"Flowers!" he proceeded. "Roses, sir. Great, fat, beastly roses. Enough
of them to sink a ship. Your card was attached to them by a small pin."
His voice died away in a sort of gurgle, and I saw that he was staring
at something behind me. I spun round, and there, in the doorway--I
hadn't seen it open, because during the last spasm of dialogue I had
been backing cautiously toward it--stood a female.
One glance was enough to tell me who she was. No woman could look so
like Lucius Pim who hadn't the misfortune to be related to him. It was
Sister Beatrice, the tough egg.
I saw all. She had left her home before the flowers arrived; she had
sneaked, unsweetened, into the flat while I was fortifying the system
at the Drones'; and here she was.
"Er----" I said.
"Alexander!" said the female.
"Goo!" said the Souper. Or it may have been "Coo!"
Whatever it was, it was in the nature of a battle cry or slogan of war.
The Souper's worst suspicions had obviously been confirmed. His eyes
shone with a strange light. His chin pushed itself out another couple
of inches. He clenched and unclenched his fingers once or twice, as if
to make sure that they were working properly and could be relied on to
do a good clean job of strangling.
Then, once more observing "Coo!" (or "Goo!") he sprang forward, trod
on the golf ball I had been practising putting with, and took one of
the finest tosses I have ever witnessed. The purler of a lifetime. For
a moment the air seemed to be full of arms and legs, and then, with a
thud that nearly dislocated the flat, he made a forced landing.
And feeling I had had about all I wanted, I oiled from the room and was
in the act of grabbing my hat from the rack in the hall, when Jeeves
appeared.
"I fancied I heard a noise, sir," said Jeeves.
"Possibly," I said. "It was Mr. Slingsby."
"Sir?"
"Mr. Slingsby practising Russian dances," I explained. "I rather think
he has fractured an assortment of limbs. Better go in and see."
"Very good, sir."
"If he is the wreck I imagine, put him in my room and send for a
doctor. The flat is filling up nicely with the various units of the Pim
family and its connections, eh, Jeeves?"
"Yes, sir."
"I think the supply is about exhausted, but should any aunts or uncles
by marriage come along and break their limbs, bed them out on the
Chesterfield."
"Very good, sir."
"I, personally, Jeeves," I said, opening the front door and pausing on
the threshold, "am off to Paris. I will wire you the address. Notify
me in due course when the place is free from Pims and completely purged
of Slingsbys, and I will return. Oh, and Jeeves."
"Sir?"
"Spare no effort to mollify these birds. They think--at least, Slingsby
(female) thinks--that it was I who ran over Mr. Pim in my car.
Endeavour during my absence to sweeten them."
"Very good, sir."
"And now, perhaps you had better be going in and viewing the body.
I shall proceed to the Drones', where I shall lunch, subsequently
catching the two-o'clock train at Charing Cross. Meet me there with an
assortment of luggage."
* * * * *
It was a matter of three weeks or so before Jeeves sent me the "All
clear" signal. I spent the time pottering pretty perturbedly about
Paris and environs. It is a city I am fairly fond of, but I was glad to
be able to return to the old home.
I hopped on a passing airplane and a couple of hours later was bowling
through Croydon on my way to the centre of things. It was somewhere
in the Sloane Square neighbourhood that I first caught sight of the
posters.
A traffic block had occurred, and I was glancing idly this way and
that, when suddenly my eye was caught by something that looked
familiar. And then I saw what it was.
Pasted on a blank wall and measuring about a hundred feet each way was
an enormous poster, mostly red and blue. At the top of it were the
words: