Joy in the Morning (17 page)

‘I haven’t seen Boko.’

‘A bit of luck for him.’

‘D’Arcy Cheesewright’s here.’

‘I know.’

‘I phoned him after I saw the burglar.’

‘I know.’

‘Did you know he was engaged to Florence?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m not sure it’s not off. They were having an awful row just now.’

He spoke lightly, throwing the statement out as if it had been some news item of merely negligible interest, and was probably surprised at the concern which I exhibited.

‘What!’

‘Yes.’

‘An awful row?’

‘Yes.’

‘What about?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘When you say an awful row, how awful a row do you mean?’

‘Well, fairly awful.’

‘High words?’

‘Pretty high.’

My heart, which had leaped up as described at the bulletin about Uncle Percy’s trouser seat, was now down in the basement again. The whole trend of my foreign policy, as I have made abundantly clear, being to promote cordial relations between these two, the information that they had been having even fairly high words was calculated to freeze the blood.

You see, what I was saying apropos of Nobby hauling up her slacks and coming the Pekinese on Boko – all that stuff, if you remember, about girls giving their loved one the devil just for the fun of the thing and to keep the pores open – didn’t apply to serious minded females like Florence and the sort of chap Stilton was. It’s all a question of what Jeeves calls the psychology of the individual. If Florence and Stilton had gone to the mat and started chewing pieces out of each other, the outlook was unsettled.

‘How much of it did you hear?’

‘Not much. Because that was when I saw something moving in the darkness and went and biffed it with my Scout’s stick, and it turned out to be you.’

This, of course, put a slightly better complexion on things. My first impression had been that he had had a ringside seat all through the conflict. If he had only heard the opening exchanges, it might be that matters had not proceeded too far. Cooler thoughts might have prevailed after his departure, causing the contestants to cheese it before the breach became irreparable. It often happens like that with girls and men of high spirit. They start off with a whoop and a holler, and then, their better selves prevailing, pipe down.

I mentioned this to Edwin, and he seemed to think that there might be something in it. But I noticed that he appeared distrait and not really interested, and after a pause of a few moments, during which I hoped for the best and he twiddled his Scout’s stick, he revealed why this was so. He was worrying about a point of procedure.

‘I say, Bertie,’ he said, ‘you know that slosh I gave you.’

I assured him that I had not forgotten it.

‘I meant well, you know.’

‘That’s a comfort.’

‘Still, of course, I did sock you, didn’t I?’

‘You did.’

‘You can’t get away from that.’

‘No.’

‘Then here’s what I’m wondering. Have I wiped out the act of kindness I did you this afternoon?’

‘When you tidied up Wee Nooke?’

‘No, I’m afraid that doesn’t count, because it didn’t work out right. I meant finding that brooch.’

I had to watch my step rather sedulously here. I mean to say, the brooch he had found and the brooch Jeeves had delivered to Florence were supposed to be one and the same brooch, and he must never learn from my lips that I had lost the dashed thing again after he had found it that time in the hall.

‘Oh, that?’ I said. ‘Yes, that was a Grade A act of kindness.’

‘I know. But do you think it still counts?’

‘Oh, rather.’

‘In spite of my socking you?’

‘Unquestionably.’

‘Coo! Then I’m all square up to last Thursday.’

‘You mean last Friday.’

‘Thursday.’

‘Friday.’

‘Thursday.’

‘Friday, you fatheaded young faulty reasoner,’ I said, with some heat, for his inability to keep the score correctly was annoying me as much as that ‘We are seven’ stuff must have annoyed the poet – I forget his name – who got talking figures with another child. ‘Listen. Your last Friday’s act of kindness would have been the tidying up of Wee Nooke. Right. But owing to the unfortunate sequel that has to be scratched off the list. You admit that, don’t you? Well, that makes the finding of the brooch your last Friday’s act of kindness. Perfectly simple, if you’ll only use the little grey cells a bit.’

‘Yes, but you haven’t got it right.’

