bedclothes like a worm after a thunderstorm.
How long this poignant scene would have lasted, one cannot say. It is a
pity that it was cut short, for I should have liked to dwell upon it.
But at this moment, from the regions downstairs, there suddenly burst
upon the silent night such a whirlwind of sound as effectually
dissipated the tense emotion in the room. Somebody appeared to have
touched off the orchestrion in the drawing-room, and that willing
instrument had begun again in the middle of a bar at the point where
Jane Hubbard had switched it off four afternoons ago. Its wailing lament
for the passing of Summer filled the whole house.
"That's too bad!" said Jane, a little annoyed. "At this time of night!"
"It's the burglars!" quavered Mrs. Hignett. In the stress of recent
events she had completely forgotten the existence of those enemies of
Society. "They were dancing in the hall when I arrived, and now they're
playing the orchestrion!"
"Light-hearted chaps!" said Eustace, admiring the sang-froid of the
criminal world. "Full of spirits!"
"This won't do," said Jane Hubbard, shaking her head. "We can't have
this sort of thing. I'll go and fetch my gun."
"They'll murder you, dear!" panted Mrs. Hignett, clinging to her arm.
Jane Hubbard laughed.
"Murder _me_!" she said amusedly. "I'd like to catch them at it!"
Mrs. Hignett stood staring at the door as Jane closed it softly behind
her.
"Eustace," she said solemnly, "that is a wonderful girl!"
"Yes! She once killed a panther--or a puma, I forget which--with a
hat-pin!" said Eustace with enthusiasm.
"I could wish you no better wife!" said Mrs. Hignett.
She broke off with a sharp wail. Out in the passage something like a
battery of artillery had roared.
The door opened and Jane Hubbard appeared, slipping a fresh cartridge
into the elephant-gun.
"One of them was popping about outside here," she announced. "I took a
shot at him, but I'm afraid I missed. The visibility was bad. At any
rate he went away."
In this last statement she was perfectly accurate. Bream Mortimer, who
had been aroused by the orchestrion and who had come out to see what was
the matter, had gone away at the rate of fifty miles an hour. He had
been creeping down the passage when he found himself suddenly confronted
by a dim figure which, without a word, had attempted to slay him with an
enormous gun. The shot had whistled past his ears and gone singing down
the corridor. This was enough for Bream. He had returned to his room in
three strides, and was now under the bed. The burglars might take
everything in the house and welcome, so that they did not molest his
privacy. That was the way Bream looked at it. And very sensible of him,
too, I consider.
"We'd better go downstairs," said Jane. "Bring the candle. Not you,
Eustace darling. You stay where you are or you may catch a chill. Don't
stir out of bed!"
"I won't," said Eustace obediently.
Sec. 4
Of all the leisured pursuits, there are few less attractive to the
thinking man than sitting in a dark cupboard waiting for a house-party
to go to bed; and Sam, who had established himself in the one behind the
piano at a quarter to eight, soon began to feel as if he had been there
for an eternity. He could dimly remember a previous existence in which
he had not been sitting in his present position, but it seemed so long
ago that it was shadowy and unreal to him. The ordeal of spending the
evening in this retreat had not appeared formidable when he had
contemplated it that afternoon in the lane; but, now that he was
actually undergoing it, it was extraordinary how many disadvantages it
had.
Cupboards, as a class, are badly ventilated, and this one seemed to
contain no air at all; and the warmth of the night, combined with the
cupboard's natural stuffiness, had soon begun to reduce Sam to a
condition of pulp. He seemed to himself to be sagging like an ice-cream
in front of a fire. The darkness, too, weighed upon him. He was
abominably thirsty. Also he wanted to smoke. In addition to this, the
small of his back tickled, and he more than suspected the cupboard of
harbouring mice. Not once or twice but many hundred times he wished that
the ingenious Webster had thought of something simpler.
His was a position which would just have suited one of those Indian
mystics who sit perfectly still for twenty years, contemplating the
Infinite, but it reduced Sam to an almost imbecile state of boredom. He
tried counting sheep. He tried going over his past life in his mind from
the earliest moment he could recollect, and thought he had never
encountered a duller series of episodes. He found a temporary solace by
playing a succession of mental golf-games over all the courses he could
remember, and he was just teeing up for the sixteenth at Muirfield,
after playing Hoylake, St. Andrew's, Westward Ho, Hanger Hill,
Mid-Surrey, Walton Heath, and Sandwich, when the light ceased to shine
through the crack under the door, and he awoke with a sense of dull
incredulity to the realisation that the occupants of the drawing-room
had called it a day and that his vigil was over.
But was it? Once more alert, Sam became cautious. True, the light seemed
to be off, but did that mean anything in a country-house, where people
had the habit of going and strolling about the garden to all hours?
Probably they were still popping about all over the place. At any rate,
it was not worth risking coming out of his lair. He remembered that
Webster had promised to come and knock an all-clear signal on the door.
It would be safer to wait for that.
