Hot Water (15 page)

'Well, I guess she's like enough to make her feel that if there's going to be a murder in the home she'd rather it was the old man than her. You put it to her, boy. You go to her and say, "Lookut, Mrs Gedge, it ain't safe for you, sleeping in that room with all that ice. First thing you know, some heist-guy'll be busting the joint and then where'll you be? Getting your head pushed in or lying there with your throat cut, that's where you'll be. You snap out of that room, Mrs Gedge," you say, "and let your old man sleep there, or before you know where you are X'll be marking the spot." That'll shift her.'

Packy weighed the advice thoughtfully. There seemed a good deal in it. Such a speech might well have the desired effect. The trouble was that it would be rather difficult to lead up to in general conversation. It was not the sort of thing you could spring on a woman you had only just met, in the middle of a chat about beautiful Brittany or the weather.

'Well, I'll think it over,' he said.

'You do,' said Mr Slattery. 'You go back to bed and think it over. Me, I rather guess, now I'm in the joint, I'll take a look around. Folks sometimes leave gold clocks and that on the dressing-table. What I mean, you never know. And you don't want to miss a trick these days. Say, did you ever see the Stock Market in such a state? Everything down to nothing, you might say, and me with all my capital locked up. Got to make what you can when you can, what I mean.'

It was not for Packy to stand in the way of a fellow-man pluckily trying to make good losses incurred through the fluctuations of the world's markets. It was plain to him, moreover, that no arguments would move Mr Slattery from the position he had outlined. So long as this room continued to be that of a beazel, the man would remain adamant. He bade him good night and passed on his way upstairs.

It seemed to him after he had been in bed some ten minutes that the silence of the Château was broken by a distant shout or cry, but he was too sleepy to give it his attention. He closed his eyes again and dropped off.

One of the things one always wants to know about a house party is what sort of a night everybody had. As regards the Château Blissac, the slumbers of the great majority of its inmates had been entirely satisfactory. Mr Gedge had slept well. Packy had slept well. Senator Opal had slept well. Jane had slept well. Miss Putnam had slept well. Medway had slept well. Blair Eggleston had slept well.

Only Mr Gordon Carlisle had failed to rest adequately. Much thinking, rendering him feverish, had caused him to turn and toss till an advanced hour, and when he did succeed in achieving a doze he was jerked out of it by that same shout or cry which had momentarily disturbed Packy. Speculation on this had made him wakeful again. It was not till dawn that he finally fell asleep, and it was scarcely two hours later when sunlight, streaming in through the window across which he had forgotten to draw the curtain, brought him to life once more.

His idea on getting out of bed had been to exclude this sunlight. But, finding himself at the open window, he leaned out, like everybody else who ever approached an open window in the early morning, to see what kind of a day it was.

From where he stood, on the second floor of the house, the view was spreading and attractive. His window did not command that distant prospect of the harbour which was the Château's pride: but there were plenty of good things to make up for this deprivation. Gardens, gay with flowers, lay before Mr Carlisle, and beyond them woods and the Breton quaintness of the home farm: while above him, as he raised his eyes, there was a blue sky, flecked with little clouds; a few of the local birds going about their business; an insect or two; a couple of butterflies; and a pair of legs encased in grey trousers and terminating in two shoes of generous dimensions.

It was these last that enchained his attention. The spectacle of legs where no legs should be is always an arresting one. Mr Carlisle, drinking them in, was frankly nonplussed. Rapidly running over in his mind the topography of the house, he discovered that their owner, if they had an owner and were not simply a stray pair of legs which had just been left about, must be sitting on the window-sill of the bedroom occupied by Senator Opal.

There surged over Mr Carlisle an intense desire for further data. He was not accustomed to be up and about so early as this, but if ever a man had a good excuse for brushing with hasty steps the dew away to meet the sun upon the upland lawn, that man was he. Only by going out and looking up from a less acute angle could he hope to probe this mystery

Taking a snap judgement on the evidence at present to hand, he presumed that the sitter must be the Senator himself. Only a man of established eccentricity would roost on window-sills first thing in the morning – or, indeed, at any hour of the day, and what he had seen of Senator Opal had been enough to convince him that the latter was eccentric enough for any form of self-expression.

