“Look out for a chance and save her from drowning,” I said.
“I can’t swim,” said Freddie.
That was Freddie all over, don’t you know. A dear old chap in a
thousand ways, but no help to a fellow, if you know what I mean.
He cranked up the piano once more and I sprinted for the open.
I strolled out on to the sands and began to think this thing over.
There was no doubt that the brain-work had got to be done by me. Dear
old Freddie had his strong qualities. He was top-hole at polo, and in
happier days I’ve heard him give an imitation of cats fighting in a
backyard that would have surprised you. But apart from that he wasn’t a
man of enterprise.
Well, don’t you know, I was rounding some rocks, with my brain whirring
like a dynamo, when I caught sight of a blue dress, and, by Jove, it
was the girl. I had never met her, but Freddie had sixteen photographs
of her sprinkled round his bedroom, and I knew I couldn’t be mistaken.
She was sitting on the sand, helping a small, fat child build a castle.
On a chair close by was an elderly lady reading a novel. I heard the
girl call her “aunt.” So, doing the Sherlock Holmes business, I deduced
that the fat child was her cousin. It struck me that if Freddie had
been there he would probably have tried to work up some sentiment about
the kid on the strength of it. Personally I couldn’t manage it. I don’t
think I ever saw a child who made me feel less sentimental. He was one
of those round, bulging kids.
After he had finished the castle he seemed to get bored with life, and
began to whimper. The girl took him off to where a fellow was selling
sweets at a stall. And I walked on.
Now, fellows, if you ask them, will tell you that I’m a chump. Well, I
don’t mind. I admit it. I _am_ a chump. All the Peppers have been
chumps. But what I do say is that every now and then, when you’d least
expect it, I get a pretty hot brain-wave; and that’s what happened now.
I doubt if the idea that came to me then would have occurred to a
single one of any dozen of the brainiest chappies you care to name.
It came to me on my return journey. I was walking back along the shore,
when I saw the fat kid meditatively smacking a jelly-fish with a spade.
The girl wasn’t with him. In fact, there didn’t seem to be any one in
sight. I was just going to pass on when I got the brain-wave. I thought
the whole thing out in a flash, don’t you know. From what I had seen of
the two, the girl was evidently fond of this kid, and, anyhow, he was
her cousin, so what I said to myself was this: If I kidnap this young
heavy-weight for the moment, and if, when the girl has got frightfully
anxious about where he can have got to, dear old Freddie suddenly
appears leading the infant by the hand and telling a story to the
effect that he has found him wandering at large about the country and
practically saved his life, why, the girl’s gratitude is bound to make
her chuck hostilities and be friends again. So I gathered in the kid
and made off with him. All the way home I pictured that scene of
reconciliation. I could see it so vividly, don’t you know, that, by
George, it gave me quite a choky feeling in my throat.
Freddie, dear old chap, was rather slow at getting on to the fine
points of the idea. When I appeared, carrying the kid, and dumped him
down in our sitting-room, he didn’t absolutely effervesce with joy, if
you know what I mean. The kid had started to bellow by this time, and
poor old Freddie seemed to find it rather trying.
“Stop it!” he said. “Do you think nobody’s got any troubles except you?
What the deuce is all this, Reggie?”
The kid came back at him with a yell that made the window rattle. I
raced to the kitchen and fetched a jar of honey. It was the right
stuff. The kid stopped bellowing and began to smear his face with the
stuff.
“Well?” said Freddie, when silence had set in. I explained the idea.
After a while it began to strike him.
“You’re not such a fool as you look, sometimes, Reggie,” he said
handsomely. “I’m bound to say this seems pretty good.”
And he disentangled the kid from the honey-jar and took him out, to
scour the beach for Angela.
I don’t know when I’ve felt so happy. I was so fond of dear old Freddie
that to know that he was soon going to be his old bright self again
made me feel as if somebody had left me about a million pounds. I was
leaning back in a chair on the veranda, smoking peacefully, when down
the road I saw the old boy returning, and, by George, the kid was still
with him. And Freddie looked as if he hadn’t a friend in the world.
“Hello!” I said. “Couldn’t you find her?”
“Yes, I found her,” he replied, with one of those bitter, hollow
laughs.
“Well, then——?”
Freddie sank into a chair and groaned.
“This isn’t her cousin, you idiot!” he said. “He’s no relation at all.
He’s just a kid she happened to meet on the beach. She had never seen
him before in her life.”
“What! Who is he, then?”
“I don’t know. Oh, Lord, I’ve had a time! Thank goodness you’ll
probably spend the next few years of your life in Dartmoor for
kidnapping. That’s my only consolation. I’ll come and jeer at you
through the bars.”
“Tell me all, old boy,” I said.
It took him a good long time to tell the story, for he broke off in the
middle of nearly every sentence to call me names, but I gathered
gradually what had happened. She had listened like an iceberg while he
told the story he had prepared, and then—well, she didn’t actually call
him a liar, but she gave him to understand in a general sort of way
that if he and Dr. Cook ever happened to meet, and started swapping
stories, it would be about the biggest duel on record. And then he had
crawled away with the kid, licked to a splinter.
“And mind, this is your affair,” he concluded. “I’m not mixed up in it
at all. If you want to escape your sentence, you’d better go and find
the kid’s parents and return him before the police come for you.”
By Jove, you know, till I started to tramp the place with this infernal
kid, I never had a notion it would have been so deuced difficult to
restore a child to its anxious parents. It’s a mystery to me how
kidnappers ever get caught. I searched Marvis Bay like a bloodhound,
but nobody came forward to claim the infant. You’d have thought, from
the lack of interest in him, that he was stopping there all by himself
in a cottage of his own. It wasn’t till, by an inspiration, I thought
to ask the sweet-stall man that I found out that his name was Medwin,
and that his parents lived at a place called Ocean Rest, in Beach Road.
I shot off there like an arrow and knocked at the door. Nobody
answered. I knocked again. I could hear movements inside, but nobody
came. I was just going to get to work on that knocker in such a way
that the idea would filter through into these people’s heads that I
wasn’t standing there just for the fun of the thing, when a voice from
somewhere above shouted, “Hi!”
I looked up and saw a round, pink face, with grey whiskers east and
west of it, staring down from an upper window.
“Hi!” it shouted again.
“What the deuce do you mean by ‘Hi’?” I said.
“You can’t come in,” said the face. “Hello, is that Tootles?”
“My name is not Tootles, and I don’t want to come in,” I said. “Are you
Mr. Medwin? I’ve brought back your son.”
“I see him. Peep-bo, Tootles! Dadda can see ’oo!”
The face disappeared with a jerk. I could hear voices. The face
reappeared.
“Hi!”