But the moments went by, and there was no knock. Sam began to grow
impatient. The last few minutes of waiting in a cupboard are always the
hardest. Time seemed to stretch out again interminably. Once he thought
he heard footsteps but they led to nothing. Eventually, having strained
his ears and finding everything still, he decided to take a chance. He
fished in his pocket for the key, cautiously unlocked the door, opened
it by slow inches, and peered out.
The room was in blackness. The house was still. All was well. With the
feeling of a life-prisoner emerging from the Bastille, he began to crawl
stiffly forward; and it was just then that the first of the disturbing
events occurred which were to make this night memorable to him.
Something like a rattlesnake suddenly went off with a whirr, and his
head, jerking up, collided with the piano. It was only the cuckoo-clock,
which now, having cleared its throat as was its custom before striking,
proceeded to cuck eleven times in rapid succession before subsiding with
another rattle; but to Sam it sounded like the end of the world.
He sat in the darkness, massaging his bruised skull. His hours of
imprisonment in the cupboard had had a bad effect on his nervous system,
and he vacillated between tears of weakness and a militant desire to get
at the cuckoo-clock with a hatchet. He felt that it had done it on
purpose and was now chuckling to itself in fancied security. For quite a
minute he raged silently, and any cuckoo-clock which had strayed within
his reach would have had a bad time of it. Then his attention was
diverted.
So concentrated was Sam on his private vendetta with the clock that no
ordinary happening would have had the power to distract him. What
occurred now was by no means ordinary, and it distracted him like an
electric shock. As he sat on the floor, passing a tender hand over the
egg-shaped bump which had already begun to manifest itself beneath his
hair, something cold and wet touched his face, and paralysed him so
completely both physically and mentally that he did not move a muscle
but just congealed where he sat into a solid block of ice. He felt
vaguely that this was the end. His heart had stopped beating and he
simply could not imagine it ever starting again, and, if your heart
refuses to beat, what hope is there for you?
At this moment something heavy and solid struck him squarely in the
chest, rolling him over. Something gurgled asthmatically in the
darkness. Something began to lick his eyes, ears, and chin in a sort of
ecstasy; and, clutching out, he found his arms full of totally
unexpected bulldog.
"Get out!" whispered Sam tensely, recovering his faculties with a jerk.
"Go away!"
Smith took the opportunity of Sam's lips having opened to lick the roof
of his mouth. Smith's attitude in the matter was that Providence in its
all-seeing wisdom had sent him a human being at a moment when he had
reluctantly been compelled to reconcile himself to a total absence of
such indispensable adjuncts to a good time. He had just trotted
downstairs in rather a disconsolate frame of mind after waiting with no
result in front of Webster's bedroom door, and it was a real treat to
him to meet a man, especially one seated in such a jolly and sociable
manner on the floor. He welcomed Sam like a long-lost friend.
Between Smith and the humans who provided him with dog-biscuits and
occasionally with sweet cakes there had always existed a state of
misunderstanding which no words could remove. The position of the humans
was quite clear; they had elected Smith to his present position on a
straight watch-dog ticket. They expected him to be one of those dogs who
rouse the house and save the spoons. They looked to him to pin burglars
by the leg and hold on till the police arrived. Smith simply could not
grasp such an attitude of mind. He regarded Windles not as a private
house but as a social club, and was utterly unable to see any difference
between the human beings he knew and the strangers who dropped in for a
late chat after the place was locked up. He had no intention of biting
Sam. The idea never entered his head. At the present moment what he felt
about Sam was that he was one of the best fellows he had ever met and
that he loved him like a brother.
Sam, in his unnerved state, could not bring himself to share these
amiable sentiments. He was thinking bitterly that Webster might have had
the intelligence to warn him of bulldogs on the premises. It was just
the sort of woollen-headed thing fellows did, forgetting facts like
that. He scrambled stiffly to his feet and tried to pierce the darkness
that hemmed him in. He ignored Smith, who snuffled sportively about his
ankles, and made for the slightly less black oblong which he took to be
the door leading into the hall. He moved warily, but not warily enough
to prevent his cannoning into and almost upsetting a small table with a
vase on it. The table rocked and the vase jumped, and the first bit of
luck that had come to Sam that night was when he reached out at a
venture and caught it just as it was about to bound on to the carpet.
He stood there, shaking. The narrowness of the escape turned him cold.
If he had been an instant later, there would have been a crash loud
enough to wake a dozen sleeping houses. This sort of thing could not go
on. He must have light. It might be a risk; there might be a chance of
somebody upstairs seeing it and coming down to investigate; but it was a
risk that must be taken. He declined to go on stumbling about in this
darkness any longer. He groped his way with infinite care to the door,
on the wall adjoining which, he presumed, the electric-light switch
would be. It was nearly ten years since he had last been inside Windles,
and it never occurred to him that in this progressive age even a woman
like his Aunt Adeline, of whom he could believe almost anything, would
still be using candles and oil-lamps as a means of illumination. His
only doubt was whether the switch was where it was in most houses, near
the door.