Only when he reached the garden did he discover that his reasoning had been faulty. Senator Opal might be temperamentally of window-sill-sitting timbre. Quite possibly the day would come when he would take to sitting on window-sills. But he had not done so yet. The man on whom Mr Carlisle's astonished gaze rested was his old friend, Soup Slattery. And as he espied Mr Slattery, simultaneously Mr Slattery espied him.

There followed one of those awkward periods which occur when a man who is compelled to confine himself entirely to grimaces is endeavouring to convey his thoughts to a second party who is so overcome with amazement that he would scarcely be in a position to understand the plainest speech. Mr Slattery contorted his features. Mr Carlisle continued to gape. It was only at the end of about five minutes, just after Mr Slattery had nearly dislocated his lower jaw in a particularly eloquent passage, that the marvelling Confidence Trick artist realized that what his friend was silently appealing for was a ladder.

Raising his hand in a sort of Fascist salute and nodding vigorously several times, he proceeded in quest of the desired object.

A ladder is not one of those things you can just reach out and lay your hand on. Mr Carlisle had to search thoroughly and well. Eventually, he discovered one outside a distant shed, only to find that it was too heavy for him to carry. Returning with the distasteful task before him of explaining this misfortune in dumb show, he received another shock.

The window-sill, which ten minutes before had featured Mr Slattery so prominently, was now empty.

Gordon Carlisle paused on the brink of believing in miracles. The only theory that seemed to fit the facts was that his friend had suddenly soared through the air like a bird. He could not have fallen, for the only corpse on the ground below was that of a small snail.

Then, just in time to save his reason from collapse, Mr Carlisle observed the stout water-pipe which ran down the wall near the window. And, putting two and two together, he deduced that in the interval of his absence Mr Slattery must have discovered this pipe. The fact that he had not done so earlier appeared to indicate that he had taken to the window-sill while the world was still in darkness. And that was perplexing, too, when you came to look into it. Mr Carlisle's reason, saved once from disintegration, began to wobble again.

Fortunately for his professional future, for a Confidence Trick artist cannot hope to continue in a keenly competitive business if his brain has come unstuck, something now occurred which threw a light on the matter. The window opened, and Senator Opal appeared. He was wearing orange-coloured pyjamas and a revolver, and on his face was a look of wonder and bafflement.

Sighting Mr Carlisle below, he sought information in a voice of thunder.

'Where's my burglar?'

Mr Carlisle had nothing to reply to this. The Senator's tone grew more peevish.

'You down below there.... You Duke.... Have you seen my burglar?'

Mr Carlisle perceived that it behoved him to pull himself together.

'Ah, non,'
he replied, in that musical accent which went with his portrayal of the Duc de Pont-Andemer.

'Ah, what?'

'Ah, no.'

'How long have you been down there?'

'I have this moment only arrived.'

'Did you see anyone sitting on my window-sill?'

'No. No. On the window-sill, no-one.'

'Hell!' cried the Senator.

You cannot conduct a full-throated long-distance conversation in the early morning and finish up by ejaculating 'Hell!' in a voice like the bursting of an ammunition-dump without rousing such sleepers as may be in your vicinity. From a window to the left the head of Mr Gedge appeared.

'What's the matter?'

'I've lost a burglar.'

'Where did you see him last?' asked Mr Gedge.

Before the Senator could reply to this pertinent question, a window on the right revealed the wondering face of Jane. She looked charming in a blue negligee.

'Whatever is the matter, Father?'

'I left a burglar on the window-sill, and he's gone,' said the Senator, rather in the manner of a householder complaining of the loss of a bottle of milk.

'How do you mean, you left a burglar on the window-sill?'

'I mean precisely what I say I found the fellow in my room last night and I wasn't going to lose my sleep calling up the police, so I made him sit on the window-sill, intending to collect him in the morning.'

'You must have been dreaming.'

'I was not dreaming.'

