MONEY FOR NOTHING
BY P. G. WODEHOUSE
GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, DORAN & COMPANY, INC.
1928
COPYRIGHT, 1928,
BY P. G. WODEHOUSE
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES AT
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS,
GARDEN CITY, N. Y.
FIRST EDITION
MONEY FOR NOTHING
CHAPTER I
I
The picturesque village of Rudge-in-the-Vale dozed in the summer
sunshine. Along its narrow High Street the only signs of life visible
were a cat stropping its backbone against the Jubilee Watering Trough,
some flies doing deep-breathing exercises on the hot window sills, and
a little group of serious thinkers who, propped up against the wall of
the Carmody Arms, were waiting for that establishment to open. At no
time is there ever much doing in Rudge's main thoroughfare, but the
hour at which a stranger, entering it, is least likely to suffer the
illusion that he has strayed into Broadway, Piccadilly, or the Rue de
Rivoli is at two o'clock on a warm afternoon in July.
You will find Rudge-in-the-Vale, if you search carefully, in
that pleasant section of rural England where the gray stone of
Gloucestershire gives place to Worcestershire's old red brick. Quiet,
in fact, almost unconscious, it nestles beside the tiny river Skirme
and lets the world go by, somnolently content with its Norman church,
its eleven public-houses, its Pop.--to quote the Automobile Guide--of
3,541, and its only effort in the direction of modern progress, the
emporium of Chas. Bywater, Chemist.
Chas. Bywater is a live wire. He takes no afternoon siesta, but works
while others sleep. Rudge as a whole is inclined after luncheon to go
into the back room, put a handkerchief over its face and take things
easy for a bit. But not Chas. Bywater. At the moment at which this
story begins he was all bustle and activity, and had just finished
selling to Colonel Meredith Wyvern a bottle of Brophy's Paramount
Elixir (said to be good for gnat bites).
Having concluded his purchase, Colonel Wyvern would have preferred
to leave, but Mr. Bywater was a man who liked to sweeten trade with
pleasant conversation. Moreover, this was the first time the Colonel
had been inside his shop since that sensational affair up at the Hall
two weeks ago, and Chas. Bywater, who held the unofficial position of
chief gossip monger to the village, was aching to get to the bottom of
that.
With the bare outline of the story he was, of course, familiar. Rudge
Hall, seat of the Carmody family for so many generations, contained in
its fine old park a number of trees which had been planted somewhere
about the reign of Queen Elizabeth. This meant that every now and
then one of them would be found to have become a wobbly menace to the
passer-by, so that experts had to be sent for to reduce it with a
charge of dynamite to a harmless stump. Well, two weeks ago, it seems,
they had blown up one of the Hall's Elizabethan oaks and as near as a
toucher, Rudge learned, had blown up Colonel Wyvern and Mr. Carmody
with it. The two friends had come walking by just as the expert set
fire to the train and had had a very narrow escape.
Thus far the story was common property in the village, and had been
discussed nightly in the eleven tap-rooms of its eleven public-houses.
But Chas. Bywater, with his trained nose for news and that sixth sense
which had so often enabled him to ferret out the story behind the story
when things happen in the upper world of the nobility and gentry, could
not help feeling that there was more in it than this. He decided to
give his customer the opportunity of confiding in him.
"Warm day, Colonel," he observed.
"Ur," grunted Colonel Wyvern.
"Glass going up, I see."
"Ur."
"May be in for a spell of fine weather at last."
"Ur."
"Glad to see you looking so well, Colonel, after your little accident,"
said Chas. Bywater, coming out into the open.
It had been Colonel Wyvern's intention, for he was a man of testy
habit, to enquire of Mr. Bywater why the devil he couldn't wrap a
bottle of Brophy's Elixir in brown paper and put a bit of string round
it without taking the whole afternoon over the task: but at these words
he abandoned this project. Turning a bright mauve and allowing his
luxuriant eyebrows to meet across the top of his nose, he subjected the
other to a fearful glare.
"Little accident?" he said. "Little accident?"
"I was alluding----"
"Little accident!"
"I merely----"
"If by little accident," said Colonel Wyvern in a thick, throaty voice,
"you mean my miraculous escape from death when that fat thug up at the
Hall did his very best to murder me, I should be obliged if you would
choose your expressions more carefully. Little accident! Good God!"
