'Never mind the heart of gold. The point is that my man, my late man, a fellow I have always looked on more as some sort of an uncle than a personal attendant, is shooting to and fro bellowing out at the top of his voice that I am mentally negligible and filling my bedroom with girls....'
'Bertie! Are you annoyed?'
'Annoyed!'
'You sound annoyed. And I can't see why. I should have thought you would have been only too glad of the chance of helping me get to the man I love. Having this heart of gold I hear so much about.'
'The point is not whether I have a heart of gold. Heaps of people have hearts of gold and yet would be upset at finding girls in their bedrooms in the small hours. What you don't seem to realize, what you and this Jeeves of yours have omitted to take into your calculations, is that I have a reputation to keep up, an unspotted name to maintain in its pristine purity. This cannot be done by entertaining girls who come in, in the middle of the night, without so much as a by-your-leave and coolly pinch your heliotrope pyjamas ...'
'You didn't expect me to sleep in a wet swimming suit?'
'... and leap into your bed ...'
She uttered an exclamation.
'I know what this reminds me of. I've been trying to think ever since you came in. The story of the Three Bears. You must have been told it as a kid. 'There's somebody in my bed....' Wasn't that what the Big Bear said?'
I frowned doubtfully.
'As I recollect it, it was something about porridge. 'Who's been eating my porridge?''
'I'm sure there was a bed in it.'
'Bed? Bed? I can't remember any bed. On the subject of the porridge, however, I am absolutely.... But we are wandering from the point once more. What I was saying was that a reputable bachelor like myself, who has never had his licence so much as endorsed, can scarcely be blamed for looking askance at girls in heliotrope pyjamas in his bed....'
'You said they suited me.'
'They do suit you.'
'You said I looked fine in them.'
'You do look fine in them, but once more you are refusing to meet the issue squarely. The point is ...'
'How many points is that? I seem to have counted about a dozen.'
'There is only one point, and I am endeavouring to make it clear. In a nutshell, what will people say when they find you here?'
'But they won't find me here.'
'You think so? Ha! What about Brinkley?'
'Who's he?'
'My man.'
'Your late man?'
I clicked the tongue.
'My new man. At nine to-morrow morning he will bring me tea.'
'Well, you'll like that.'
'He will bring it to this room. He will approach the bed. He will place it on the table.'
'What on earth for?'
'To facilitate my getting at the cup and sipping.'
'Oh, you mean he will put the tea on the table. You said he would put the bed on the table.'
'I never said anything of the sort.'
'You did. Distinctly.'
I tried to reason with the girl.
'My dear child,' I said, 'I must really ask you to use your intelligence. Brinkley is not a juggler. He is a well- trained gentleman's gentleman, and would consider it a liberty to put beds on tables. And why should he put beds on tables? The idea would never occur to him. He ...'
She interrupted my reasoning.
'But wait a minute. You keep babbling about Brinkley, but there isn't a Brinkley.'
'There is a Brinkley. One Brinkley. And one Brinkley coming into this room at nine o'clock to-morrow morning and finding you in that bed will be enough to start a scandal which will stagger humanity.'
'I mean, he can't be in the house.'
'Of course he's in the house.'
'Well, he must be deaf, then. I made enough noise getting in to wake six gentlemen's gentlemen. Apart from smashing a window at the back ...'
'Did you smash a window at the back?'
'I had to, or I couldn't have got in. It was the window of some sort of bedroom on the ground floor.'
'Why, dash it, that's Brinkley's bedroom.'
'Well, he wasn't in it.'
'Why on earth not? I gave him the evening off, not the night.'
'I can see what has happened. He's away on a toot somewhere, and won't be back for days. Father had a man who did that once. He went out for his evening from our house on East Sixty-Seventh Street, New York, on April the fourth in a bowler hat, grey gloves and a check suit, and the next we heard of him was a telegram from Portland, Oregon, on April the tenth, saying he had overslept himself and would be back shortly. That's what your Brinkley must have done.'
I must say I drew a good deal of comfort from the idea.
'Let us hope so,' I said. 'If he is really trying to drown his sorrows, it ought to take him weeks.'
'So, you see, you've been making a fuss about nothing. I always say...'
But what it was she always said, I was not privileged to learn. For at that moment she broke off with a sharp squeak.
Somebody was knocking on the front door.
8 POLICE PERSECUTION
We looked at each other with a wild surmise, silent upon a first floor back in Chuffnell Regis. That frightful sound, coming unexpectedly like that in the middle of the peaceful summer night, had been enough to strike the chit-chat from anybody's lips. And what rendered it so particularly unpleasant to us, personally, was the fact that we had both jumped simultaneously to the same ghastly conclusion.
'It's father!' Pauline gargled, and with a swift flip of her finger she doused the candle.
'What did you do that for?' I said, a good deal pipped. The sudden darkness seemed to make things worse.
'So that he shouldn't see a light in the window, of course. If he thinks you're asleep he may go away.'
'What a hope!' I retorted, as the knocking, which had eased off for a moment, started again with more follow-through than ever.
'Well, I suppose you had better go down,' said the girl in a subdued sort of voice. 'Or' – she seemed to brighten – 'shall we pour water on him from the staircase window?'
I started violently. She had made the suggestion as if she considered it one of her best and brightest, and I suddenly realized what it meant to play the host to a girl of her temperament and personality. All that I had ever heard or read about the reckless younger generation seemed to come back to me.
'Don't dream of it!' I whispered urgently. 'Dismiss the project utterly and absolutely from your mind.'
I mean to say, a dry J. Washburn Stoker seeking an errant daughter was bad enough. A J. Washburn Stoker stimulated to additional acerbity by a jugful of H2O on his head, I declined to contemplate. Goodness knows, I wasn't keen on going down and passing the time of night with the man, but if the alternative was to allow his loved ones to drench him to the skin and then wait while he tore the walls down with his bare hands I proposed to do so immediately.
