“What idea?”
“Well, you know how many parsons there are round about here. There are about a dozen hamlets within a radius of six miles, and each hamlet has a church and each church has a parson and each parson preaches a sermon every Sunday. Tomorrow week—Sunday the twenty-third—we’re running off the great Sermon Handicap. Steggles is making the book. Each parson is to be clocked by a reliable steward of the course, and the one that preaches the longest sermon wins. Did you study the race-card I sent you?”
“I couldn’t understand what it was all about.”
“Why, you chump, it gives the handicaps and the current odds on each starter. I’ve got another one here, in case you’ve lost yours. Take a careful look at it. It gives you the thing in a nutshell. Jeeves, old son, do you want a sporting flutter?”
“Sir?” said Jeeves, who had just meandered in with my breakfast.
Claude explained the scheme. Amazing the way Jeeves grasped it right off. But he merely smiled in a paternal sort of way.
“Thank you, sir, I think not.”
“Well, you’re with us, Bertie, aren’t you?” said Claude, sneaking a roll and a slice of bacon. “Have you studied that card? Well, tell me, does anything strike you about it?”
Of course it did. It had struck me the moment I looked at it.
“Why, it’s a sitter for old Heppenstall,” I said. “He’s got the event sewed up in a parcel. There isn’t a parson in the land who could give him eight minutes. Your pal Steggles must be an ass, giving him a handicap like that. Why, in the days when I was with him, old Heppenstall never used to preach under half an hour, and there was one sermon of his on Brotherly Love which lasted forty-five minutes if it lasted a second. Has he lost his vim lately, or what is it?”
“Not a bit of it,” said Eustace. “Tell him what happened, Claude.”
“Why,” said Claude, “the first Sunday we were here, we all went to Twing church, and old Heppenstall preached a sermon that was well under twenty minutes. This is what happened. Steggles didn’t notice it, and the Rev. didn’t notice it himself, but Eustace and I both spotted that he had dropped a chunk of at least half a dozen pages out of his sermon-case as he was walking up to the pulpit. He sort of flickered when he got to the gap in the manuscript, but carried on all right, and Steggles went away with the impression that twenty minutes or a bit under was his usual form. The next Sunday we heard Tucker and Starkie, and they both went well over the thirty-five minutes, so Steggles arranged the handicapping as you see on the card. You must come into this, Bertie. You see, the trouble is that I haven’t a bean, and Eustace hasn’t a bean, and Bingo Little hasn’t a bean, so you’ll have to finance the syndicate. Don’t weaken! It’s just putting money in all our pockets. Well, we’ll have to be getting back now. Think the thing over, and phone me later in the day. And, if you let us down, Bertie, may a cousin’s curse—Come on, Claude, old thing.”
The more I studied the scheme, the better it looked.
“How about it, Jeeves?” I said.
Jeeves smiled gently, and drifted out.
“Jeeves has no sporting blood,” said Bingo.
“Well, I have. I’m coming into this. Claude’s quite right. It’s like finding money by the wayside.”
“Good man!” said Bingo. “Now I can see daylight. Say I have a tenner on Heppenstall, and cop; that’ll give me a bit in hand to back Pink Pill with in the two o’clock at Gatwick the week after next: cop on that, put the pile on Muskrat for the one-thirty at Lewes, and there I am with a nice little sum to take to Alexandra Park on September the tenth, when I’ve got a tip straight from the stable.”
It sounded like a bit out of Smiles’s Self-Help.
“And then,” said young Bingo, “I’ll be in a position to go to my uncle and beard him in his lair somewhat. He’s quite a bit of a snob, you know, and when he hears that I’m going to marry the daughter of an earl—”
“I say, old man,” I couldn’t help saying, “aren’t you looking ahead rather far?”
“Oh, that’s all right. It’s true nothing’s actually settled yet, but she practically told me the other day she was fond of me.”
“What!”
“Well, she said that the sort of man she liked was the self-reliant, manly man with strength, good looks, character, ambition, and initiative.”
“Leave me, laddie,” I said. “Leave me to my fried egg.”
Directly I’d got up I went to the phone, snatched Eustace away from his morning’s work, and instructed him to put a tenner on the Twing flier at current odds for each of the syndicate; and after lunch Eustace rang me up to say that he had done business at a snappy seven-to-one, the odds having lengthened owing to a rumour in knowledgeable circles that the Rev. was subject to hay-fever, and was taking big chances strolling in the paddock behind the Vicarage in the early mornings. And it was dashed lucky, I thought next day, that we had managed to get the money on in time, for on the Sunday morning old Heppenstall fairly took the bit between his teeth, and gave us thirty-six solid minutes on Certain Popular Superstitions. I was sitting next to