Few things in this world are more painful than the realization that an
estrangement has occurred between two old friends who for years have
jogged amiably along together through life, sharing each other's joys
and sorrows and holding the same views on religion, politics, cigars,
wine, and the Decadence of the Younger Generation: and Mr. Bywater's
reaction, on hearing Colonel Wyvern describe Mr. Lester Carmody, of
Rudge Hall, until two short weeks ago his closest crony, as a fat thug,
should have been one of sober sadness. Such, however, was not the
case. Rather was he filled with an unholy exultation. All along he had
maintained that there was more in that Hall business than had become
officially known, and he stood there with his ears flapping, waiting
for details.
These followed immediately and in great profusion: and Mr. Bywater, as
he drank them in, began to realize that his companion had certain solid
grounds for feeling a little annoyed. For when, as Colonel Wyvern very
sensibly argued, you have been a man's friend for twenty years and are
walking with him in his park and hear warning shouts and look up and
realize that a charge of dynamite is shortly about to go off in your
immediate neighbourhood, you expect a man who is a man to be a man. You
do not expect him to grab you round the waist and thrust you swiftly
in between himself and the point of danger, so that, when the explosion
takes place, you get the full force of it and he escapes without so
much as a singed eyebrow.
"Quite," said Mr. Bywater, hitching up his ears another inch.
Colonel Wyvern continued. Whether, if in a condition to give the matter
careful thought, he would have selected Chas. Bywater as a confidant,
one cannot say. But he was not in such a condition. The stoppered
bottle does not care whose is the hand that removes its cork--all
it wants is the chance to fizz: and Colonel Wyvern resembled such a
bottle. Owing to the absence from home of his daughter, Patricia, he
had had no one handy to act as audience for his grievances, and for two
weeks he had been suffering torments. He told Chas. Bywater all.
It was a very vivid picture that he conjured up. Mr. Bywater could see
the whole thing as clearly as if he had been present in person--from
the blasting gang's first horrified realization that human beings
had wandered into the danger zone to the almost tenser moment when,
running up to sort out the tangled heap on the ground, they had
observed Colonel Wyvern rise from his seat on Mr. Carmody's face and
had heard him start to tell that gentleman precisely what he thought
of him. Privately, Mr. Bywater considered that Mr. Carmody had acted
with extraordinary presence of mind, and had given the lie to the
theory, held by certain critics, that the landed gentry of England are
deficient in intelligence. But his sympathies were, of course, with
the injured man. He felt that Colonel Wyvern had been hardly treated,
and was quite right to be indignant about it. As to whether the other
was justified in alluding to his former friend as a jelly-bellied
hell-hound, that was a matter for his own conscience to decide.
"I'm suing him," concluded Colonel Wyvern, regarding an advertisement
of Pringle's Pink Pills with a smouldering eye.
"Quite."
"The only thing in the world that super-fatted old Blackhander cares
for is money, and I'll have his last penny out of him, if I have to
take the case to the House of Lords."
"Quite," said Mr. Bywater.
"I might have been killed. It was a miracle I wasn't. Five thousand
pounds is the lowest figure any conscientious jury could put the
damages at. And, if there were any justice in England, they'd ship the
scoundrel off to pick oakum in a prison cell."
Mr. Bywater made noncommittal noises. Both parties to this unfortunate
affair were steady customers of his, and he did not wish to alienate
either by taking sides. He hoped the Colonel was not going to ask him
for his opinion of the rights of the case.
Colonel Wyvern did not. Having relieved himself with some six minutes
of continuous speech, he seemed to have become aware that he had
bestowed his confidences a little injudiciously. He coughed and changed
the subject.
"Where's that stuff?" he said. "Good God! Isn't it ready yet? Why does
it take you fellows three hours to tie a knot in a piece of string?"
"Quite ready, Colonel," said Chas. Bywater hastily. "Here it is. I have
put a little loop for the finger, to facilitate carrying."
"Is this stuff really any good?"
"Said to be excellent, Colonel. Thank you, Colonel. Much obliged,
Colonel. Good day, Colonel."
Still fermenting at the recollection of his wrongs, Colonel Wyvern
strode to the door: and, pushing it open with extreme violence, left
the shop.
The next moment the peace of the drowsy summer afternoon was shattered
by a hideous uproar. Much of this consisted of a high, passionate
barking, the remainder being contributed by the voice of a retired
military man, raised in anger. Chas. Bywater blenched, and, reaching
out a hand toward an upper shelf, brought down, in the order named,
a bundle of lint, a bottle of arnica, and one of the half-crown (or
large) size pots of Sooth-o, the recognized specific for cuts, burns,
scratches, nettle stings, and dog bites. He believed in Preparedness.