'Say, listen,' said Mr Gedge chattily. 'I had the strangest dream last night. I dreamed I was at the Biltmore, Los Angeles, and the waiter came up to take my order, and do you know what he was? A skeleton. Yessir, a skeleton in a pink middy-blouse.'

The disposition to be impatient towards the recital of other people's dreams is almost universal. Senator Opal was not one of those exceptional men who made good listeners on such occasions.

'Stop gabbling, you Gedge!'

'Father!'

And you stop saying "Father!" What's become of the fellow, that's what I want to know.'

'I never heard of such a thing,' said Jane primly. 'Putting burglars on window-sills.'

'Well, you've heard of it now.'

'Why didn't you simply...?'

'I've told you why I didn't simply. Do you think I was going to lose my night's rest just because a blasted burglar came into my room?'

Mr Carlisle intruded on this family jar.

'I think the man must have made his descent by the water-pipe.'

'Water-pipe?' The Senator gaped, aghast. 'You don't mean there's a ... My God! There is. It was so dark I didn't see it.'

'Serves you right,' observed Jane, who, womanlike, intended to have the last word if it took all summer, 'for being such a smarty.'

'A what?' boomed the Senator, quivering at the offensive term.

'A smarty,' repeated Jane firmly 'Putting burglars on window-sills. Much too clever to do anything like anybody else, aren't you? I'm very glad he has gone. It will be a lesson to you.'

She gave him a severe look and withdrew, closing the window behind her. She was a kind-hearted girl, but, like every modern girl, she did not believe in being foolishly indulgent with parents. When they behaved like cuckoos, you had to tell them so – quite quietly – not angrily – just pointing it out to them and leaving their intelligence to do the rest.

But even with her departure Senator Opal did not find himself free from criticism. Even as he puffed and exercised his eyebrows, it broke out unexpectedly in another quarter.

'She's quite right,' said Mr Gedge, protruding from his window like a snail out of its shell. 'Yessir, the girl's absolutely right. Should have thought a man would have had more sense.'

Mr Gedge, as has been indicated earlier in this narrative, was not without a certain native shrewdness, and it had just occurred to him that here, sent by Providence, was a most admirable opportunity for intensifying and consolidating the hostility which this snorting man already felt towards him. The madder, he argued, he made Senator Opal, the firmer would become the latter's already firm resolve to do all that lay in his power to see that he, J. Wellington Gedge, was not appointed to the post of Ambassador to France.

Pleasantly aware that they were a long distance apart and that there was no chance of the other getting at him, he proceeded to give his views at considerable length. It was like ticking a man off over the telephone, and Mr Gedge had always been a very lion over the telephone.

He spoke, accordingly, forcefully and well. And the debate was at its height when Packy, disturbed by these voices, put on his dressing-gown and came down to see what it was all about.

He could make nothing of the affair. An argument of some kind appeared to be in progress between his host and Senator Opal, but as they were talking simultaneously at the extreme limit of their lungs it was not easy to follow thrust and counter-thrust. He turned to the Duc de Pont-Andemer as an intelligent bystander.

'What seems to be the trouble?' he asked.

He was surprised to note that his companion, on whom a moment before he had been looking as the one safe and sane unit in what had all the appearance of being a rally of lunatics, was staring at him in a manner that struck his critical sense as definitely goofy. Packy knew that he was not beautiful – he never was till he had shaved – but he could not understand what there was about him to cause this normally unruffled aristocrat to goggle at him with this odd expression of horror.

Mr Carlisle could have explained, but he did not do so. Instead, he turned sharply and hurried without a word on the long trail which went winding to the Hotel des Etrangers. It seemed to him imperative that he should have immediate speech with Soup Slattery.

What had startled Mr Carlisle in Packy's appearance was the fact that it was unblemished. That cry in the night had convinced him that Mr Slattery, carrying on according to plan, had invaded the other's boudoir and put it across him in his own inimitable manner. And here the fellowwas, as good as new. Not so much as a black eye.

It stunned Mr Carlisle. At their parting on the previous day, Mr Slattery had been all fire and generous wrath. He had hinted unmistakably at a punitive expedition on lines of the most gratifying severity. And apparently he had done nothing.