‘I have got it right. Listen—’

‘I mean, you’re talking about the first time I found the brooch. What I’m talking about is the second time. That counts as well.’

I couldn’t follow him.

‘How do you mean, the second time? You didn’t find it twice.’

‘Yes, I did. The first time was when you dropped it in the hall, you remember. Then I went off to clean the kitchen chimney. Then there was that explosion, and I came out, and you were standing on the lawn in your shirt sleeves. You had taken off your coat and chucked it away.’

‘Oh my gosh!’

What with the stress of this and that, I had completely forgotten that coat sequence. It all came back to me now, and a cold hand seemed to clutch at my heart. I could see where he was heading.

‘I suppose the brooch must have fallen out of your pocket, because when you had gone into the house I saw it lying there. And I thought it would be an act of kindness if I saved you trouble by taking it to Florence.’

I gazed at him dully. With a lack-lustre eye is, I believe, the expression.

‘So you took it to Florence?’

‘Yes.’

‘Saying it was a present from me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did she seem pleased?’

‘Frightfully. Coo!’

He vanished abruptly, like an eel going into mud, and I was aware of the approach of someone breathing heavily.

It did not need the child’s impulsive dash into the shadows to tell me that this stertorous newcomer was Florence.

CHAPTER 18

F
lorence was obviously in the grip of some powerful emotion. She quivered gently, as if in the early stages of palsy, and her face, as far as I could gather from the sketchy view I was able to obtain of it, was pale and set, like the white of a hard-boiled egg.

‘D’Arcy Cheesewright,’ she said, getting right off the mark without so much as a preliminary ‘What ho, there,’ ‘is an obstinate, mulish, pigheaded, overbearing, unimaginative, tyrannical jack in office!’

Her words froze me to the core. I was conscious of a sense of frightful peril. Owing to young Edwin’s infernal officiousness, this pancake had been in receipt only a few hours earlier of a handsome diamond brooch, ostensibly a present from Bertram W., and now, right on top of it, she had had a falling out with Stilton, so substantial that it took her six distinct adjectives to describe him. When a girl uses six derogatory adjectives in her attempt to paint the portrait of the loved one, it means something. One may indicate a merely temporary tiff. Six is big stuff.

I didn’t like the way things were shaping. I didn’t like it at all. It seemed to me that what she must be saying to herself was ‘Look here upon this picture and on this,’ as it were. I mean to say, on the one hand, a suave, knightly donor of expensive brooches; on the other, an obstinate, mulish, pigheaded, overbearing, unimaginative, tyrannical jack in office. If you were a girl, which would you prefer to link your lot with? Exactly.

I felt that I must spare no effort to plead Stilton’s cause, to induce her to overlook whatever it was he had done to make her go about breathing like an asthma patient and scattering adjectives all over the place. The time had come for me to be eloquent and persuasive as never before, pouring oil on the troubled waters with a liberal hand, emptying the jug if necessary.

‘Oh, dash it!’ I cried.

‘What do you mean by “Oh, dash it”?’

‘Just “Oh, dash it!” Sort of protest, if you follow me.’

‘You do not agree with me?’

‘I think you’ve misjudged him.’

‘I have not.’

‘Splendid fellow, Stilton.’

‘He is nothing of the kind.’

‘Wouldn’t you say he was the sort of chap who has made England what it is?’

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘I said no.’

‘Yes, that’s right. So you did.’

‘He is a mere uncouth Cossack.’

A cossack, I knew, was one of those things clergymen wear, and I wondered why she thought Stilton was like one. An inquiry into this would have been fraught with interest, but before I could institute it she had continued.

‘He has been abominably rude, not only to me but to father.

Just because father would not allow him to arrest the man in the potting shed.’

A bright light shone upon me. Her words had made clear the root of the trouble. I had, if you remember, edged away from the Stilton-Florence-Uncle Percy group just after the last named had put the presidential veto on the able young officer’s scheme of pinching J. Chichester Clam, and had, accordingly, not been there to hear Stilton’s comments. These, it was now evident, must have been on the fruity side. Stilton, as I have indicated, is a man of strong passions – one who, when annoyed, does not mince his words.