II
While Colonel Wyvern had been pouring his troubles into the twitching
ear of Chas. Bywater, there had entered the High Street a young man in
golf clothes and Old Rugbian tie. This was John Carroll, nephew of Mr.
Carmody, of the Hall. He had walked down to the village, accompanied
by his dog Emily, to buy tobacco, and his objective, therefore, was
the same many-sided establishment which was supplying the Colonel with
Brophy's Elixir.
For do not be deceived by that "Chemist" after Mr. Bywater's name. It
is mere modesty. Some whim leads this great man to describe himself as
a chemist, but in reality he goes much deeper than that. Chas. is the
Marshall Field of Rudge, and deals in everything, from crystal sets to
mousetraps. There are several places in the village where you can get
stuff they call tobacco, but it cannot be considered in the light of
pipe-joy for the discriminating smoker. To obtain something that will
leave a little skin on the roof of the mouth you must go to Mr. Bywater.
John came up the High Street with slow, meditative strides, a large
and muscular young man whose pleasant features betrayed at the
moment an inward gloom. What with being hopelessly in love and one
thing and another, his soul was in rather a bruised condition these
days, and he found himself deriving from the afternoon placidity of
Rudge-in-the-Vale a certain balm and consolation. He had sunk into a
dreamy trance when he was abruptly aroused by the horrible noise which
had so shaken Chas. Bywater.
The causes which had brought about this disturbance were simple and
are easily explained. It was the custom of the dog Emily, on the
occasions when John brought her to Rudge to help him buy tobacco,
to yield to an uncontrollable eagerness and gallop on ahead to Mr.
Bywater's shop--where, with her nose wedged against the door, she would
stand, sniffing emotionally, till somebody came and opened it. She
had a morbid passion for cough drops, and experience had taught her
that by sitting and ogling Mr. Bywater with her liquid amber eyes she
could generally secure two or three. To-day, hurrying on as usual, she
had just reached the door and begun to sniff when it suddenly opened
and hit her sharply on the nose. And, as she shot back with a yelp of
agony, out came Colonel Wyvern carrying his bottle of Brophy.
There is an etiquette in these matters on which all right-minded dogs
insist. When people trod on Emily, she expected them immediately to
fuss over her, and the same procedure seemed to her to be in order when
they hit her on the nose with doors. Waiting expectantly, therefore,
for Colonel Wyvern to do the square thing, she was stunned to find that
he apparently had no intention of even apologizing. He was brushing
past without a word, and all the woman in Emily rose in revolt against
such boorishness.
"Just a minute!" she said dangerously. "Just one minute, if you please.
Not so fast, my good man. A word with you, if I may trespass upon your
valuable time."
The Colonel, chafing beneath the weight of his wrongs, perceived that
they had been added to by a beast of a hairy dog that stood and yapped
at him.
"Get out!" he bellowed.
Emily became hysterical.
"Indeed?" she said shrilly. "And who do you think you are, you poor
clumsy Robot? You come hitting ladies on the nose as if you were the
King of England, and as if that wasn't enough...."
"Go away, sir."
"Who the devil are you calling Sir?" Emily had the Twentieth Century
girl's freedom of speech and breadth of vocabulary. "It's people like
you that cause all this modern unrest and industrial strife. I know
your sort well. Robbers and oppressors. And let me tell you another
thing...."
At this point the Colonel very injudiciously aimed a kick at Emily.
It was not much of a kick, and it came nowhere near her, but it
sufficed. Realizing the futility of words, Emily decided on action. And
it was just as she had got a preliminary grip on the Colonel's left
trouser leg that John arrived at the Front.
"Emily!!!" roared John, shocked to the core of his being.
He had excellent lungs, and he used them to the last ounce of their
power. A young man who sees the father of the girl he loves being
swallowed alive by a Welsh terrier does not spare his voice. The
word came out of him like the note of the Last Trump, and Colonel
Wyvern, leaping spasmodically, dropped his bottle of Brophy. It fell
on the pavement and exploded, and Emily, who could do her bit in a
rough-and-tumble but barred bombs, tucked her tail between her legs
and vanished. A faint, sleepy cheering from outside the Carmody Arms
announced that she had passed that home from home and was going well.