It is odd to reflect that, as his searching fingers touched the knob, a
delicious feeling of relief came to Samuel Marlowe. This misguided young
man actually felt at that moment that his troubles were over. He
positively smiled as he placed a thumb on the knob and shoved.
He shoved strongly and sharply, and instantaneously there leaped at him
out of the darkness a blare of music which appeared to his disordered
mind quite solid. It seemed to wrap itself round him. It was all over
the place. In a single instant the world had become one vast bellow of
Tosti's "Good-bye."
How long he stood there, frozen, he did not know; nor can one say how
long he would have stood there had nothing further come to invite his
notice elsewhere. But, suddenly, drowning even the impromptu concert,
there came from somewhere upstairs the roar of a gun; and, when he heard
that, Sam's rigid limbs relaxed and a violent activity descended upon
him. He bounded out into the hall, looking to right and to left for a
hiding-place. One of the suits of armour which had been familiar to him
in his boyhood loomed up in front of him, and with the sight came the
recollection of how, when a mere child on his first visit to Windles,
playing hide and seek with his cousin Eustace, he had concealed himself
inside this very suit, and had not only baffled Eustace through a long
summer evening but had wound up by almost scaring him into a decline by
booing at him through the vizor of the helmet. Happy days, happy days!
He leaped at the suit of armour. Having grown since he was last inside
it, he found the helmet a tight fit, but he managed to get his head into
it at last, and the body of the thing was quite roomy.
"Thank heaven!" said Sam.
He was not comfortable, but comfort just then was not his primary need.
Smith the bulldog, well satisfied with the way the entertainment had
opened, sat down, wheezing slightly, to await developments.
Sec. 5
He had not long to wait. In a few minutes the hall had filled up nicely.
There was Mr. Mortimer in his shirt-sleeves, Mr. Bennett in blue pyjamas
and a dressing-gown, Mrs. Hignett in a travelling costume, Jane Hubbard
with her elephant-gun, and Billie in a dinner dress. Smith welcomed them
all impartially.
Somebody lit a lamp, and Mrs. Hignett stared speechlessly at the mob.
"Mr. Bennett! Mr. Mortimer!"
"Mrs. Hignett! What are you doing here?"
Mrs. Hignett drew herself up stiffly.
"What an odd question, Mr. Mortimer! I am in my own house!"
"But you rented it to me for the summer. At least, your son did."
"Eustace let you Windles for the summer!" said Mrs. Hignett
incredulously.
Jane Hubbard returned from the drawing-room, where she had been
switching off the orchestrion.
"Let us talk all that over cosily to-morrow," she said. "The point now
is that there are burglars in the house."
"Burglars!" cried Mr. Bennett aghast. "I thought it was you playing that
infernal instrument, Mortimer."
"What on earth should I play it for at this time of night?" said Mr.
Mortimer irritably.
"It woke me up," said Mr. Bennett complainingly. "And I had had great
difficulty in dropping off to sleep. I was in considerable pain. I
believe I've caught the mumps from young Hignett."
"Nonsense! You're always imagining yourself ill," snapped Mr. Mortimer.
"My face hurts," persisted Mr. Bennett.
"You can't expect a face like that not to hurt," said Mr. Mortimer.
It appeared only too evident that the two old friends were again on the
verge of one of their distressing fallings-out; but Jane Hubbard
intervened once more. This practical-minded girl disliked the
introducing of side-issues into the conversation. She was there to talk
about burglars, and she intended to do so.
"For goodness sake stop it!" she said, almost petulantly for one usually
so superior to emotion. "There'll be lots of time for quarrelling
to-morrow. Just now we've got to catch these...."
"I'm not quarrelling," said Mr. Bennett.
"Yes, you are," said Mr. Mortimer.
"I'm not!"
"You are!"
"Don't argue!"
"I'm not arguing!"
"You are!"
"I'm not!"
Jane Hubbard had practically every noble quality which a woman can
possess with the exception of patience. A patient woman would have stood
by, shrinking from interrupting the dialogue. Jane Hubbard's robuster
course was to raise the elephant-gun, point it at the front door, and
pull the trigger.
"I thought that would stop you," she said complacently, as the echoes
died away and Mr. Bennett had finished leaping into the air. She
inserted a fresh cartridge, and sloped arms. "Now, the question is...."
"You made me bite my tongue!" said Mr. Bennett, deeply aggrieved.
"Serve you right!" said Jane placidly. "Now, the question is, have the
fellows got away or are they hiding somewhere in the house? I think
they're still in the house."
"The police!" exclaimed Mr. Bennett, forgetting his lacerated tongue and
his other grievances. "We must summon the police!"
"Obviously!" said Mrs. Hignett, withdrawing her fascinated gaze from the
ragged hole in the front door, the cost of repairing which she had been
mentally assessing. "We must send for the police at once."
"We don't really need them, you know," said Jane. "If you'll all go to
bed and just leave me to potter round with my gun...."
"And blow the whole house to pieces!" said Mrs. Hignett tartly. She had
begun to revise her original estimate of this girl. To her, Windles was
sacred, and anyone who went about shooting holes in it forfeited her
esteem.
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