My mind went back to that time at Oxford, when I had gone in for rowing and had drawn him as a coach. If what he had said to Uncle Percy had been even remotely in the same class as his remarks on that occasion with reference to my stomach, I could see that relations must inevitably have got pretty strained, and my heart sank as I visualized the scene.

‘He said father was shackling the police and that it was men like him, grossly lacking in any sense of civic duty, who were the cause of the ever-growing crime wave. He said that father was a menace to the community and would be directly responsible if half the population of Steeple Bumpleigh were murdered in their beds.’

‘You don’t think he spoke laughingly?’

‘No, I do not think he spoke laughingly.’

‘With a twinkle in his eye, I mean.’

‘There was not the slightest suggestion of any twinkle in his eye.’

‘You might have missed it. It’s a dark night.’

‘Please do not be utterly absurd, Bertie. I have sufficient intelligence, I hope, to be able to recognize a vile exhibition of bad temper when I see it. His tone was most offensive. “And you,” he said, looking at father as if he were some sort of insect, “call yourself a Justice of the Peace. Faugh!”’

‘Fore? Like at golf?’

‘F-a-u-g-h.’

‘Oh, ah.’

I was beginning to be almost sorry for Uncle Percy, as far as it is possible to be sorry for a man like that. I mean, there was no getting away from it that it hadn’t been a big evening for the poor old bloke. First, Boko with his ‘My dear Worplesdon’; then Edwin with his hockey stick; and now Stilton with his ‘Faughs’. One of those nights you look back to with a shudder.

‘His behaviour was a revelation to me. It laid bare a brutal, inhuman side of his character, of the existence of which I had never till then had a suspicion. There was something positively horrible in the fury he exhibited, when he realized that he was not to be allowed to arrest the man. He was like some malignant wild beast deprived of its prey.’

It was plain that Stilton’s stock was in or approaching the cellar, and I did what I could to stop the slump.

‘Still, it showed zeal, what?’

‘Tchah!’

‘And zeal, after all, when you come right down to it, is what he draws his weekly envelope for.’

‘Don’t talk to me about zeal. It was revolting. And when I said that father was quite right, he turned on me like a tiger.’

Although by this time, as you may well imagine, I was rocking on my base and becoming more and more a prey to alarm and despondency, I couldn’t help admiring Stilton for his intrepid courage. Circumstances had so arranged themselves as to extract most of the stuffing from what had been a closeish boyhood friendship, but I had to respect a man capable of turning on Florence like a tiger. I would hardly have thought Attila the Hun could have done it, even if at the peak of his form.

All the same, I wished he hadn’t. Oh, I was saying to myself, that the voice of Prudence had whispered in his ear. It was so vital to my interests that the mutual love of these two should continue unimpaired, and already much of the gilt, I feared, must have been rubbed off the gingerbread of their romance. Love is a sensitive plant, which needs cherishing and fostering. This cannot be done by turning on girls like tigers.

‘I told him that modern enlightened thought held that imprisonment merely brutalizes the criminal.’

‘And what did he say to that?’

‘“Oh, yes?”‘

‘Ah, he agreed with you.’

‘He did nothing of the kind. He spoke in a most unpleasant, sneering voice. “It does, does it?” he said. And I said ‘Yes, it does.” He then said something about modern enlightened thought which I cannot repeat.’

I wondered what this had been. Evidently something red hot, for it was clear that it still rankled like a boil on the back of the neck. Her fists, I saw, were clenched, and she had started to tap her foot on the ground – sure indications that the soul is fed to the eye teeth. Florence is one of those girls who look on modern enlightened thought as a sort of personal buddy, and receive with an ill grace cracks at its expense.

I groaned in spirit. The way things were shaping, I was expecting her to say next that she had broken off the engagement.

And that was just what she did say.

‘Of course, I broke off the engagement instantly.’

In spite of the fact that, as I say, I had practically known it was coming, I skipped like the high hills.

‘You broke off the engagement?’