John continued to be agitated. You would not have supposed, to look
at Colonel Wyvern, that he could have had an attractive daughter, but
such was the case, and John's manner was as concerned and ingratiating
as that of most young men in the presence of the fathers of attractive
daughters.
"I'm so sorry, Colonel. I do hope you're not hurt, Colonel."
The injured man, maintaining an icy silence, raked him with an eye
before which sergeant-majors had once drooped like withered roses, and
walked into the shop. The anxious face of Chas. Bywater loomed up over
the counter. John hovered in the background. "I want another bottle of
that stuff," said the Colonel shortly.
"I'm awfully sorry," said John.
"I dropped the other outside. I was attacked by a savage dog."
"I'm frightfully sorry."
"People ought not to have these pests running loose and not under
proper control."
"I'm fearfully sorry."
"A menace to the community and a nuisance to everybody," said Colonel
Wyvern.
"Quite," said Mr. Bywater.
Conversation languished. Chas. Bywater, realizing that this was no
moment for lingering lovingly over brown paper and toying dreamily with
string, lowered the record for wrapping a bottle of Brophy's Paramount
Elixir by such a margin that he set up a mark for other chemists to
shoot at for all time. Colonel Wyvern snatched it and stalked out,
and John, who had opened the door for him and had not been thanked,
tottered back to the counter and in a low voice expressed a wish for
two ounces of the Special Mixture.
"Quite," said Mr. Bywater. "In one moment, Mr. John."
With the passing of Colonel Wyvern a cloud seemed to have rolled
away from the chemist's world. He was his old, charmingly chatty self
again. He gave John his tobacco, and, detaining him by the simple means
of not handing over his change, surrendered himself to the joys of
conversation.
"The Colonel appears a little upset, sir."
"Have you got my change?" said John.
"It seems to me he hasn't been the same man since that unfortunate
episode up at the Hall. Not at all the same sunny gentleman."
"Have you got my change?"
"A very unfortunate episode, that," sighed Mr. Bywater.
"My change?"
"I could see, the moment he walked in here, that he was not himself.
Shaken. Something in the way he looked at one. I said to myself 'The
Colonel's shaken!'"
John, who had had such recent experience of the way Colonel Wyvern
looked at one, agreed. He then asked if he might have his change.
"No doubt he misses Miss Wyvern," said Chas. Bywater, ignoring the
request with an indulgent smile. "When a man's had a shock like the
Colonel's had--when he's shaken, if you understand what I mean--he
likes to have his loved ones around him. Stands to reason," said Mr.
Bywater.
John had been anxious to leave, but he was so constituted that he could
not tear himself away from anyone who had touched on the subject of
Patricia Wyvern. He edged a little nearer the counter.
"Well, she'll be home again soon," said Chas. Bywater. "To-morrow, I
understand."
A powerful current of electricity seemed to pass itself through John's
body. Pat Wyvern had been away so long that he had fallen into a sort
of dull apathy in which he wondered sometimes if he would ever see her
again.
"What!"
"Yes, sir. She returned from France yesterday. She had a good crossing.
She is at the Lincoln Hotel, Curzon Street, London. She thinks of
taking the three-o'clock train to-morrow. She is in excellent health."
It did not occur to John to question the accuracy of the other's
information, nor to be surprised at its minuteness of detail. Mr.
Bywater, he was aware, had a daughter in the post office.
"To-morrow!" he gasped.
"Yes, sir. To-morrow."
"Give me my change," said John.
He yearned to be off. He wanted air and space in which he could ponder
over this wonderful news.
"No doubt," said Mr. Bywater, "she...."
"Give me my change," said John.
Chas. Bywater, happening to catch his eye, did so.
III
To reach Rudge Hall from the door of Chas. Bywater's shop, you go up
the High Street, turn sharp to the left down River Lane, cross the
stone bridge that spans the slow-flowing Skirme as it potters past on
its way to join the Severn, carry on along the road till you come to
the gates of Colonel Wyvern's nice little house, and then climb a stile
and take to the fields. And presently you are in the park and can see
through the trees the tall chimneys and red walls of the ancient home
of the Carmodys.
The scene, when they are not touching off dynamite there under the
noses of retired military officers, is one of quiet peace. For John
it had always held a peculiar magic. In the fourteen years which had
passed since the Wyverns had first come to settle in Rudge Pat had
contrived, so far as he was concerned, to impress her personality
ineffaceably on the landscape. Almost every inch of it was in some
way associated with her. Stumps on which she had sat and swung her
brown-stockinged legs; trees beneath which she had taken shelter with
him from summer storms; gates on which she had climbed, fields across
which she had raced, and thorny bushes into which she had urged him to
penetrate in search of birds' eggs--they met his eye on every side.
