And then there was another burst of passion, and he kicked out at
adjacent chairs and banged the floor. He behaved just as I should
have expected a great, fat, self-indulgent man to behave under trying
circumstances--that is to say, very badly. He spoke of me and my
great-grandmother with an utter want of discretion.
“I never asked you to take the stuff,” I said.
And generously disregarding the insults he was putting upon me, I sat
down in his armchair and began to talk to him in a sober, friendly
fashion.
I pointed out to him that this was a trouble he had brought upon
himself, and that it had almost an air of poetical justice. He had eaten
too much. This he disputed, and for a time we argued the point.
He became noisy and violent, so I desisted from this aspect of his
lesson. “And then,” said I, “you committed the sin of euphuism. You
called it not Fat, which is just and inglorious, but Weight. You--”
He interrupted to say he recognised all that. What was he to DO?
I suggested he should adapt himself to his new conditions. So we came to
the really sensible part of the business. I suggested that it would
not be difficult for him to learn to walk about on the ceiling with his
hands--
“I can't sleep,” he said.
But that was no great difficulty. It was quite possible, I pointed out,
to make a shake-up under a wire mattress, fasten the under things on
with tapes, and have a blanket, sheet, and coverlet to button at the
side. He would have to confide in his housekeeper, I said; and after
some squabbling he agreed to that. (Afterwards it was quite delightful
to see the beautifully matter-of-fact way with which the good lady took
all these amazing inversions.) He could have a library ladder in his
room, and all his meals could be laid on the top of his bookcase. We
also hit on an ingenious device by which he could get to the floor
whenever he wanted, which was simply to put the British Encyclopaedia
(tenth edition) on the top of his open shelves. He just pulled out a
couple of volumes and held on, and down he came. And we agreed there
must be iron staples along the skirting, so that he could cling to those
whenever he wanted to get about the room on the lower level.
As we got on with the thing I found myself almost keenly interested. It
was I who called in the housekeeper and broke matters to her, and it was
I chiefly who fixed up the inverted bed. In fact, I spent two whole days
at his flat. I am a handy, interfering sort of man with a screw-driver,
and I made all sorts of ingenious adaptations for him--ran a wire to
bring his bells within reach, turned all his electric lights up
instead of down, and so on. The whole affair was extremely curious and
interesting to me, and it was delightful to think of Pyecraft like some
great, fat blow-fly, crawling about on his ceiling and clambering round
the lintels of his doors from one room to another, and never, never,
never coming to the club any more....
Then, you know, my fatal ingenuity got the better of me. I was sitting
by his fire drinking his whisky, and he was up in his favourite corner
by the cornice, tacking a Turkey carpet to the ceiling, when the
idea struck me. “By Jove, Pyecraft!” I said, “all this is totally
unnecessary.”
And before I could calculate the complete consequences of my notion I
blurted it out. “Lead underclothing,” said I, and the mischief was done.
Pyecraft received the thing almost in tears. “To be right ways up
again--” he said. I gave him the whole secret before I saw where it
would take me. “Buy sheet lead,” I said, “stamp it into discs. Sew 'em
all over your underclothes until you have enough. Have lead-soled boots,
carry a bag of solid lead, and the thing is done! Instead of being a
prisoner here you may go abroad again, Pyecraft; you may travel--”
A still happier idea came to me. “You need never fear a shipwreck.
All you need do is just slip off some or all of your clothes, take the
necessary amount of luggage in your hand, and float up in the air--”
In his emotion he dropped the tack-hammer within an ace of my head. “By
Jove!” he said, “I shall be able to come back to the club again.”
The thing pulled me up short. “By Jove!” I said faintly. “Yes. Of
course--you will.”
He did. He does. There he sits behind me now, stuffing--as I
live!--a third go of buttered tea-cake. And no one in the whole world
knows--except his housekeeper and me--that he weighs practically
nothing; that he is a mere boring mass of assimilatory matter, mere
clouds in clothing, niente, nefas, the most inconsiderable of men. There
he sits watching until I have done this writing. Then, if he can, he
will waylay me. He will come billowing up to me....
He will tell me over again all about it, how it feels, how it doesn't
feel, how he sometimes hopes it is passing off a little. And always
somewhere in that fat, abundant discourse he will say, “The secret's
keeping, eh? If any one knew of it--I should be so ashamed.... Makes a
fellow look such a fool, you know. Crawling about on a ceiling and all
that....”
And now to elude Pyecraft, occupying, as he does, an admirable strategic
position between me and the door.