The very air seemed to be alive with her laughter. And not even the
recollection that that laughter had generally been directed at himself
was able to diminish for John the glamour of this mile of Fairyland.
Half-way across the park, Emily rejoined him with a defensive,
Where-on-earth-did-you-disappear-to manner, and they moved on in
company till they rounded the corner of the house and came to the
stable yard. John had a couple of rooms over the stables, and thither
he made his way, leaving Emily to fuss round Bolt, the chauffeur, who
was washing the Dex-Mayo.
Arrived in his sitting room, he sank into a deck chair and filled his
pipe with Mr. Bywater's Special Mixture. Then, putting his feet up on
the table, he stared hard and earnestly at the photograph of Pat which
stood on the mantelpiece.
It was a pretty face that he was looking at--one whose charm not even
a fashionable modern photographer, of the type that prefers to depict
his sitters in a gray fog with most of their features hidden from
view, could altogether obscure. In the eyes, a little slanting, there
was a Puck-like look, and the curving lips hinted demurely at amusing
secrets. The nose had that appealing, yet provocative, air which slight
tip-tiltedness gives. It seemed to challenge, and at the same time to
withdraw.
This was the latest of the Pat photographs, and she had given it to him
three months ago, just before she left to go and stay with friends at
Le Touquet. And now she was coming home....
John Carroll was one of those solid persons who do not waver in their
loyalties. He had always been in love with Pat, and he always would
be, though he would have had to admit that she gave him very little
encouragement. There had been a period when, he being fifteen and she
ten, Pat had lavished on him all the worship of a small girl for a big
boy who can wiggle his ears and is not afraid of cows. But since then
her attitude had changed. Her manner toward him nowadays alternated
between that of a nurse toward a child who is not quite right in the
head and that of the owner of a clumsy but rather likable dog.
Nevertheless, he loved her. And she was coming home....
John sat up suddenly. He was a slow thinker, and only now did it occur
to him just what the position of affairs would be when she did come
home. With this infernal feud going on between his uncle Lester and
the old Colonel she would probably look on him as in the enemy's camp
and refuse to see or speak to him.
The thought chilled him to the marrow. Something, he felt, must be
done, and swiftly. And, with a flash of inspiration of a kind that
rarely came to him, he saw what that something was. He must go up
to London this afternoon, tell her the facts, and throw himself on
her clemency. If he could convince her that he was whole-heartedly
pro-Colonel and regarded his uncle Lester as the logical successor
to Doctor Crippen and the Brides-in-the-Bath murderer, things might
straighten themselves.
Once the brain gets working, there is no knowing where it will stop.
The very next instant there had come to John Carroll a thought so new
and breathtaking that he uttered an audible gasp.
Why shouldn't he ask Pat to marry him?
IV
John sat tingling from head to foot. The scales seemed to have fallen
from his eyes, and he saw clearly where he might quite conceivably have
been making a grave blunder all these years. Deeply as he had always
loved Pat, he had never--now he came to think of it--told her so. And
in this sort of situation the spoken word is quite apt to make all the
difference.
Perhaps that was why she laughed at him so frequently--because she was
entertained by the spectacle of a man, obviously in love with her,
refraining year after year from making any verbal comment on the state
of his emotions.
Resolution poured over John in a strengthening flood. He looked at
his watch. It was nearly three. If he got the two-seater and started
at once, he could be in London by seven, in nice time to take her to
dinner somewhere. He hurried down the stairs and out into the stable
yard.
"Shove that car out of the way, Bolt," said John, eluding Emily, who,
wet to the last hair, was endeavouring to climb up him. "I want to get
the two-seater."
"Two-seater, sir?"
"Yes. I'm going to London."
"It's not there, Mr. John," said the chauffeur, with the gloomy
satisfaction which he usually reserved for telling his employer that
the battery had run down.
"Not there? What do you mean?"
"Mr. Hugo took it, sir, an hour ago. He told me he was going over to
see Mr. Carmody at Healthward Ho. Said he had important business and
knew you wouldn't object."
The stable yard reeled before John. Not for the first time in his life,
he cursed his light-hearted cousin. "Knew you wouldn't object!" It was
just the fat-headed sort of thing Hugo would have said.